New 30 Day Challenge... This Time It's Real.

Summery

New Blog: Trading By Price Action
Follow a old Eve-Online Player trying to make a living trading Futures, the most volatile trading instrument on the plant.

Confessions of a Eve-Online Trader

 I've had a few people ask me where I've went, why I stopped playing Eve-Online, and if they could have my hundreds of billions of ISK. Well, to awnser the most important question, I may reactivate one of my accounts and have some fun. I may do some sort of donation to new players, poor old school players, or maybe just to people who entertain me or something. I still haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do, but Eve-Online really has lost it's fun for me. For me, Eve-Online was about trading and getting unimaginably wealthy. One of the best features of Eve-Online is the fact that you don't use your imagination to role-play. If you want to role-play a pirate, you go out and be a pirate. If you want to mine, then you go out and mine.

I've always wanted to become the arms dealer. So I went out and became the arms dealer.  I raised capital ratting, doing missions, and eventually buying weapons in scarcely populated regions. I focused on the higher meta stuff the rats in the region would drop. I would spend one day a week flying around gathering stuff all over the region, and then flying it to Jita to sell.  Then I realized, why should I cut someone else in on my profits?  I started selling my stuff directly at mission hubs for a even higher markup.

Eventually, I started to make some real ISK.  I could afford to fly faction fitted battleships, but I barely had the skills to fly a battle-cruiser. This wasn't enough for me, so I expanded.  I started buying all sort of stuff over three regions.  The opportunities were endless, but the time required to fly around and pick everything up was getting kinda crazy.  I reached the point where I didn't even bother picking stuff up unless there was at least 50 items in that specific station.  I was buying everything from tech 2 items to rat drops.

I started to develop some real ISK, and the only real market that I haven't touched were raw materials and ships.  I pooled together all the money I could scrap together, and moved my best trading character to a populated region and began dabbling in ships.  I would buy them from people, and just resell them in the same place I bought them.  The margins sucked, and I had to update my orders constantly. The nice thing, though, was that I didn't have to fly around picking stuff up.  It could take a month to sell a ship at a station, but I didn't care.  I had a ton of trading slots available.

I picked up on some tricks along the way.  I was getting tired of playing the .01 isk game with other traders, so I simply sold one item to them just to figure out who they were.  I added them to my friends list, and wrote down key details.  I figured out what region and items they dealt with, and their play schedule. Five minutes after they logged off, I would log on .01 up their order and go about my business.

I increased my margins dramatically by creating completely taking over a popular level 3 mission hub.  I chose it because there really wasn't much completion.  I stocked it with battle-cruisers and everything you could want to fit it.  I also bought every Drake (most popular battle-cruiser at the time) in a three system radius.  People had to fly to my station to buy my Drake and fit it with my modules, all at a pretty decent mark up.  Eventually, I started selling the battle-cruisers as loss-leaders just to get them to buy my modules at 100% markup. 

I was in it for the duration, and while a few people tried to run me out, no one ever succeed.  I've had a few people piss me off, I've had a few people try to destroy my margins, or do other things to try and hinder me.  They all paid for it in the end.  I reached the point where no one could touch me. I took over a level 4 mission hub, and while the competition never really left I had the majority market share.

I tried to take over the retriever market for a entire region, but some idiot decided to fight me on it.  I offered to split it with him, but the deal fell through...  So I paid mercenaries to bump his freighter every time he left the station (to stop him from going anywhere).  I managed to make a a bit of money by raising the prices of retrievers by 1-2 million ISK for the whole region for a month.

Eventually, Eve-Online lost it's fun for me, and I moved on.  By far I think this is the greatest MMO ever created. I tried playing others like AION, WOW, and others, but Eve was always my favorite.

So I Moved On

I thought to myself, what could be more fun then being a arms dealer in a video game? It hit me, why can't I do it for real? Of course, I'm kidding.  All my time play Eve-Online made me wonder if I had what it took to become a real trader on Wall-Street. I began studying during my night job. I lived, breathed, and obsessed about the stock market.  I eventually started trading live last year, and my equity curve was all over the place.  I did end up making a lot of money, but I realized I needed to put my own spin on it.

I learned so much along the way, and I am still learning.  I am just one of the lucky few that wasn't destroyed by playing with fire.  It wasn't until now that I feel like I really truly have some sort of grasp of what is going on the markets.  My thinking has completely changed in the past few months.  Looking at a chart, I used to see that price action is testing the bottom of the channel, or this dot just turned green (don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about here, I had to throw this in just in case there's any John Carter fans here. I hate the guy, he is just a master salesmen and not a trader).  Now when I look at the chart, I can see that a bunch of traders just got trapped on the wrong side of a move because they thought the trend line was breaking. 

There are so many trading systems out there, but it is just people trying to sell you junk.  It doesn't work!  To become a trader you need to understand the why something works.  Trading is like swimming in a shark invested pool, and your a little piranha trying to take some food from the shark.  OK, that was a terrible analogy. The key thing to remember is that trading is a zero sum game.  You need to take money from other traders if you want to make any money yourself.

30 Day Challenge... On The Real Markets

I really don't care about becoming rich.  To me money represents one thing, freedom.  I want to develop the skill set that lets me sit in-front of the computer and earn a paycheck without having to answer to anyone.  I want to go on vacation when I want to go on vacation.  If I want to skip winter this year, I can go to Florida and skip winter.  I want freedom.

So while I am making money while I do this 30 Day Challenge, my goal is to make money consistently.  I'm using a discretionary price action trading strategy developed by a guy named Mack.  In the past, I got burned by buying expensive strategy from different people.  Some of the information was alright, but I quickly realized that these people were just salesmen (AKA John Carter).  They always have a new and improved method for just $400 bucks! My favorite was when they tried to up-sell you a year long mentor-ship for 10,000 dollars using high pressure sales tactics (AKA John Carter).  Sorry, I figure I should add that this is just my opinion of their services.

Anyways, back on topic, I'm using this strategy because it makes sense to me.  The guy is not constantly trying to sell you anything, and does free daily reviews of the ES using his method.  I've been working with it for the past few months, and now I am taking it live.

I'm really making the new blog for myself.  It helps me to learn something better if I am trying to explain it to someone else.

If anyone is interested in following along, the new blog is Trading By Price Action.  If there are any other traders out there, or just someone who wants to learn trading feel please free to drop me a comment on the new site with your email and we can chat.  I'll happily answer any questions, and teach my strategy.