Today I was thinking back over the last three months and how difficult they have been. For one reason or another, we have been getting pole-axed every way we turn. After the disastrous month of January, I gave up on swing trading and Tradeitup gave up on futures for the time being. February wasn’t much better and I had to go on Trading Probation for several weeks while Tradeitup continued to struggle with swing trading due to the volatility in the market. This week we finally put on two swing trades. We closed FO on Thursday for a $254 profit and are currently holding 200 RBA with a little over $125 built in.

I have mentioned several times before that the market is currently in a funk and next to impossible to trade. In January there were scores of traders that either had large drawdowns or totally blew up. Everyone knows well the plight of HPT because of his viral video of his blowup in futures. Less well known are the silent killers, the slow death that is a losing streak. Any of our readers that have just begun to follow this blog since we took over the VO, or the ones that have come to us from our handful of linked posts by WallStreetFighter, all you have seen here is the losing streak that we are currently in.

For the newer traders like us, and for the veterans that might have forgotten, here is a little reminder of how quickly things can change in this business. A quick history… We were very conservative the first 6-8 months after starting to trade full-time in January 2007. We had a few good weeks and months here and there, but we were mostly just “learning the ropes” so to speak. Come October, we had finally gotten settled into our individual styles of trading and we felt like we were making progress. The market was a breeze to trade and it seemed we were on the one way train to trading success.

In the last three months of 2007 we pulled in $8,689 day trading and swing trading stocks, effectively digging ourselves out of the $10k hole we had dug the first nine months of the year. We went into the end of the year net short but decided to close out most of our swing positions on Dec 31st. Those last few trades in December were really the last of the winners. January, February and now March have all been losing months. We have been able to cut back on trading to curb the losses, and some of the market action is a little bit easier to deal with, but we are still fighting to get back on stable ground.

In case you were wondering what three months of winning and three months of losing looks like, I have provided a little eye candy. Have I ever mentioned that I really, really hate the color red?

Just remember, no matter how good or bad your trading is right now… Things can always change, and change much quicker than you can imagine.

Here at 10kthrownaway, we wanted to offer a little insight into our trading style and also our progression through trading full time for almost a year now. I am currently working on getting all the data together including equity curves, PnL on longs vs shorts, PnL for stocks vs options vs futures vs currencies and our biggest winners and losers.

Maybe by compiling all of this information and digging into the specifics, it will help us better understand our trading abilities and shortcomings and possibly help others through their trading difficulties.