August Performance Review

August Performance Review
Photo by Simon English / Unsplash

August 2022 - First month as a full-time trader

From a full-time European Product manager I am switching to Full-time Trader. I will share my journey to keep myself accountable, but maybe you will find something useful while reading this.

Trading:

  • +$350 for the month (from more than 50 trades). I consider it a success. Learned a lot of things and am happy with how the month went even if I did some rookie mistakes.
  • Trading with very small positions of $1k per stock, very hesitant as I don't afford to lose.

Education:

  • attended Stockholm boot camp end of July which set me up for a productive August
  • Spartan Deep Dive Done: made 4500 stock deep dives on Bullish MB; reviewed more than 50 members' deep dives;
  • listened again to 2 boot camps of Pradeep from last year and some Q videos.
  • didn't miss any of the 9 AM calls on zoom with EG
  • making the first steps in building my processes and factories

There is a lot of work to be done on the foundation of my trading knowledge and I dedicate a lot of energy, time, and focus to increase the depth of my knowledge and practical skills. Some good, interesting work ahead…

Innovation:

Notion -is assigned as my main note-taking and project-management app. I am happy to see that it gives structure and keeps my ideas within an organized framework, makes me decluttered, and frees my mind.

Snagit - is assigned for taking print screens while I do deep dives (super convenient app). I have a Ctrl+Space shortcut on a specific area of the screen and make a shot whenever I find the need to save it, and then copy it to PowerPoint.

**Briefing.com** - is used to build my SA but also to learn things about the stocks I identify in the scans. At 1 PM EU time, I start reading their summaries “ Overnight Brief, Asian market summary, EU market summary, Morning Reading Summary, Wake up call Briefing.” These summaries help me set my situational awareness for the day.

Koyfin -  is used for earnings and sales trends. They have a super cool and useful representation of sales in a graphical view, which helps me a lot in evaluating the strength of the company and it gives me a couple of points of confidence in the trade if I see good sales and earnings trends YoY. I posted details in another recent post.

One browser per group of tasks to make it easier to access what I need but also more convenient to display tabs on multiple screens. I split them as follows:

  • Chrome for Stockbee forum, Google Calendar;
  • Brave blocks some annoying ads so it is assigned to the news tab: WSJ, Bloomberg, Zacks, The Fly; Briefing.com, Barron
  • Firefox assigned for Koyfin

Timer- watch - a  watch that is set with 45 min time blocks and which I keep on my table is giving so much structure and organization to my day. I will share more details about it in another post.

Processes/ Habits:

Incremental adjustments - I have a lot of gaps in processes and understanding all across the system of habits and what I do. From software to different parts of my trading strategy, to how I plan the day for productive work and trading. All across are gaps. I now focus on fixing them through incremental adjustments to build better processes and habits.

Build the Second Brain - staying super organized is not my superpower, but I understand that I will fail short of my potential without implementing a good project management system. Being inspired by the “Build your second brain” book and video on YouTube on the topic I decided to implement this system step by step on my side. I am not fully there yet but I am working to learn and build my second brain in notion.

Self-Leadership & Mental State:

Staying organized, disciplined, motivated, energized, and healthy while working on my projects and not for a company or under the pressure of “not allowed to miss corporate deadlines” was and is giving me anxiety. I was not sure if I can make myself accountable to myself but also, it's an overall big change for me as I am moving from a full-time job as a manager where from 8 AM till 6.30 PM people will always need my time and pull me in different topics to a situation where I have all day for myself. I need to make the best out of it and there are a lot of resources and knowledgeable people on the Stockbee forum that could help me to do so.

September goals for the month coming soon…

September Goals
The main goal for September will be to continue building on the excellent work and open actions from August. Here are more details: https://stockbee.biz/tweet/592857/. In addition, I will relocate end of September. I am currently in The Netherlands and will move back to Moldova, my home