In response to a question

How's the trading going overall? Is it worth the stress and hard work involved?

It's going ok, it's difficult to properly take advantage of my edge since I have a full time job that I trade around.  My edge for this current strategy is that, on average, 31% of the signals are winners, and  I am using a 1 : 5 risk reward ratio.  So each trade I risk 2 points and I have a fixed profit limit order at 10 points.  

So for example, taking into account commissions I would need to achieve a win rate of just 21%, to break even.   So my edge for this strategy is that the average win % for trades is 10% higher than the breakeven % required.   

Since I can't trade all the time, this means that as well as potentially missing some losing trades, I miss some winning trades also, of course missing winning trades has an adverse impact on profitability, particularly since the difference between the risk and the reward is on the high side.  So although I've designed a pretty good and consistent strategy it only works optimally if I can trade it consistently ensuring all the signals are traded.   For the last 2 months I've been going through a process of trading and assessing this latest strategy.  I'll need to look at the numbers more closely to see if I would be better off with a different approach.

Trading was stressful a long time ago when I started trading options, mainly because I was determined to just trade and learn as I go along rather than paper trade or trade on a demo account, I didn't have any sort of plan nor any clue as to what I was doing, and I later discovered I am more suited to trading futures.  The stressful thing about trading is if your PC crashes while you're in a trade (it's happened a couple of times before), although it just means a call to the broker if I need to cancel orders or get out of a trade.  As regards hard work I don't classify it as work.   I read a book a while ago;







I got a lot out of this book, one of the interesting messages was that if you are following your authentic will in the pursuit of a goal then it will not feel like work and time will pass quickly.  

From Chapter 2 - NOTHING STANDS BEFORE THE WILL

"Another way to identify your authentic self is to recognize when you become completely engrossed in something.  If you are able to jump into a subject or action to the degree that you lose all sense of time and feel a deep sense of fulfillment, you know that that subject or action aligns with your authentic self "

This is what trading feels like for me.  This is a great chapter to read for anyone who isn't currently doing what they want to in their work life.