My Trading Journey: I Earned $100 After 7 Days of Trading

_{This blog is a bit longer than expected, you are free not to read it. This is just about my 7-day trading journey.}

I never thought that I would get back to trading again after losing a lot of money last year due to a lack of knowledge and risk management. I tried trading between 2021-2022 after getting exposure to the crypto-community. I was getting into hype and tried different types of trading; spot, futures, and copy trading. It was full of lessons and experiences that led me to stop for a while and get back again today.

I funded my account on Binance before the start of November and decided to split my balance 50/50. I had a total of 200 USDT, I put 50% to my spot wallet that I can use for spot trade and another 50% on my futures account. It is also my way of minimizing the risk of losing everything just in case I start a wrong trade position.

On my spot trade account, I use it for trading some HIVE and take advantage of the up-down movement of the chart. Then I decided to start trading random coins on my futures account. The first day was a mess, of course, I lost a total of $9.00 on my first trade. I was overthinking and scared that I might lose everything.

With every movement of the chart, when my position turns red, I can’t stop myself from thinking of hitting the close position thinking that I am saving myself from liquidation. When this is happening and my trade starts to turn green, even a $0.25 profit, I try to close it. But to my surprise, my balance is less than my expected amount.

But why?

I checked my transaction history and saw that I am paying a lot of fees. Some of them are more than a dollar and it is higher than my profit. It was funny that I did not study how the fees are working. I’ve done my research and learned how to compute the fees on futures. It turns out that the leverage does have a contribution to how it works.

After that first day of losing more than $9 from trade and fees, I decided to stop for 1 day and start learning about how the fees are deducted from my account for every trade and refresh my little knowledge in trading from putting the support and resistance, some indicators, etc.

Then the next day, I opened a trade again and started having a quick plan on how am I going to trade just like putting my target profit, and started to have this mindset, “I will take the risk no matter how much negative PNL I have”. Although I had this kind of mindset during my trade, I was still afraid that I might lose everything because, to be honest, it was from my savings.

There were a lot of ups and downs where some of my positions turned into regret because of either closing the position too early and then losing some more unrealized profit or not closing the position because of greediness then it turns out that it will go to negative unrealized losses.

Nevertheless, I still accumulated a total of $113.39 net profit after 7 days of trading. It was all a combination of risk management, planning, controlling your emotions, and the courage to risk your money. After all, it is hard to earn money and risk your savings.

There are a lot of lessons that I learned from these 7 days of trading but the best is to stick to your plan no matter what and learn risk management. There was one day when I opened a trade and saw my unrealized PNL having -$60 then, I had this urge to close the position and lose that $60 but I said that I would risk it because my analysis says that it could still bounce back and have a profit. What is funny is that I chose to sleep (because it was already midnight and I was still at a loss but I had to sleep because I still had classes tomorrow), I set a Take Profit price hoping that it would hit it. By morning, it was the first thing that I checked and thankfully, I hadn’t received a liquidation email from Binance, but I got a total of $35 profit. It was my highest profit from a single trade, I know that it was risky to sleep while having an open position but you know, I risked everything and decided to do it anyway.

I am still learning more about trading, and I know that it’s not always like this. I want to know the opinion of other trades in the community on how they set their stop loss, how much percentage can you risk and set as your loss when trading? And do you also wait instead of closing the position if you have more than 50% of losses?

There are a lot more things to learn, and I am willing to learn more about it. It was fun opening a trade in the morning before the class started, monitoring it during the class, and closing the position by noon when you already have the profit. My original plan was scalping, but having negative unrealized PNL makes me wait more instead of closing it.

Now, I decided to move out my capital from my account and just use my profit this week to continue my trading journey. I want to learn more, and I want to know what I miss in trading, the techniques, and what are the things that I should do when opening a trade.

I want to hear it from real traders in the community, watching videos on YouTube from “trading gurus” makes me think twice because they only post their successes and not losses, I feel that it is just clickbait and do the content for profit only. But I do not generalize them, if you have recommended channels to watch, please share them in the comments!