I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, so to speak… getting up early (early is defined as 9AM) and going to bed late (the Forex chat I attend is from 11PM-1AM, and I usually stay up trading until 2AM or so.) Combine that with a lot of work at Simpli and meetings after work, as well as trying to make some reasonable time for friends, and I am feeling pretty burned out from pushing myself so hard. Right now, nothing sounds better than a pile of sleep and less stress at Simpli, but since that’s not going to happen, I have to push on and do the best I can. I am feeling exhausted and grumpy right now, so I can tell that the lack of sleep is catching up with me.
I have been making several trades in the Forex market, mostly good. I am finding that it is definitely possible to make a consistent 10 pips a day. The chat rooms have proved helpful too; the 11PM moderated chat is a voice-capable chat, so it’s neat to be able to hear the excitement as the market starts moving.
The two classic emotions to avoid in Forex are fear (“I don’t know if I want to jump in yet”, even though the signals are telling you it’s a good time to get in), and greed (“I’m going to stay in a bit longer and try to grab some more pips”, even though the market signs are telling you to exit!) A classic example of greed showed up last night during the chat. The moderator advised us to get in on a buy. The market went up about 5 pips and then lost its momentum and couldn’t decide which direction it wanted to go. “That’s a warning sign,” the chat moderator said. “I would advise you to take your profits now” (which means close the trade.) No sooner had he said it than a chat participant jumped in and said “I think I’m going to hold my trade… I’m up 6 right now. I’ll sell if I get down to +3.” In the next minute, the market had gone down 12 pips, wiping out that guy’s profit and putting him in the negative. (Fortunately, I got out right before that happened since I took the moderator’s advice.)
The key thing to remember is that when the market is trending sideways; that is, it isn’t really moving up or down, that there is no science to predict where it’s going to go next. Since the Euro is in a general “up” trend right now, you’re more likely to guess right by buying currency rather than selling. But that’s a risky gamble — as I found out the hard way last night, when I put in a trade and lost about 14 pips because the market was trending sideways and I thought it was going to go up. Lesson learned: Wait for the indicators; don’t get impatient and try to guess where the market is going to go!
The good news is, although I’m down slightly from my $5000 start in my demo account, I’m not down much and I do seem to have the fundamentals of making a good trade. I just have to be patient! (If Forex actually teaches me how to be patient, that will be an amazing accomplishment. Heh!)
I’m going to set some goals for Forex. First of all, if I do double my money every 30 days by making 10 pips a day, I should have over $2 million after 1 year of trading. But I am going to set a much more conservative goal — that way, I don’t feel pressure if I’m not a millionaire on my 1-year Forex anniversary!
Here are the goals I’m setting:
1) Spend at least 30 days in the demo account. Make sure I’m making consistently good trades and am “up” (hopefully pretty far up) over my $5000 start (the $5000 isn’t real money, but you trade on the real market like it is) before even considering putting any of my money into the market.
2) Start with $1000 of my money once I’m really comfortable trading. Go for the 10 pips a day goal. But the real goal is just to have consistently more money in my account every day.
3) Once I’ve hit $5000, pull out money as needed to pay off debt, but continue to keep at least $5000 in my account.
The great thing about Forex is that having $5000 in your account does NOT mean that that $5000 is at risk all the time. In fact, on a single trade, you should only have 5% of your account at risk. That means that the most you’re risking at any given time is $250. By setting your stop losses correctly, you’ll never lose more than $100-$250 on a single trade… but you can make $300 or more on a single trade in a matter of minutes.
4) My goal, at the end of 12 months of real trading, is to have made at least $25,000 in the Forex market. How did I figure this out? Well, I spend about 8-10 hours a week on Forex trading. I could be spending that time doing consulting (programming, repairing computers, etc.) at $50/hour. $50/hr x 10 hours a week x 52 weeks = $26,000. So I figure if I make $25,000 in the Forex market, I’ll be doing at least as well as I would have by doing computer consulting, and Forex is way more interesting for me. Also, I think $1000->$25,000 in 12 months is a worthy investment.
There are my goals… I’ll keep updating as my trades progress and I learn more about the market!
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I completed my beginner’s training class today. It’s a 4-6 hour (depends on number of questions asked) web-based class. They take you through the basics of training, walk you through the two pieces of trading software (called “platforms”), and make sure you know how to use the software.
There are two basic things you do when trading: 1) Look at/analyze the charts and 2) Make trades in the trading platform. The charts can be as detailed as you want, from 3 years all the way down to 1 second (which is called a “tick” in trading terminology.) General trend lines tell you where the market is probably heading, and more specific bars or “candles” tell you what the market is doing right now. (I will post some charts in the future, but here is a general idea of what they look like.) These charts update in real-time over the Internet, so it’s pretty exciting to watch the tick chart and have it constantly showing what the market is doing at any given moment.
You decide what you think the market is going to do based on previous data as well as analysis of that data (and the training course walks you through several “telltale signs” of where the market might be going based on reading the charts.) Once you think you know where the market is going, you enter a trade (buy or sell) and set some limits (the amount where you want to get out of the market, having made your profit) and stop losses (if you’re wrong, and the market goes the opposite direction, this will automatically pull you out of the trade so you don’t lose everything.) You trade based on “pips”, which are 1/100 of 1 cent. (That’s right–10,000 pips in a dollar!) The goal, which the training company reinforces, is to make 10 pips per day consistently. If you do that, depending on how much money you have in your account, you will double your money every 30-45 days.
While the training class was going on, I was watching the 1-minute EUR/USD (euro/US dollar) charts. During the middle of the afternoon, it wasn’t doing much. I entered a trade just to test the system and watched it bounce around for a little while. I entered a sell, which means I was expecting the market to go down. Now here is the key — when you enter a trade, you’re automatically down 3 pips. This is called the “spread” and it’s how brokers make their money. So to gain 10 pips in a day, you actually have to gain 13. My first trade wasn’t going anywhere, and I spotted a trend reversal that meant the market was going to go up, so I got out of that trade. I got out at +2, which actually means I made 5, but only 2 counted due to the spread.
I watched the market on and off for the rest of the day, and at one point I noticed a 20-pip jump in 1 minute! Wow, that was huge! Our instructor noticed too. He had some open trades, and he immediately closed them for a nice gain. The market knew it had jumped a little too quickly, and in the next 3 minutes it was back down about 25 pips. I spotted the trend (it was headed back up since the general trend lines had just converged, and the 3 down minutes were actually not where the market was heading as a whole), and quickly jumped in with a buy order. I watched the trend lines take back off, and sure enough, in 9 minutes, I’d gained 10 pips, which was my limit. “Ding!” said my trading software, and automatically closed my trade. Beautiful! A nice 12-pip profit in my first day.
Now, that will not happen every day, and indeed with the demo account I fully intend to play around and make aggressive trades (who cares… it’s not real money anyway.) Before getting into real trading, you are supposed to make 30+ consecutive “good” trades (that is, you gained pips.) For the first 2-3 weeks, I figure I’ll make trades based on “gut feeling” and trend analysis and see how it goes. During that time, I will begin to develop my own system, and within 3-6 months I’ll begin trading with real money. At least, that is the plan. I will continue to update here!
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It’s been a long week. It was one of those weeks that seems to be infinitely long and go by very quickly at the same time. I survived on little sleep and a lot of caffeine (hey, for me, half a Diet Dr. Pepper is a “lot” of caffeine!) I was out past midnight almost every night, including last night, when I got back from SuperHappyDevHouse at about 4:45AM.
To run it down quickly, I got back Monday, went to a Forex meeting on Tuesday (which was in San Rafael, which is over an hour away from my house, and ended at about 12:30AM), went to movie night on Wednesday (Sideways, which I didn’t like since I am not a 40-something going through a midlife crisis), went out with Bill Ayers to do a sales mentoring session in SF on Thursday night, went with D to Dave & Buster’s on Friday, and went to SuperHappyDevHouse on Saturday. Which brings us to today, and somehow I have survived the week. Leetle zoom has 1400 more miles on him (in 10 days!!) and has had an alignment problem fixed. He is also very dirty, and I have promised to show him some lovin’ by getting him a car wash next week.
Next week is already fully set to be a blur as well. Tomorrow I have my first Forex training. For those of you who don’t know what Forex is, it’s foreign currency (exchange) trading… kind of like day trading, but with currency instead of stocks. I have watched other people make a lot of money with this, and I am excited to embark on this as a hobby that will hopefully make me some money as well. The first training is 8 hours long and is a web class. Then I do some trades, get comfortable with the system, and take the advanced training, which is another 8 hours and which I will probably do next month.
My friends are split on whether I will make any money with foreign currency trading. On one hand, there’s DW, who is completely convinced I’m going to come up short on this, and feels my time could be better spent in other areas. On the opposite extreme, we have two guys (Reggie and Doug; Reggie’s the one in San Rafael and Doug is the one who signed me up) who do the foreign currency trading training, and they’re both multi-millionaires from it. (Ironically, though they are part of the same program, I met them at different times, they didn’t know each other until last weekend, and they have quite different strategies!) Either way, I’ve seen the numbers and I think I can pull this off. You are welcome to take bets on this as well; feel free to comment in this blog. My commitment to DW, and to you, is that I will be blogging all (or at least the vast majority) of my trades throughout time, so in 6 months or a year you all can look back on when I started trading and see exactly what worked and didn’t work. The good news about the online trading class is they give you a demo account, which you can use to trade on the real market but without losing any of your own money. They recommend you trade in the demo account for at least 30 days, but I will probably spend longer in it. As a footnote, Reggie showed me his demo account. With $10,000 invested (that’s $10K of your own money), he traded for 15 days and had $18,000+ at the end of the 15 days. The more interesting news is that he only guessed correctly on 43% of the trades (that is, he probably would have done better with a chart printout on a dartboard), yet still came out ahead.
I’ll be making a new “Forex” category on my blog so you can follow along and root for me (or laugh at me) as my time in Forex training progresses. My philosophy is: If people can spend 4 years in college learning how to make a salary for the rest of their lives, I’ll take 1-2 years and learn this and learn how to make money that will keep me from needing a salary for the rest of my life. Or not. We’ll see! 😉
Also, look for a large (and really good) announcement from Simpli in the next 14 days. I also have an investor presentation on Friday in Vegas to raise our first round of seed capital for our next stage, so wish me luck there. This is going to be a crazy week, but hopefully I will have some time to update before next weekend.
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This is going to be a long blog entry. I’m saying that so you’re prepared. But it’s worth it to read.
My friend G (not to be confused with FG) had been staying at my house for a couple weeks. He is interested in moving out here and wanted to give it a “trial run” by taking over my living room for a couple of weeks. I said sure, why not, and we definitely had a ton of fun. I do think we will work out as roommates (as long as he has his own car, haha.) We’ve agreed to not date (yes, I am blogging this so it’s an official contract!!!) and honestly, I think it’s great to have a best friend whom I’m not dating!
So. On to the weekend. We drove to IBI, which is in LA–about a 5-hour drive from my house. Poor G is 6’5″ and leetle zoom could not quite hold him, so he was scrunched up in the passenger seat the whole way. I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it, but he did–and without complaining! (This whole trip made me realize I need more people with a positive outlook like G has in my life, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry.)
Oh man. IBI was crazy. I could sit here and write for about 3 hours about everything that happened. I had a chiropractor straighten out my back. I’ve never heard so much cracking in my life. It felt great. Makes me realize I need to go to a chiropractor more often. (Like, for the first time in my life!) I gained several new hosting customers. Everyone was overjoyed to see me. Paul Hoyt, my strategic planner, was fighting to be the president of the Erica Douglass Fan Club. I told him he could only be president of my fan club if I became president of his fan club. I love Paul and he is great. He is now the first member of Simpli’s newly-appointed Board of Advisors, with several more people to come. He and I came up with that idea because I feel it’s important to have some older people on my team to lend credibility to investors. Paul is definitely a mentor for me — he has a son who is a year younger than I am and views me as a sort of successful daughter type. Paul, for me, is like my “business dad”. I trust him completely to tell me when I’m doing things right or wrong and I take his advice quite seriously! We had dinner Saturday and went over strategy, which again, is another blog.
But on to the real meat of this blog entry. (I told you it was going to be long!) I was sitting in the lounge, talking language with Bill Ayers, who has made a quite successful business out of door-to-door sales (he owns one of those companies that sells discount cards door-to-door.) Bill makes his money by teaching people (in his case, high school and college kids) how to overcome objections and close sales. Since he recently moved to San Francisco, I asked him to do some 1-on-1 coaching for me in the next 2 weeks on how to become a better closer. It is all about understanding body language and looking at people with a keen eye. He brought up several good points about overcoming objections before they can be stated by watching body and expression cues and figuring out what people are thinking, reading doubts, and speaking out about how that’s not a problem. Bill is writing a book on this stuff and this will be great advice for me to have.
Anyway, Bill and another woman were down in the lounge teaching me how to read cues and working on my investor presentation. One of the most valuable tips I learned: don’t ask for money; present it as an opportunity. The more “limited” and time-sensitive you can make it, the better. There’s a huge difference between “My company is looking for $75,000” and “I am presenting a limited opportunity for just 3 investors at $25,000 each.” 😉
Bill introduced me to a guy he said I definitely needed to do a session with. That person was Michael Peak. Michael comes to IBI weekends just to do sessions with students. In fact, he says word of mouth has spread so far within IBI that he doesn’t even do any of the networking events available on the weekend; he just does sessions nonstop. Michael’s one-on-one sessions last about an hour and he promises to “eliminate all fear, anger and other mental blocks” that prevent you from achieving your goals. Since I’d had about 5 people at IBI that I trust recommend a session, and I figured I didn’t have anything to lose (except $200 for the session, but eh), I went for it.
Michael said we’d be working through a sort of directed hypnosis where I would be fully aware of what was going on. He asked if I had any concerns, and I said “I’m sort of prematurely embarrassed for what I might say.” I had no idea what was going to come out. Some people have stuff from past lives come out, he said, and I knew my last previous life was pretty ugly. I didn’t really want to go through that again. He said to just relax and we’d see what happened.
He started with a quick relaxation session to get me OK with the whole process, since I was still really nervous. At first I couldn’t adapt to it, but I quickly settled in and began. He asked me when the first time that I was angry was: before I was born, while I was in the womb, or after I was born. He said I’d know the answer immediately and to say the first thing that came into my head. “After,” I replied without hesitation. Then, to my amazement, he stepped me through it. I could actually feel it burning inside of me, like my feet were on hot molten lava. He asked me to describe the scene that I was seeing, and my mind’s eye placed me in the kitchen of my parents’ house. I was about 3 years old, and I really wanted something. I mean, whatever it was, I just wanted that darn thing. And my mother said “No.” I was SO MAD at her! (Looking back now, I laugh, but we all have this stuff floating around in our subconscious…you’d be amazed at what really shapes your emotions on a daily basis!)
After describing the scene, Michael encouraged me to tell my three-year-old self that I was okay and that I turned out just fine, and I was asked to replace the anger in the scene with a color, a symbol, and a reminder to myself. I chose purple, a daisy, and something about how I am unique. He then asked me to invite “my older and wiser self” into the picture to see what the learning experience was for the situtation. I invited Julia (my spirit guide; yes, another blog entry I need to write) in and she said “Your mother wanted you to understand that you couldn’t have everything you wanted in this life, but you were too young to understand this at the time.” I thanked her for her insight; we did some more exercises, and Michael moved on to fear.
This one came a bit more easily. I knew what it was almost immediately. I was 13 years old and in 7th grade. My best friend had just moved away, and I had my had on the door at school, ready to go out on the playground at recess but knowing that there were no friends for me there and that I was all alone. It was the first time I really felt fear. After painting it over with yellow and giving my 13-year-old self a golden ring and telling her I loved her, I asked Julia what the lesson was here. It was quite powerful and it was at this point in the session that I started crying. The lesson was so heartfelt and amazing that I was almost shocked I hadn’t realized it before. Landmark Forum had helped me realize that this moment when I was 13 was a pivotal moment in my life; it allowed fear to enter, which in turn caused depression (it’s all in my blog somewhere.) It created what Landmark calls a strong suit, which for me was “I don’t need anyone”, which has also carried itself as a theme throughout my life. But Michael helped me realize that this moment had even deeper meaning. Julia said, quite clearly at that point, “You are never alone.” She’s told me that over and over again, but I didn’t get how important it was until I returned last night to my 13-year-old self and watched Julia bend over and whisper in her (my) ear, right by that school door, “You are never alone.” That was the first time she had said that to me, and it was powerful.
That moment doesn’t hurt any more. I used to wreck myself over that; it was a huge root of depression for me… “knowing” that I was all alone. That moment, that day, would haunt me and torment me in dreams, making me cry myself to sleep with depression. And now I know that that was the moment that Julia told me that there was love in this universe and that none of us are ever alone, that there is always someone there to talk to and God, who loves unconditionally and will pick any of us up when we feel alone and unloved by everyone, when we open that schoolyard door and think that there are nothing but angry people out there.
After breaking through that and handing my 13-year-old self that beautiful golden ring, I realized that I had learned the lesson (finally!!!) and that there would be no more torment or nightmares about being alone. From now on, that moment, for me, could only hold the most powerful love in the universe.
I was smiling after that, but I think Michael still sensed that there was something else there within me. And indeed there was. As soon as he said “sadness”, I knew I was going to get hit hard, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. This moment was by far the most difficult to find. I said “after” with some hesitation. He had me search for it and I couldn’t find it. “I see lots of little sadnesses, but no big ones,” I told him. He asked me to jump back 20 years on my timeline, and WHAM, it hit me so abruptly that I was pulled into it without warning. There I was, in a hospital… Michael cut me off and eased me out of it to figure out a color (pink) and a symbol (heart) and a saying (“I am beautiful”, which I said so powerfully that for the first time, I really believed it.) “Alright,” he said, “we’re going to ease into this one…NOT YET!” (he could see me slipping into it again) “…and remember, you have a protective shield…” His words faded, as I was already there, in the hospital, and someone was crying. Wait. I looked up. My mom was crying! But it wasn’t my mom… it was my birth mother, so young, crying and crying and crying. I knew what this was. “Oh no,” I said out loud. “Oh, no, she’s giving me away! And she didn’t realize how much it was going to hurt, because it’s like giving part of yourself away…” The words were coming rapid-fire as the scene unfolded. I had just been born, and I knew so much sadness already in my life, because she knew she couldn’t raise me, and it was her sadness… her sadness and anger at having to make the hardest decision of her young life by giving her child away so I could have a better life. I remember her looking at me, kissing me, the pain, oh, the infinite sadness in her eyes that seemed to reach on for miles, and I could do nothing but be that sadness, because I had no idea how to do or be anything else.
I had no idea that this memory lurked inside, but it was there, and it was that infinite sadness that I woke up with every morning of my life until THIS morning, THIS day, August 1, 2005. Every single day of my life until now had started with sadness, and often I talked about it but I never understood what it was until last night. I had carried with me for 24 years the sadness of the woman who birthed me and then, a scant 3 days later, gave me away, never to see me again or even know my new name.
Michael gently asked me to remind my very small and young self that it was not my sadness, but her sadness, and to invite my older and wiser self in. I called Julia in again, and all Julia said was “She loved you and wanted the best for you.” That was an amazing moment; the sadness was wiped out and replaced with infinite love.
Michael continued the session for a little while longer, but I knew right then, after I saw that scene and remembered the smile on my birth mother’s face, that my life would not be the same again. Never again would I wake up with sadness that I couldn’t explain. Never again would I be wracked with sobbing pain that I couldn’t identify the source of. I had finally been able to let that go and replace it with love.
This morning, I woke up at 7AM after a scant 5 hours sleep, but I felt amazing. For the first time I can remember, I didn’t wake up with a knot of sadness in my heart. I woke up only with infinite love and the blessings of a woman who gave me away in order to make sure I could have the best life I could have. So I did everything I could do — I smiled, got out of bed, and thanked her for her sacrifice in loving me enough to give me away. And I looked in the mirror, smiled, and realized I am beautiful and unique.
As Julia would say, that chapter of my life is now written. I can move on. And my life is going to be amazing…if it isn’t amazing enough already. 🙂
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