Hi folks, I’ve been looking for an excuse to start writing a trading journal and I’ve been having really good success with small SPY trades primarily (1-10% gains). But I need goals to go for instead of making numbers go up. So here’s the plan: I will be trading in 2 different accounts and have set 3 challenges for myself that I want to achieve with my trading in order to give me enough of a goal to care about the money. I’m hoping that doing this will keep me honest and focused
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Return my Roth IRA to $67K. I bet big on RSX and went from $400,000 up on that Friday to $65K down when all of my options expired worthless. So I’m taking my Roth back up to where it was and owning my scars.
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Build my fun account up to $30K. I’ve been playing in an account with money from selling RSUs from a previous job. It goes up and down… but I want to get it up to $30K as a baseline to show that I can be disciplined. I’ll be using this to pay for #3
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Pay off my house. My wife and I bought our house 5 years ago for relatively cheap around here (it was a piece of crap we fixed for years). We have the house mortgage as well as a solar panel loan. I want to pay that off as a surprise to my wife. I’ll be using the fun account (after it hits $30K) to fund this and 50% of all gains per month will go to the mortgage.
I will be trading most days (except when I don’t feel like it/am busy/forget or when I don’t understand what’s going on in the market) and while I won’t be posting each trade, I’ll try to do weekly updates and monthly roll-ups.
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So here’s where I stand on these goals each month:
| Goal |
Roth to $67K |
Fun Account to $30K |
Pay off solar (remaining) |
Pay off house (remaining) |
| April |
$1,569.77 |
$31,370.17 |
$12,512.32 |
$369,551.87 |
| May |
$2,615.45 |
$24,281.11 |
$12,466.87 |
$368,864.81 |
| June |
$3,194.45 |
$16,568.92 |
$12,421.23 |
$368,176.11 |
| Current |
$3,747.74 |
$23,704.13 |
|
|
Roth is up ~17% and Fun is up ~43% since the start of the month
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Well a great week turned into a pretty shitty week after that big sudden drop in SPY + my broker not executing trailing stops… So I’m ending up pretty far down this week and down on the month. I think this means I’ll have to be more practiced or simply avoid likely high volatility days in the future.
| Goal |
Roth to $67K |
Fun Account to $30K |
Pay off solar (remaining) |
Pay off house (remaining) |
| April |
$1,569.77 |
$31,370.17 |
$12,512.32 |
$369,551.87 |
| May |
$2,615.45 |
$24,281.11 |
$12,466.87 |
$368,864.81 |
| June |
$3,194.45 |
$16,568.92 |
$12,421.23 |
$368,176.11 |
| Current |
$1,917.55 |
$13,261.57 |
|
|
Roth is down ~40% and Fun is down ~20% since the start of the month.
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I spent the first part of this week just getting over last week’s awful turn and get my head clear to start again. Ended up ok with a few very good trades on Thursday and Friday.
| Goal |
Roth to $67K |
Fun Account to $30K |
Pay off solar (remaining) |
Pay off house (remaining) |
| April |
$1,569.77 |
$31,370.17 |
$12,512.32 |
$369,551.87 |
| May |
$2,615.45 |
$24,281.11 |
$12,466.87 |
$368,864.81 |
| June |
$3,194.45 |
$16,568.92 |
$12,421.23 |
$368,176.11 |
| Current |
$2,314.40 |
$13,970.72 |
|
|
Roth is down ~27% and Fun is down ~15% since the start of the month.
Additionally, I have discovered that I can sell covered calls on RSU grants from former jobs. While I won’t disclose those trades in detail so that I don’t dox myself (it would be very easy to figure me out), I have decided that I will use that money to support women’s health in the US since the SCOTUS has turned its back on 50% of the population by legislating from the bench. If money talks, I will add my voice for my children, family, community to protect the right of all women to choose how and when to have a family. With some back of the napkin math, I expect to donate $12-20 K (Edit $8-14 K, they’re not all weeklies) per month to charities in support of these rights.
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