I actully never planned to start a blog post, however my first week as a trader have completely destroyed my confidence in what I thought I had learned. This blog post is thus mainly a self reflecting blog post to try to clear my mind and get back on track. On the other hand if it might also help other new traders understand how many mistakes you can make even though you thought you were prepared. 

I've decided to divide my blog post in to two posts. One about my preparation and one about my first week as a trader. To give a little background information about myself, I am 26 years old, and working on finishing my Master from Copenhagen Business School. 

I started to look into the stock market around 3 months ago. In the beginning I just read about it for the fun of it, but after a while I was hooked. I couldn't stop reading about it and I spend several hours every day studying the stock market. To be honest, I probably spend too many hours studying the stock market in the beginning (more than 10 hours a day), as I ended up having trouble sleeping. I couldn't stop thinking about different patterns, and what to study the next day - my mind simply wouldn't let my body relax. After a while I naturally cut back on my studying to around 5-6 hours a day. I tried not to study the last few hours before going to sleep, so I had time to clear my mind. 

In the beginning I spend most of my time studying all the free stuff you can find online about the stock market - Tim Sykes has tons and tons of articles and videos that kept me more than busy in the beginning, not to mention his book "An American hedge fund". Every time I read one of Tim's articles, it linked to 5 new articles I could study. My browser was thus always open and filled with 10+ articles ready for me to read.

After spending a month or so studying the market I decided to sign up for Sykes Pennystocking silver subscription to get acces to even more videos. I spend some time watching a few of his videos, probably only 1-2% - there are more than 3000 - and came to the conclusion that I was ready for a more narrow source of information. I thus decided to invest in one of the trading DVD's. Because many of Sykes articles mention his trading student Tim Grittani, I'd read Tim Grittani's blog fairly early in my studies. In his blog Grittani mention that he had studied two different DVD's, and I thus decided to buy one of them. I bought Nate's DVD "Textbook Trading" and dived in. Over the next couple of weeks I studied it, took notes and prepared for my future entrance into the stock market. 

Now roughly 3 months later and lots of studying I felt ready to enter the stock market. I had done some paper trading with mixed results and my trading account with suretrader was finally funded and open. I spend my weekend preparing for my first trading week, setting up my trading platform, and looking over my notes. Monday came and I felt excited to finally test the last element of trading - EMOTIONS!