During 1 month of paper trading, I really got into the actual game. Before I was just watching DVDs and video lessons, but wasn’t really looking at the current stocks and overall market. Starting on December 21st, I’ve been showing up every single day during the first 1-2 hours and the last hour of the market. I got into the habit of making a watchlist every single day a night before which really helps me during the market hours. Furthermore, I can say that my whole life has changed not just during this month but during the past few months when I was studying and immersing myself into this new world. Since I live in CA, and the market opens here at 6:30 am, I got into the great habit of sleeping early at about 10 pm and waking up at 5:15-5:30 am to have enough time to prepare for the market open. In my experience I can say that I truly believe that waking up early is a very powerful habit since when I wake up, I feel really inspired and excited realizing the level of dedication that I’m putting in while many other people are waking up right at the open without any preparation. I love this new little shift in my lifestyle that makes me believe that I can become successful following good habits.   So, let’s now talk about my trading. During the past seven months of studying I was learning and seeing many different patterns that I thought would be great for me, but that were just my assumptions since I had never practiced any of them. So, throughout this month of paper trading, I learned that my 3 favorite patterns are dip buying morning panics, buying breakouts, and holding overnight strong closing OTC stocks, ideally, First Green Days. I also learned to never hold listed stocks overnight regardless of how strong they close because they trade afterhours, and I prefer low stress overnight plays. Also, I was posting all my trades on Profitly, my entry price and comments and my exit price and comment. However, I didn’t track my trades in a spreadsheet since I believe that paper trades and real trades are very different from each other due to the emotional aspects, so they are not very reliable to track them to see what works best for me. but I will track my real trades starting on my first day. Overall my paper profit for this month is around $1,800 on a $3,000 account; by the way, I’ve never used more than $1,000 on a single position. In total I made 22 trades (23 to be exact, I have one swing trade that I will sell on Monday for likely a profit), 17 wins and 5 loses. Winning % and average gain % are not very important due to the small amount of trades I made. However, I will mention that the most important part which I am very proud of is that I was always sticking to my risk and cutting losses quickly when either my risk was reached or the stock wasn’t doing what I wanted; therefore, my losses are very small compared to my wins on % bases and $ bases expect of one quiet big loss that I couldn’t control on an overnight play that just didn’t gap up and I cut it immediately. I understand that these stats are just based on my paper trades, so I’m not expecting to have the same results when I start trading with real money, but I believe that I formed a great foundation and proper mindset. All I need is to focus on my favorite patterns, refining and honing them as much as I can while trying to ignore anything else. Finally, I believe that I have learned the proper rules of the game and how to follow the rules, but not yet how to use them to my advantage in order to win the game consistently with little risk. Therefore, my goal is to continue putting in as much time and work as possible in order to become a consistently profitable trader.