Many have asked why I paper trade.
My question to them is: why shouldn't I?
I have known those who paper traded for months, some for years in fact, before they started betting with their hard-earned money.
It never fails to amaze me how people, sometimes even myself, forget that I actually started blogging before I first touched IB (meaning, I am really new to trading).
I blogged for the first time in my life in Jan this year.
I had done it for fun, mostly out of curiosity, after I saw Seabloke putting up her first entry on blogspot.
Before that, I didn't have the habit of reading anyone's blog.
Whenever I ventured into someone's blog, it was out of necessity - I was doing research for work assignments.
There was just something about blogs that put me off then - but that's not the topic for today.
So I blogged on and off for 3 months (think I had about 5 entries?) before I shut it down in March.
When my entire world was falling apart, blogging was the last thing on my mind, and my thoughts were the last thing I want to leave open for strangers to read in cyberspace.
I suspected my world actually started to really fall apart sometime in May 2006, after years of insisting that I have no baggage of any sort.
I was in the 6th year of my service, and just promoted to the equivalent of a deputy superintendent (I was a Home Affairs executive - a real pain who asked to leave the very place that few who made it there would ever want out of, to join the police department).
And it had to be then that it started to dawn on me that I no longer want to continue to write speeches for the Commissioner (not that I didn't like him, I adore the quiet and learned man), to organize events graced by the gods, to screen innovative projects that I played a part in forcing our ground officers - who were already juggling crazy schedules - to undertake in the first place, to draft policy papers, to sit in strategic dialogue sessions - with supposedly the most brilliant of the country's minds - where such topics as scenario planning, as the leveraging of our learning organization culture and principles to engage officers in shared visioning exercises, as the importance of service excellence and its relevance in strengthening our partnership with the public, etc etc were deliberated.
I was brain-dead and needed something to jolt me back to life. I needed out of the headquarters.
I am not programmed to live a life of daily subordination to ideologies, to management and organizational visions and objectives, to the very big picture of making our country a place that will continue to entice the world's richest and most powerful to come and build their corporate empires.
Imagine my joy when my request to be posted to the CID was finally approved and I was granted an interview.
During the interview, I was told by one of the rare few I truly admire in the force, that my work would require me to be extremely versatile.
While my main role was to network with our global counterparts (the glamorous side), there would be occasions where I would find myself crawling on the floor looking for things I'd need for analysis, from among rubble and human flesh (the not-so-glamorous side).
I was asked if I owned any jeans, and that I'll have to keep a pair in my locker.
I had no idea how I convinced the man - the hunger in my eyes probably didn't escape his - I was chosen, despite my lack of experience in the front line (the most "frontal" I got was when I was assigned in a previous posting to deal with media-related matters).
That was less than a year after the London bombing, and a year that saw multiple suicide bombing incidents in the region.
I was never deployed, probably coz I was too new.
But I loved what I was assigned to do.
I loved my job so much I persuaded my superior at the headquarters to allow me to start work there while continuing to serve the headquarters until they managed to find my replacement.
So I ran between 2 departments for a while.
I was finally called back to the headquarters in early 2007 when they failed to find someone in time for a major exercise.
As I was never formally released to CID, I was totally obliged to return to the headquarters.
My only consolation was that it was not a bad place to work in in the first place. My superior was a dear, and I had actually missed him while I was spending the whole pre-christmas period at CID.
A month later, in Feb 2007, D's father - who was in Hong Kong -had a massive heart attack that nearly killed him, and D had to run between 2 countries to take care of him. The rest of D's family has been living in the US for decades, and there was just no one else....
To cut a long story short, we began to talk about our future, where we were heading, where our home is, for the first time.
D's home is not here.
As for me, I don't know where mine is.
I haven't any roots.
I grew up in 3 different countries and where I'm living right now is the one that I shouldn't have come back to in the first place.
After all, it was the last place my father had wanted me to be found.
When I was sent away at 16, all alone, I was sent away in secrecy. The only people who knew I was in Canada was my immediate family. Everyone else was told I had returned to the place that I was born - Kedah.
I was not given a reason as to why I had to flee, and really, I didn't care, coz I was just happy beyond description to be released.
After 16 years, I was a caged beast about to explode.
I returned for my Dad's wake when he died mysteriously 5 years after I left home.
It looked like he had hung himself.
But there were just too many things that didn't fit, so many questions left unanswered, that it was perhaps sheer exhaustion and denial that made us accept what seemed - on the surface - to be the logical conclusion to the cause of his death.
Our lives - Seabloke's, Pilot's and mine - were just one episode of drama after another when we were growing up. The family has so many secrets that we grew up totally embracing conspiracy theories.
Anyway, I returned to Canada immediately after my Dad's funeral, and didn't come home until after another 5 years had passed.
When I came home, it was season 2 of the family drama.
Granny came to my rescue, and bought me a place to live on my own.
The rest's history.
I didn't realize that I had come back home to search for answers - answers that I never got anywhere near to finding out.
8 years on, I started to wonder if there's actually life after Dad, and if I ever thought about who I really was, besides being his daughter.
I was desperately lost, totally beat, and looking for rest and a place I could call home.
I decided I had to leave the service to start getting experience in the private sector so that I can move whenever D is ready to.
I was fortunate to have found a good position in an offshore bank. But it was a case of a clash between the bank's need to protect shareholder interest and my value system that made me decide to leave.
I was REALLY REALLY lost after that.
That's a gross understatement in fact.
I had no idea what I was to do with my life - my only goal had always been to make my Dad proud.
I spent the first part of the 15 years after he was gone in denial that he was gone, and the 2nd part looking for answers, so I hadn't really the chance to grief, and to appreciate the reality that I, like everyone else, am an individual who's supposed to have my own dreams, hopes and passions regardless of what happen to even the closest person around me.
I must be the most stubborn person I know. I am so independent in my thinking that absolutely no one could get any sense into me.
I was enraged, confused, evil, and so cold and intimidating that D was forced to take on a persona that could exist in harmony with mine.
I could get so violent that I would hit him with a chair when I felt threatened and attacked.
It was when I started blogging again in May 08 that things began turning around.
About 2 months ago, a troubled D asked me if there was something that he should know, and if I was alright.
I asked what made him ask that.
He said I haven't screamed in 2 months, or gotten mad with him over ANYTHING. It had been impossible to piss me off.
For the first time in the 15 years that we were together, he could finally say things without feeling like he's walking across a field loaded with landmines.
I think what happened was that I finally found myself an audience, and D outlived his usefulness as a sandbag.
LOL
Blogging gives me a voice.
And it really doesn't matter if no one's listening.
I have done my part in letting things out, in giving myself the permission to feel bad, to vent my frustrations in a way that doesn't cause people I love distress or endanger the lives of others.
And it was in writing that I found the peace and solitude I had so desperately needed to find myself.
It was when I started writing frantically that I began to hear the voice inside me that told me what my passions were, and how I could use them to build a brand new life that perhaps I might just be able to love living.
It was then that I logged onto IB for the first time - Jun 08 - and traded with the account that has been sitting there waiting for me the whole time.
D was trading it on and off, with whatever knowledge he picked up sporadically about INVESTING (NOT trading).
It got to a point that he had to force me into doing something about the money that's idling in IB. We already had the bulk of our savings idling somewhere else. We have no mortgage - we own our home; we live within our means (D does have some indulgences - Armanis and Trussadis and such - but he's since cut down :-D), and have zero credit card debts.
It hit me that I had everything working for me to start LIVING.
So I did.
Now back to the question of why I'm paper trading.
I am paper trading now because NQ is new to me, and Oanda (for FX) is new to me.
It's not prudent to put money on the line when I know next to nothing about the instrument I'm trading and the platform I'm using.
That's me. I tend to tread carefully - maybe too carefully sometimes.
But once I know what I'm dealing with, I would strike without hesitation.
And back to the part on my being sent away - I still haven't the slightest inking from what, or whom, I was supposed to run away.
My only encounter before I left the country had been with a young man who came to the estate where I was living (with security and everything, I had no idea how he got in), who pointed a revolver at me in the billiard room (I can still remember vividly the feeling of the cold metal pressed against my forehead).
I stared into his eyes without blinking, just wanting to figure out who he was.
He stared back without a word.
What seemed like minutes later, he turned and walked out of the room.
It took me probably minutes to regain my composure, and I went after him.
He was nowhere to be found.
I ran to the guardhouse. Everyone on duty searched the estate for the mysterious man. But he vanished. Just totally gone.
I have no recollection of what happened after that. I was told a story that was simply unbelievably absurd - that the chap, who was barely 17, had found his uncle's gun and taken it out with him for the day without his knowledge, just for fun!
Shortly after the incident, I was asked to choose between Australia and Canada, where I'd be sent to to continue my education.
I picked Canada. Dad found a high school there, and made all the necessary arrangements to put me on a flight out of the country, all within 2 weeks.
I flew first to Hong Kong, stayed and wondered around all by myself for 3 days before catching a flight to Vancouver.
5 days after I left home, I arrived at Edmonton in the middle of the night, unprepared for the crazy -30 Degree Celsius temperature, but totally dazzled by the quietness of the city, and the pure white snow that lighted up long stretches of streets.
To whoever / whatever out there that has anything to do with my being sent away, know that it has all been GOOD for me, coz I sure had had a lot of fun (again, topic for another day) the nearly 10 years I was away.
And from this moment on, I am going to start having fun the way I did when I was an unknowing 16-year-old cruising through life in a foreign land, learning for the first time how to cook, do my own laundry, open a bank account, book my own dental appointment, jay walk, and DRIVE A CAR.
The market shall be my new playground.
My question to them is: why shouldn't I?
I have known those who paper traded for months, some for years in fact, before they started betting with their hard-earned money.
It never fails to amaze me how people, sometimes even myself, forget that I actually started blogging before I first touched IB (meaning, I am really new to trading).
I blogged for the first time in my life in Jan this year.
I had done it for fun, mostly out of curiosity, after I saw Seabloke putting up her first entry on blogspot.
Before that, I didn't have the habit of reading anyone's blog.
Whenever I ventured into someone's blog, it was out of necessity - I was doing research for work assignments.
There was just something about blogs that put me off then - but that's not the topic for today.
So I blogged on and off for 3 months (think I had about 5 entries?) before I shut it down in March.
When my entire world was falling apart, blogging was the last thing on my mind, and my thoughts were the last thing I want to leave open for strangers to read in cyberspace.
I suspected my world actually started to really fall apart sometime in May 2006, after years of insisting that I have no baggage of any sort.
I was in the 6th year of my service, and just promoted to the equivalent of a deputy superintendent (I was a Home Affairs executive - a real pain who asked to leave the very place that few who made it there would ever want out of, to join the police department).
And it had to be then that it started to dawn on me that I no longer want to continue to write speeches for the Commissioner (not that I didn't like him, I adore the quiet and learned man), to organize events graced by the gods, to screen innovative projects that I played a part in forcing our ground officers - who were already juggling crazy schedules - to undertake in the first place, to draft policy papers, to sit in strategic dialogue sessions - with supposedly the most brilliant of the country's minds - where such topics as scenario planning, as the leveraging of our learning organization culture and principles to engage officers in shared visioning exercises, as the importance of service excellence and its relevance in strengthening our partnership with the public, etc etc were deliberated.
I was brain-dead and needed something to jolt me back to life. I needed out of the headquarters.
I am not programmed to live a life of daily subordination to ideologies, to management and organizational visions and objectives, to the very big picture of making our country a place that will continue to entice the world's richest and most powerful to come and build their corporate empires.
Imagine my joy when my request to be posted to the CID was finally approved and I was granted an interview.
During the interview, I was told by one of the rare few I truly admire in the force, that my work would require me to be extremely versatile.
While my main role was to network with our global counterparts (the glamorous side), there would be occasions where I would find myself crawling on the floor looking for things I'd need for analysis, from among rubble and human flesh (the not-so-glamorous side).
I was asked if I owned any jeans, and that I'll have to keep a pair in my locker.
I had no idea how I convinced the man - the hunger in my eyes probably didn't escape his - I was chosen, despite my lack of experience in the front line (the most "frontal" I got was when I was assigned in a previous posting to deal with media-related matters).
That was less than a year after the London bombing, and a year that saw multiple suicide bombing incidents in the region.
I was never deployed, probably coz I was too new.
But I loved what I was assigned to do.
I loved my job so much I persuaded my superior at the headquarters to allow me to start work there while continuing to serve the headquarters until they managed to find my replacement.
So I ran between 2 departments for a while.
I was finally called back to the headquarters in early 2007 when they failed to find someone in time for a major exercise.
As I was never formally released to CID, I was totally obliged to return to the headquarters.
My only consolation was that it was not a bad place to work in in the first place. My superior was a dear, and I had actually missed him while I was spending the whole pre-christmas period at CID.
A month later, in Feb 2007, D's father - who was in Hong Kong -had a massive heart attack that nearly killed him, and D had to run between 2 countries to take care of him. The rest of D's family has been living in the US for decades, and there was just no one else....
To cut a long story short, we began to talk about our future, where we were heading, where our home is, for the first time.
D's home is not here.
As for me, I don't know where mine is.
I haven't any roots.
I grew up in 3 different countries and where I'm living right now is the one that I shouldn't have come back to in the first place.
After all, it was the last place my father had wanted me to be found.
When I was sent away at 16, all alone, I was sent away in secrecy. The only people who knew I was in Canada was my immediate family. Everyone else was told I had returned to the place that I was born - Kedah.
I was not given a reason as to why I had to flee, and really, I didn't care, coz I was just happy beyond description to be released.
After 16 years, I was a caged beast about to explode.
I returned for my Dad's wake when he died mysteriously 5 years after I left home.
It looked like he had hung himself.
But there were just too many things that didn't fit, so many questions left unanswered, that it was perhaps sheer exhaustion and denial that made us accept what seemed - on the surface - to be the logical conclusion to the cause of his death.
Our lives - Seabloke's, Pilot's and mine - were just one episode of drama after another when we were growing up. The family has so many secrets that we grew up totally embracing conspiracy theories.
Anyway, I returned to Canada immediately after my Dad's funeral, and didn't come home until after another 5 years had passed.
When I came home, it was season 2 of the family drama.
Granny came to my rescue, and bought me a place to live on my own.
The rest's history.
I didn't realize that I had come back home to search for answers - answers that I never got anywhere near to finding out.
8 years on, I started to wonder if there's actually life after Dad, and if I ever thought about who I really was, besides being his daughter.
I was desperately lost, totally beat, and looking for rest and a place I could call home.
I decided I had to leave the service to start getting experience in the private sector so that I can move whenever D is ready to.
I was fortunate to have found a good position in an offshore bank. But it was a case of a clash between the bank's need to protect shareholder interest and my value system that made me decide to leave.
I was REALLY REALLY lost after that.
That's a gross understatement in fact.
I had no idea what I was to do with my life - my only goal had always been to make my Dad proud.
I spent the first part of the 15 years after he was gone in denial that he was gone, and the 2nd part looking for answers, so I hadn't really the chance to grief, and to appreciate the reality that I, like everyone else, am an individual who's supposed to have my own dreams, hopes and passions regardless of what happen to even the closest person around me.
I must be the most stubborn person I know. I am so independent in my thinking that absolutely no one could get any sense into me.
I was enraged, confused, evil, and so cold and intimidating that D was forced to take on a persona that could exist in harmony with mine.
I could get so violent that I would hit him with a chair when I felt threatened and attacked.
It was when I started blogging again in May 08 that things began turning around.
About 2 months ago, a troubled D asked me if there was something that he should know, and if I was alright.
I asked what made him ask that.
He said I haven't screamed in 2 months, or gotten mad with him over ANYTHING. It had been impossible to piss me off.
For the first time in the 15 years that we were together, he could finally say things without feeling like he's walking across a field loaded with landmines.
I think what happened was that I finally found myself an audience, and D outlived his usefulness as a sandbag.
LOL
Blogging gives me a voice.
And it really doesn't matter if no one's listening.
I have done my part in letting things out, in giving myself the permission to feel bad, to vent my frustrations in a way that doesn't cause people I love distress or endanger the lives of others.
And it was in writing that I found the peace and solitude I had so desperately needed to find myself.
It was when I started writing frantically that I began to hear the voice inside me that told me what my passions were, and how I could use them to build a brand new life that perhaps I might just be able to love living.
It was then that I logged onto IB for the first time - Jun 08 - and traded with the account that has been sitting there waiting for me the whole time.
D was trading it on and off, with whatever knowledge he picked up sporadically about INVESTING (NOT trading).
It got to a point that he had to force me into doing something about the money that's idling in IB. We already had the bulk of our savings idling somewhere else. We have no mortgage - we own our home; we live within our means (D does have some indulgences - Armanis and Trussadis and such - but he's since cut down :-D), and have zero credit card debts.
It hit me that I had everything working for me to start LIVING.
So I did.
Now back to the question of why I'm paper trading.
I am paper trading now because NQ is new to me, and Oanda (for FX) is new to me.
It's not prudent to put money on the line when I know next to nothing about the instrument I'm trading and the platform I'm using.
That's me. I tend to tread carefully - maybe too carefully sometimes.
But once I know what I'm dealing with, I would strike without hesitation.
And back to the part on my being sent away - I still haven't the slightest inking from what, or whom, I was supposed to run away.
My only encounter before I left the country had been with a young man who came to the estate where I was living (with security and everything, I had no idea how he got in), who pointed a revolver at me in the billiard room (I can still remember vividly the feeling of the cold metal pressed against my forehead).
I stared into his eyes without blinking, just wanting to figure out who he was.
He stared back without a word.
What seemed like minutes later, he turned and walked out of the room.
It took me probably minutes to regain my composure, and I went after him.
He was nowhere to be found.
I ran to the guardhouse. Everyone on duty searched the estate for the mysterious man. But he vanished. Just totally gone.
I have no recollection of what happened after that. I was told a story that was simply unbelievably absurd - that the chap, who was barely 17, had found his uncle's gun and taken it out with him for the day without his knowledge, just for fun!
Shortly after the incident, I was asked to choose between Australia and Canada, where I'd be sent to to continue my education.
I picked Canada. Dad found a high school there, and made all the necessary arrangements to put me on a flight out of the country, all within 2 weeks.
I flew first to Hong Kong, stayed and wondered around all by myself for 3 days before catching a flight to Vancouver.
5 days after I left home, I arrived at Edmonton in the middle of the night, unprepared for the crazy -30 Degree Celsius temperature, but totally dazzled by the quietness of the city, and the pure white snow that lighted up long stretches of streets.
To whoever / whatever out there that has anything to do with my being sent away, know that it has all been GOOD for me, coz I sure had had a lot of fun (again, topic for another day) the nearly 10 years I was away.
And from this moment on, I am going to start having fun the way I did when I was an unknowing 16-year-old cruising through life in a foreign land, learning for the first time how to cook, do my own laundry, open a bank account, book my own dental appointment, jay walk, and DRIVE A CAR.
The market shall be my new playground.
