The first week is out of the way.

As I didn’t want to put myself under any extra pressure I set a very conservative target for the week. £500. Monday started slowly but I started to settle into it towards the end. Tuesday was a little more comfortable and by Wednesday I was pretty much trading “normally”.

Thursday was my best day with around £240 profit but then had a bit of a nightmare day on Friday ending it -£60!

By the end of the week I was around £800 up which i was satisfied with all things considered.

I can manage well enough on £500 a week but with previous performance I would expect to average £200 a day fairly easily. That doesn’t mean I will be beating myself up if I am below that. Nor does it mean I will stop once I reach that total. Its simply a guide for me to measure the day against.

Last week I also made a definite decision to limit the hours I spent in front of the PC. One of the main reasons for turning full time was to improve our standard of living and obviously our income. There is little point earning more money if you are either sat by your desk for 16 hours a day or else if you’re too tired to enjoy the new “freedom”.

So I set a finish time each day meaning I had a 4pm finish and a couple of 5pm finishes. That is something I aim to continue as is having a proper day off. I am sure that will come easier once I am happier with the amount of profit by close of business Saturday 🙂

Hopefully I have given myself a good base to work on. I still don’t think it has sunk in though! Still feels a little strange.

I’ll update you this time next week

 

Well that’s it. As of 3:30 this afternoon I am no longer employed.

The reaction at work was a little strange but I suppose not totally unexpected. One or two people knew a bit about what I was planning for the end of the year but didn’t really understand it.

When I changed The Plan and decided to take the plunge earlier I gave 2 week’s notice. I explained to my boss what it was I would be doing. Cue the scenario that many others have faced before me. Explaining trading to someone who hasn’t got the faintest idea of what I am talking about. She tried to make the right noises from behind the glazed expression but I knew she didn’t get it.

A briefing was called to inform the rest of her team. I wasn’t in the briefing. Shortly afterwards one of the Account Managers ( I think she is a born again Christian or something similar) approached me and said, ” So Paul, I understand you’re a professional gambler?”. So I explained the difference between punting and trading. Glazed expression number 2…..

During the next week  it was noticeable how few people were talking to me. It felt almost like they thought I was making a big mistake but none had the bottle to tell me. I was told that the  born-again-godsquad muppet had been telling some of the others that she thought it was terrible to be encouraging others to gamble and that she was going to “have a word”.  I was looking forward to that. Anyone foolish enough to talk down to me soon realises their mistake.

Over the last couple of  days a few more asked what it was that I was going to do. Glazed expressions 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 followed. In the end I just settled for “its like the stock market”. The good thing about working for yourself is that you only have to deal with one idiot  😉

The-God-Squad was working at another site today so I never got the chance too shut her up publicly. Shame. If ever anyone needed shutting up….

So what prompted me to change The Plan?  Newer readers may not know that The Plan was to turn full time at the end of the year. After Wimbledon my wife and I went away for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. After a  very nice meal at the hotel we were sitting in the summerhouse-cum-smoking hut  having a drink and chatting. You know when someone starts a  conversation and they are building up to something important? Well this was one of those times. She started saying how I was putting a lot of time and energy into the business and  was wearing me out doing all that alongside a fulltime job. I thought it was going to go along the lines of ,  “you’re spending so much time on the laptop blah blah, no time for us blah blah, I dont think you should be thinking about doing this fulltime as we’ll never see you etc etc”.

However I was wrong. ” The business is going well. So why are you wasting time at work?”. She spent the rest of the evening coming up with reason after reason why I  should trade full time straight away. She didn’t need to ofcourse but if she thinks it was her idea…  😉

So Monday is my first “proper” day as a fulltimer.  This isn’t a holiday. No job to go back to next week. This is the ultimate in performance related pay.

I’ll write a bit of a diary post on how the day goes.