**This was originally posted in 2010
Well here we go. Its not often you get a chance to follow a dream so what I have to be careful of is keeping discipline and not getting carried away.
6:45: Got up to take my daughter to work, getting back just after 7. Sitting in the kitchen with a coffee it still didn’t seem real. This isn’t a holiday. This is it. The ultimate in performance related pay. I didn’t feel nervous. Didn’t feel anything really. Thats a good thing surely? Business as usual. We’ll see.
7:30: I sat on the sofa with the laptop to write the blog. Scanned over the list of matches looking for a couple of suitable matches. Checked out the stats on Tennis Insight and ATPworldtour. Loads of matches running from 10am to 5am the next morning. Going to be a busy day!
Answered a few emails. Quite a few good luck messages which was nice. A couple of sales of the Trading Guide so at least I have made 50 quid!
Deleted the 150 spam comments on the blog. Why do they bother? Most of them are from the same bloody person!
9:00: My wife gets up. She is on day off and I have agreed that on her days off I will trade from the bedroom and not come downstairs until the evening ( as if I was at work). She doesn’t get much time to herself so I totally understand where she’s coming from. I will probably be trading upstairs anyway. I move the laptop upstairs and set up the fan as its so hot.
The new 17inch laptop fills my small computer desk. I have 2 monitors and hook one of them up to the laptop to give me more room.
9:30: matches start at 10. I check out who’s in the chatroom. Not many in but its early yet. I decide to try to figure out a solution to the problem I have been having with the keyboard on the new laptop. It keeps missing keystrokes. I make plenty of typos anyway but this makes me look like a retard for god’s sake!
Google throws up a possible solution. I need to make a change to a registry entry. Not long to go before the game starts. Maybe I should wait. Nah it will only take a couple of minutes. As it turned out I didn’t read it properly and managed to disable the keyboard!! 15 minues to go and I’m running system restore………idiot!
10:00: The keyboard is back to its original state. I’ll sort that later.
The first match starts. WTA. I normally scalp womens matches as they are so unpredictable and lay the server when the match looks right. Not really sure what I was doing in the first 2 games but I came away with a combined total of 3 quid! More importantly they took up the whole morning. Not a great start. I had lost discipline as I had opportunities to take acceptable profits but got greedy. Newbie errors!!
Having given myself a talking to things started to fall into place. I was taking moderate greens but they were adding up.
Its good to get that first day out of the way and out of my system. I would have been very suprised if I hadnt had any reaction to the situation and at least it didn’t cost me anything. I came away from the day with around £170 so its hardly a disaster. Anything over £100 is ok but I’d prefer to be over the £200 mark each day.
Hopefully I will start my second day the way I finished the first. So much of trading is in the mind. I have a very strong mind and my discipline is (usually) pretty good but I’m human.
All in all a decent first day. Oh and I managed to sort the keyboard issue. Well, I think I have. We’ll find out in a while in the chatroom!!
