Trading From Home

It always amazes me just what a difference there can be trading from home vs. in an office environment or else a very structured home environment. As you know, it is currently summer vacation and I have a 4 year old and and 8 year old. Well, for the past month, they have been up in Iowa visiting family and such and while I had noticed a change in my trading at the start of summer vacation, it was much more pronounced today.

At the start of the summer I began to see one of my accounts go sideways and the others also saw slowing growth. It was not that I was not finding as many things, but rather constantly missing many of them or showing greater hesitation. After I got back from vacation though my trading began to fall back into place. I've been "in the zone" so to speak.

Yesterday, however, I picked up my kids and today, even though I still found a number of nice setups, I managed to only bank literally a couple of dollars after commissions. All day I felt distracted and not at all focused. After about an hour I began to notice a trend... every 10-15 minutes my 4-year old was coming in... just little things... "look at this" etc.

His timing was immaculate. I would find something I was watching to trade and he would pop in. I was quite surprised at just how much difference this made in my ability to place trades. I felt very much on the edge of my chair all day and finally just gave up. I let three completely textbook setups in VMI, INFY and FCX slip by. Even though I had the stocks up and ready to hit the button, FCX was the only one I was even looking at when it actually triggered!

My day went much like this:

"Mommy, look what I got for you!"

I am then presented with a toothbrush.

"Do you like it?"

Of course I have to say how it's a very wonderful tooth brush.

He then stops and yells into the other room "Grandma, can I give mom a toothbrush?"

She replies, "I don't care."

He looks at me and states very matter-of-factly, "That means yes."

"Now here he how you use it."

I am trying to watch a setup forming at this point.

"You are not looking, Mom! See... you use it like this."

I reply something about how wonderful a job he is doing as I'm trying to watch my screen. You see, by this point I had given up on trying to keep him out of the office and was trying to ignore him without him realizing I was not paying much attention since it was his first day back afterall...

"Mom, do you want to give it a try? Look at how shiny my teeth are!"

So I accepted the toothbrush, saying how I would try it out later and sent him off to play.

By the end of the day I had acquired not only a toothbrush, but also a stuffed teddy bear, a christmas tree ornament, a pen, a homemade telescope, 12 drawings, a cat hairbrush, a set of aviation wings and a book about dinosaurs.

So, for any of you thinking that you can be a stay-at-home parent and trade full-time with very young children... I must warn you... You are nuts!!! It is very difficult to stay in the right frame of mind for trading and still be the type of parent that your kids don't live in fear of! :) Granted, I was more lenient today than earlier in the summer simply because they have been gone so long.

Even with that more structured setting, however, whereby they could not distract me at all unless someone was bleeding in the first 2 hours of the trading day, it was still difficult since kids still have to be fed and will interupt with things that they feel are truly important. So, the lesson here is to be sure to take in the realities of how the environment you trade in can affect your ability to focus. It's something that a lot of us seem to overlook at times, or at least underestimate. I, for one, will tend to go so far as to screen all my calls during the day, letting most go to voicemail and checking them when things or slow or afterhours since even that can be quite distracting. I like the text-based chatroom I have over a voice-based one simply for that reason. I can talk and respond without it taking away from my trading as much. Anyway... just things to consider if you find yourself often frazzled during the day as well and can't quite pin down why!