Income Report Mar 2021 - Lost 1500 USD In Stock Markets

Welcome to my income report for March 2021

In March I have earned $132 in total. 53% more than in the previous month.

What I Did In March

So what happened in March?

Nothing much really. My 9-5 job got really stressful with deadlines and unrealistic expectations. It's no more worth it to live miserably like this anymore, working for peanuts at the expense of my other pursuits.

Therefore I don't have much to share with you guys. I could hardly focus creatively on creating content and I also had to deal with some technical issues with my web projects, so I feel I wasted the whole month of my life doing nothing meaningful.

Lost 1500 USD In Stock Market

At least I will amuse you with my latest failure instead and tell you how I lost 1500 USD in the stock markets in one day.

You know me as a risk-averse person, who has to have tons of analytical proof before making a decision. The downside is that by the time I make a decision, the train already left the station and I regret not listening to my gut.

On the other hand, I have no issues YOLOing if I already made the decision. That leads to relying on hope and belief instead of hard facts.

So when applied to stock markets. I miss the home runs often and always holding on to the losses longer than I should.

If I was purely rigid about the trades, I would not profit much, but I would also not lose much. There would be no regret from taking too many risks.

With the same analogy, If I was purely gambling, then the home runs would often big losses in the long run.

Instead, I take the worst of both worlds and come up in loss and with regrets.

The same situation happened to me in March.

I mistakenly opened a same-day trade due to being so overwhelmed from a 9-5 job. Originally my trading plan was to trade every day at 15 pm, take a good look at the charts and then execute the trade. It worked so far and I was up 900 USD since I started.

Not this time. It was Friday and I had a meeting, really frustrating meeting. Furious and stressed about the soul-sucking job I mistakenly opened a same-day trade by looking at the wrong window.

I didn't even look properly at the chart, I just wanted to execute the trade to get some high, to soothe me from my frustrations.

Of course, I realize the mistake 10 minutes after the stock went against me. My hunch told me to immediately close the trade and swallow the transaction costs, as a lesson.

Nope. I saw that the market calmed down and I decided to eyeball the market every second with the intention to maybe close the trade if markets became volatile again.

If it was that easy.

A few hours later, I even had the opportunity to close for a smaller profit and my gut repeatedly called for closing.

I silenced my gut again and let my greed win. Unexpectedly few minutes before the close, the market started to be volatile again and quickly moved against me.

By this time, It was already too late and I refused to close for a small loss. I hoped it would stay there because who would ever trade the last minute before the market close? Huge hedge funds and high-frequency algorithms, that react to sudden market movements.

Yeah, those parties can accelerate the move even more. So a few seconds later, I was in tears looking at my breached stop loss. I lost 1.5 times what earned the whole month.

An expensive life lesson to pay for my stubbornness and poor risk management. It was so fast I even didn't try to move my short position closer to reduce the overall loss.

All tactics I learned went out of the window once I was in the loss and was overwhelmed by emotions.

So all in all, this setback put me down for few good days. I was so sad I just laid in bed for few days. I felt like a failure and regretted not listening to my gut. I had exactly 4 opportunities to close at break-even and 2 hours window to close at a minor profit.

So what is a lesson here? Always listen to your gut and don't trade, when being emotional due to a 9-5 job. It is not worth it. And also, don't fight the trends.

Live projects

The Hustle App

I used The Hustle as a reference when interviewing for a job and it definitely helped me to set the foot in the door. So I think I will make it free for all and keep it alive indefinitely to show off my programming prowess.

Good House Music

At the time of writing this post, it grew to 246 subscribers. A 10% increase over the previous month.

I have uploaded zero DJ mixes and only 4 new single tracks. The most viewed track recorded 156 views. I slacked hard in March due to a 9-5 job. I will have to make up for it in April no matter what. Every day not posting is the day lost.

I will keep uploading till I reach 269 uploads, then we will see if it is going anywhere.

Personal Youtube Channel #1

In March, I posted 1 new video on my personal Youtube channel, that I don't want to share yet. My most viewed video posted in March got 17 views.

Again, I was so stressed out from a 9-5 job I could not creatively focus on creating content. I will have to do something quick to free myself from slavery.

I will keep uploading till I reach 246 uploads, then we will see if it is going anywhere.

Personal Youtube Channel #2

In March, I posted 1 new video on my personal Youtube channel, that I don't want to share yet. My most viewed video posted in March got tens of views.

In April, I will try to keep my original content schedule no matter what. Not pursuing my creative projects for a 9-5 job will be one of my biggest regrets 40 years from now. No one ever regretted not working more at a 9-5 job. But most regretted not chasing their dreams.

Anyway, I will keep uploading till I reach 30 uploads, then we will see if it is going anywhere.

Financia

In March, I had to face some serious troubles with the Financia website. First, the data gathering process got so bloated it regularly timed out so my website was outdated for several days.

In a desperate move to save the situation, I decided to completely rewrite the database structure to narrow down data attributes. It took me two weeks and many GIT commits to reduce the calculation time under one hour and a half.

The second issue was more serious because it directly affected my paying members. The page with the listing component was already significantly slow. It was because of some hasted architectural decisions, that made navigation too complex and CPU intensive.

And one day in March it stopped working. All ajax calls returned timeout and I was again in a pickle. The only solution was to throw off the code and do a major refactor.

Fortunately, after two long weeks, I did it. The page is now swift and clean. I had to reduce the HTML bloat and break down the page to VUE sub-components. I also had to create a completely new navigation design and logic from scratch.

Instead of hierarchical breadcrumb navigation, which required intense CPU calculation of the locations, I opted for a more front-end-wise complex search input field, which in return was less data-intense.

I believe it was the right decision and my users will forgive my design choices for better performance. After all, all my competitors except for one don't use breadcrumb navigation so there must be a reason for it.

It just seemed like the easiest path back then, when my data structure was less scaled, but now the situation changed.

As for future plans, I will keep grinding and create a mailing service MVP. I already did most of the hard work by redoing navigation and refactoring data structures. Now I can start developing an alert service.

Income Report Breakdown

P2P Lending

Nothing has changed in March.

My P2P strategies are turned off and I am still waiting on the sideline. Most of the defaulted lenders are on an ongoing debt recovery plan, that will fulfill all the debts in the next ten years.

Savings Accounts

As of now, I will only keep a small portion of money in savings accounts to cover my living expenses.

Stock Investing

From now on, I will document my stock investing journey here on my blog as a part of income reports. As of now, I already opened a trading account on one of the reputable brokers and I am waiting for my options trading request approval.

Used Stuff Sales

My path to life minimalism went well in March. I got rid of a stainless steel alcohol flask and a PS1 game. The fewer material things I own, the more freedom I get.

Plans, dreams, and wishes

My goals for April are the following. Make Financia better, work on the authority website and Ecom site, and produce video content on regular basis.

That would be it. Thank you so much for following me on this journey and see you in the next report.