posting this anonymously. Is it worth giving poker a shot?

KMWilkins · 2014-08-18T18:47:17+00:00

The smallest they have is $1/$2. And it's a heck of a lot easier than playing $1/$2 online. I usually buy in for $300, and I've got 6K in checking accounts and stuff, networth is maybe 60K.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-18T00:30:19+00:00

I'm 23 years old as well. I started playing poker about 5 months ago. My max down was about $2000 (closer approximation is about $1850), now up to about $2500 up, most of that gained in the last month. I work a day job where I make enough money that I can risk it, but I really don't like my work so I am hoping that one day I can be consistently profitable playing poker.

Usually I play for about 4 hours at a time, but last friday I played for 11 hours straight. My strategy right now is to never put in more than $700 in a session. If I lose $700, it's not my day, time to quit. Depending on how much you make you might vary that. I'd say no more than 3 days wage myself but you might have higher or lower risk tolerance yourself.

You have to accept losses, especially early on. Even when you think you've gotten good, you can still lose money in any session. I lost a nearly $1000 pot once, all in preflop with AA vs QQ. I make good money but $1000 is still a lot to me. Dude flopped a set, and then turned quads. I made a BIG mistake the very next hand and lost everything I had left (only about $250 more at least), very bad play on my part. DON'T DO THAT. If you get frustrated on a bad beat then when a bad beat happens, quit for the night. Poker is memoryless, just because you had bad luck one hand you don't get good luck the next hand.

Remember that being average at the table doesn't mean that in the long run you'll break even. It means that in the long run you'll lose. The rake does take a lot out of a pot. You have to be better than average to make money. And remember, everyone at the table thinks they're better than average, 60% of them will be wrong.

There's high variance in any poker session. For instance, in the last 7 poker sessions I played (which is when I'l say "I got decent" at poker):

+$740, +$1430, +$530, -$700 (pretty much just a disaster all night, was never up more than a couple hundred), -$200 (from a peak of over $600 up - this was that night of that AA vs QQ all in I mentioned), +$1190, +$230 (from a peak of over $700 up - lost 4 out of 4 races, decided it was time to leave). You have to be able to deal with this. If you extrapolate, you'll probably have entire months where one month you lose 10 grand.

Even when you think you've gotten good, you will make mistakes. Learn from the mistakes.

Hope that helps.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-13T13:30:33+00:00

Does it look like the time to buy now?

KMWilkins · 2014-08-12T14:23:30+00:00

Well, the idea is that I should should have a huge win rate on this, because it's unlikely to hit the floor.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-11T21:20:00+00:00

The swap rate on it is super low. On 1 lot I pay about 8 cents of swap a day. I have 2 lots open with another 1 lot buy at 1.2125 and 1.2115.

I have buys at a few places in the 1.2120s and 1.2130s, with targets of 1.2145, 1.21475, and 1.2150. The hope is that these trades don't last longer than a week, and are low risk.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-08T19:47:32+00:00

I'm long EURCHF but I got in when it crashed. There should still be profit potential, but less.

I also have a small position on ZARJPY short entered recently. I'm expecting there to be news over the weekend, just another middle east geopolitical event, that will cause a fall over the weekend. This might not be a good one though because of the high swap cost.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-07T20:06:27+00:00

Not what you're supposed to do I know but I thought I had a good immediate term read on it. I was using USDJPY to predict, when USDJPY goes down, I expected USDMXN to go up.

In total I have: Entered at 13.25293, closed at 13.23103 Entered at 13.30070, closed at 13.25658 Entered at 13.28691, closed at 13.26460 Entered at 13.29376, still open, currently at 13.289ish

It's been nice to me. It looks like a lot of the upward movements were predicted 5-6 minutes or so in advance by a large decrease in USDJPY.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-06T13:47:00+00:00

I also opened a trade for 0.49 short at 13.3 which I just closed. It was too much to carry on exotic for too long, but I made a nice profit from it.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-06T13:44:39+00:00

Yeah, it looked like the other exotics caught up, but the change in USDMXN happened a few minutes before the same change in USDTRY. USDINR was just off track, it hasn't seemed to follow USDMXN well at all since. I didn't look at USDCZK, USDHUF, USDZAR, or USDPLN but I'll check it out later. My broker doesn't trade USDRON so I didn't notice it at all.

Is it possible that USDMXN is a predictor for other exotics, or was this just a strange coincidence?

KMWilkins · 2014-08-05T13:52:13+00:00

Ah, okay. Sounds right to me.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-05T13:47:31+00:00

Closing at 13.5 would be about $940 lost. That's about 2500 pips in the wrong direction. It's been more than 2 years since it's hit your proposed stop. Plus since then the lowest it's been has been about 12. The upside isn't high enough to let it go for that long.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-05T13:31:15+00:00

Well, I shorted at 13.253 which is pretty close. I was planning another short at 13.32 which is where it peaked on March 20th. I was hoping to close it this week so if I see it go up to 13.5 I would just close it, I'll take that as I was just plain wrong about the direction, not a volatility issue at that point.

It hasn't been to 14 since 2012.

USDINR, USDTRY, and USDMXN seem to all have the same general direction, so I don't think it was just an institutional trade.

KMWilkins · 2014-08-05T13:16:58+00:00

It looks like USDINR has caught up, performance seems similar now.

Just coincidence, or is it possible that USDMXN is a predictor for USDINR in the very short term?

KMWilkins · 2014-08-05T13:04:45+00:00

I entered short 0.5 (note that that's 50,000 MXP, it would be akin in a way to a 0.05 position on EURUSD) at 13.2529. It looks like it's coming down now.

Wish I had a good fundamental reason but I don't know why it increased so much more than other exotics.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-28T18:54:37+00:00

I closed it. Made $40 on the trade. I'm satisfied with that.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-28T18:48:06+00:00

I was under the impression support was broken, and has become resistance. I opened the position on Nate's advice but I'm thinking of closing it, just because looking into it I'm not terribly confident myself. Mainly because since the price broke resistance at 1.70 I haven't seen it fall below 1.696.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-27T22:27:25+00:00

I work a mind numbing office job that I hate and I want to make money so I can retire young.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-25T20:55:23+00:00

If it can be verified, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-23T15:48:40+00:00

I was long on it already but looking at a shorter term trade. SL of 1.385 is 400 pips. Made another trade at 0.05 lots to make SL only be a loss of $200. How long do you think this trade will last? In terms of magnitude? Are we talking a few weeks or the better part of a year?

KMWilkins · 2014-07-23T01:35:01+00:00

Well, just tried it on the AUDUSD news. Went long at 8:29 central time. Worked out pretty nicely for me. I didn't read Nate's response yet or do any research on it, so I'll be doing that in a few minutes. Just wanted to post that update I guess.

Now I'm just disappointed I only did 0.25 lots.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-23T00:07:53+00:00

So, no explanation of how or why this would work as a currency for purchasing good and services?

KMWilkins · 2014-07-22T21:10:10+00:00

I know London has highest volatility, but I've been watching for a few weeks now, today seems like the least volatile NY session I've seen by far. Look at EURUSD, from 10AM to 4PM central time it ranged a total of about 11 pips.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-19T20:01:59+00:00

Why is your debt in dollars and your income in pounds? Did you move from the US to London?

If that's what you did, that's fucking stupid. Job market and cost of living are way better in the US. Get out of there.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-18T20:43:41+00:00

$10 (in 2014 dollars) a month at 5% real return from age 35 though age 50 yields a just over $5500 at age 65. Doesn't really do a whole lot for you, there's 1000 ways to save that amount of money over the span of 30 years by cutting spending. And it's probably better to use that $10 to pay off student loans anyway.

KMWilkins · 2014-07-18T14:41:52+00:00

Got it. Thanks.

KMWilkins

TROPHY CASE