Flashcards, Fitness & Forex

[Macallik86]

I created a thread tracking some 2021 goals earlier this month (Here, here and here). Figured I might as well start a thread to track my progress too.

Flashcards is in the title because I create (digital) flashcards for everything I learn to lock it in. It is so underrated and has become a routine that will help me succeed faster than most I believe.

Forex is in the title because I have been trading it for the last few months and looking to get good enough to eventually make it a primary source of income.

Fitness is in the title because... well it starts with an 'F'? I'm not in terrible shape but I might as well focus on getting in better shape now that we're in a pandemic and I'm hella motivated in general

 

[Macallik86]

Your reference point
During the summer, I was nervous about putting on weight so I started jogging at a running track near my crib. As temperatures dropped, so did my interest in running, so I started doing Kettlebell workouts and put cardio on the backburner.

Fast forward to November... my company offered $250 towards a bicycle for all employees and I took them up on their offer. Because bikes are so popping during covid tho, my purchase didn't get delivered for months.

Eventually it was delivered in the first week of 2021. I put that shyt together myself and everything. I texted some friends who bike about gear and their habits & stuff, and one thing they mentioned is that they said they don't ride during the winter. The idea of waiting for months to ride my new bike was out of the question though, (especially if some shyt was broken and the return window was closed) so I decided to bite the bullet and ride a few blocks during my lunch break one day.

One ride one day has turned into multiple rides per week. It is to the point now that the only time the cold weather affects me is when I finish my ride and grab my bike by the frame to get to my apartment and the metal is cold to the touch. Random but my current beliefs around cycling in the cold are completely different from my initial beliefs about running in the cold. I think it was because I psychologically started in the optimal environment for running which made it feel untenable when things got shaky. On the flipside, I started biking in 30 degree weather, so shyt can only get better. Don't let your initial reference point cloud your beliefs about what the future will look like, especially when things look uncertain.

Flashcards
I grabbed some stats from the flashcard software called Anki. I stumbled on it based on some books I read re: efficient learning, but apparently a shyt-ton of med students swear by it because it helps retain the reams of information that have to lock in to become doctors.

Making flashcards has become lowkey addictive which gives the process of learning less friction too. There is an Anki add-on I use called Image Occlusion that is a game-changer... you can turn screenshots into flashcards which makes the process buttery smooth, Anyways here are some stats. (I didn't know I created so many cards)

Spoiler

Cards Reviewed in the last 30 days:

Currently Reading
Personal Development

• Atomic Habits - James Clear (Audiobook from Library)
• Resilience - Rick Hanson (Audiobook from Library)

Trading (Decision Making skills)

• Sources of Power: How People Make Decision - Gary Klein (Bought)

Professional Development

• Visualize This - Nathan Yau (Bought)

 

[The Don]

I’ve been trading forex for about a year breh. Just starting to get profitable. Which training did you go through?

 

[Macallik86]

I’ve been trading forex for about a year breh. Just starting to get profitable. Which training did you go through?

That's dope! I have been trading Forex since September. I was using $$$ but I wasn't consistent so I started backtesting more via MT4. Currently I have backtested EURUSD & AUDUSD using a year or so of data. I'm working on backtesting USDCAD using 2017 data to present right now. My strategy is using the ideas from this book by Laurentiu Damir. One dude I've been following on YouTube has some basic yet interesting ideas around market structure that I have been digging into a bit recently too:

Spoiler: Video

Wbu?

 

[The Don]

That's dope! I have been trading Forex since September. I was using $$$ but I wasn't consistent so I started backtesting more via MT4. Currently I have backtested EURUSD & AUDUSD using a year or so of data. I'm working on backtesting USDCAD using 2017 data to present right now. My strategy is using the ideas from this book by Laurentiu Damir. One dude I've been following on YouTube has some basic yet interesting ideas around market structure that I have been digging into a bit recently too:

Spoiler: Video

Wbu?

That’s wassup. I only trade the GBP pairs and gold. Occasionally I scalp other pairs too. I use the Astrofx method from Shaun Lee. Super simple and effective

 

[Macallik86]

Link to goals can be found here
End Of Month Progress Review
Fitness

Spoiler

Q1 Goal - Bike for at least 100 Miles
I'm biking a lot more than I expected. This snow storm finna have me MIA for the next week or so but I'm en route to exceeding my Q1 Goal by the end of February.

Q1 Goal - Eat Pizza Every other Week
So far so good. I have also been drinking more protein shakes with chopped up bananas instead of having a big lunch too. I'm periodically tracking my weigh which drills home the impact of my positive habits:

I aint gonna hold you. I'm finna go ham-burger and order a large pizza to myself for Superbowl Sunday. After that though, I will only order pizza once every three weeks.

Q1 Goal - More reps in my Kettlebell Workouts
I'm at the point where I can occasionally catch the outline of abs in the mirror. I haven't seen my abs in a good 5-10 years.

It's always dope to see hard work leading to positive outcomes, but stat tracking kept me motivated until the outcomes show. The book Atomic Habits talks about outcomes being lagging indicators for your habits, which is such a good way to put it. I've been doing kettlebell workouts since November, and if I wasn't tracking stats, I probably would've felt like I was just spinning my wheels all this time.

Today though, I realized that I didn't set good short-term kettlebell goals, so I don't have any way to make sure I'm on track for hitting my Q1 goals. Below are my two most recent weeks of workouts, as well as some new structure to create a pathway to achieving my Q1 goals:

1. No more skipping sets due to cycling. Kettlebell workouts are strength training & cycling is cardio. They serve different purposes.
2. I will set the following goals:
   1. Kettlebell Swings
      1. Moving forward, each set will have a minimum of 50 reps
      2. I will do 3 additional reps per set per week. In two months time, that should get me to Q1 goal of 75 swings per set
   2. Kettlebell Squats
      1. Moving forward, each set will have at least 13 reps
      2. I will do one additional rep per set per week until I hit my goal of 20 squats per set
   3. Turkish Get Ups
      1. Every other week I will do an additional rep until I hit my goal of 7 reps per set
   4. Kettlebell Clean & Press
      1. Moving forward, each set will have at least 12 reps
         
      2. I will do two additional rep per set per week until I hit my goal of 20 reps per set

Confidence

Spoiler

Q1 Goal - Read at least one book on socializing
I finished a book on confidence last week. It was a short read but it did the job. The book was Confidence by Martin Meadows. It described self efficacy as having faith in your abilities, while self-esteem is having faith in your self worth. Here are the rules that I jotted down around building self-efficacy:

Speaking of confidence, I had a Tinder date on Friday. Definitely my type. Looking forward to us hopefully linking up again. I definitely talked too much, cut her off a few times and had maybe one more beer than I should've, but I'll chalk that up to being rusty. I've gone on three first dates in the past 11 months, when pre-Covid, I was doing 3 first dates/month. On the flipside, I jumped right in the convo, asked good questions and made her laugh. Got a brief makeout to end the date too so I can't complain tbf.

Q1 Goal - Finish first 5 sections of public speaking online course
Completely forgot about this. I will have to jump in this Wednesday.

Q1 Goal - Revisit every day scenarios and find ways to show my personality in them
I haven't had time for this. It shouldn't take a lot of time though. I just have to sit down and reflect... I will dedicate one hour per month to this for the rest of Q1

Reading
Q1 Goal - Read at least 6 books
So far, this goal is being completed naturally. I have completed reading/listening to 5 books so far:

• Practice Perfect - Doug Lemov
• Mindset - Carol Dweck
• Confidence - Martin Meadows
• Atomic Habits - James Clear
• PlayBook - Mike Bellafiore

For each book, I have created flashcards so that I can lock in the key takeaways.

Minimalism
Q1 Goal - Donate coats while it is still cold enough for people to use them
I haven't tackled this yet. I will have to set some time aside before the weather improves. I have a bunch of coats that I haven't worn in over two years

Trading
Q1 Goal - Do a total of 250 simulated trades with a win rate of at least 50%
I can't control my win rate as much as I'd like, but just know I'm putting in an hour and a half of practice per day. Loweky, I think I have been too focused on my win rate which has led to me doing worse in my backtesting. I am restructuring a few things this week to keep myself honest.

Professional
Q1 Goal - Creating 1-2 reports in Power BI
I haven't had time to play around with Power BI yet. I have tried my hand at revising a few standard reports and my boss has been impressed with what I've brought to the table which always feels good. I will likely jump into Power BI around March at the earliest. I have been reading a book on Data Visualization that I think will be advantageous for Power BI as well as general reports that we share.

 

[Macallik86]

In the past 13 weeks, there has only been 1 day where I forgot to review my flashcards:

Spoiler

(Each column = a week, each square = a day.

In 2020, after a hiatus, my first day reusing Anki was 11/27. This is on the right hand side of the 2020 graph)

 

[Macallik86]

This wraps up my third month with my bicycle. So far in 2021, I've put in 550 miles. It has been mostly fun albeit one flat tire, once when my chain came off while I was doing 25 mph downhill, and that one time I was involved in a road rage/hit and run by some rando.

I'm probably in the best shape I've ever been in in my life lowkey. Even when I'm smashing in the bedroom, I've got more stamina because I'm not flabby and sick like I used to be lol. I'm overexaggerating, but I did used to be running out of steam after 5-10 straight minutes of stroking lol.

I'm kicking myself about falling off with the kettlebell workouts though. I'm gonna start socializing again soon and my arms are nowhere near as swole as I wanted them to be coming out of covid seclusion. I suppose if I start now, they can be looking right by the summer....

But yeah, here are some month-over-month stats on my cycling journey so far:

Spoiler

My speed is steadily increasing. I think learning when to shift gears has helped a lot too fwiw

I biked about 300 miles in a month. Not sure if I'll do much better than that, but at least I know what I'm capable of. Once I hit 2,000 - 2,500 miles I'll probably upgrade my bike so that's my incentive to keep pushing so that hopefully I can cop a new one by the end of the year.

The weight is coming off steadily right now, but I think that's because I've been skipping on the junk food that I normally eat the last week or so. I'm contemplating a new diet where I eat more healthily during the week and then pig out on the weekends. Kind of a delayed gratification vibe.

 

[Leao2005]

Link to goals can be found here
End Of Month Progress Review
Fitness

Spoiler

Q1 Goal - Bike for at least 100 Miles
I'm biking a lot more than I expected. This snow storm finna have me MIA for the next week or so but I'm en route to exceeding my Q1 Goal by the end of February.

Q1 Goal - Eat Pizza Every other Week
So far so good. I have also been drinking more protein shakes with chopped up bananas instead of having a big lunch too. I'm periodically tracking my weigh which drills home the impact of my positive habits:

I aint gonna hold you. I'm finna go ham-burger and order a large pizza to myself for Superbowl Sunday. After that though, I will only order pizza once every three weeks.

Q1 Goal - More reps in my Kettlebell Workouts
I'm at the point where I can occasionally catch the outline of abs in the mirror. I haven't seen my abs in a good 5-10 years.

It's always dope to see hard work leading to positive outcomes, but stat tracking kept me motivated until the outcomes show. The book Atomic Habits talks about outcomes being lagging indicators for your habits, which is such a good way to put it. I've been doing kettlebell workouts since November, and if I wasn't tracking stats, I probably would've felt like I was just spinning my wheels all this time.

Today though, I realized that I didn't set good short-term kettlebell goals, so I don't have any way to make sure I'm on track for hitting my Q1 goals. Below are my two most recent weeks of workouts, as well as some new structure to create a pathway to achieving my Q1 goals:

1. No more skipping sets due to cycling. Kettlebell workouts are strength training & cycling is cardio. They serve different purposes.
2. I will set the following goals:
   1. Kettlebell Swings
      1. Moving forward, each set will have a minimum of 50 reps
      2. I will do 3 additional reps per set per week. In two months time, that should get me to Q1 goal of 75 swings per set
   2. Kettlebell Squats
      1. Moving forward, each set will have at least 13 reps
      2. I will do one additional rep per set per week until I hit my goal of 20 squats per set
   3. Turkish Get Ups
      1. Every other week I will do an additional rep until I hit my goal of 7 reps per set
   4. Kettlebell Clean & Press
      1. Moving forward, each set will have at least 12 reps
         
      2. I will do two additional rep per set per week until I hit my goal of 20 reps per set

Confidence

Spoiler

Q1 Goal - Read at least one book on socializing
I finished a book on confidence last week. It was a short read but it did the job. The book was Confidence by Martin Meadows. It described self efficacy as having faith in your abilities, while self-esteem is having faith in your self worth. Here are the rules that I jotted down around building self-efficacy:

Speaking of confidence, I had a Tinder date on Friday. Definitely my type. Looking forward to us hopefully linking up again. I definitely talked too much, cut her off a few times and had maybe one more beer than I should've, but I'll chalk that up to being rusty. I've gone on three first dates in the past 11 months, when pre-Covid, I was doing 3 first dates/month. On the flipside, I jumped right in the convo, asked good questions and made her laugh. Got a brief makeout to end the date too so I can't complain tbf.

Q1 Goal - Finish first 5 sections of public speaking online course
Completely forgot about this. I will have to jump in this Wednesday.

Q1 Goal - Revisit every day scenarios and find ways to show my personality in them
I haven't had time for this. It shouldn't take a lot of time though. I just have to sit down and reflect... I will dedicate one hour per month to this for the rest of Q1

Reading
Q1 Goal - Read at least 6 books
So far, this goal is being completed naturally. I have completed reading/listening to 5 books so far:

• Practice Perfect - Doug Lemov
• Mindset - Carol Dweck
• Confidence - Martin Meadows
• Atomic Habits - James Clear
• PlayBook - Mike Bellafiore

For each book, I have created flashcards so that I can lock in the key takeaways.

Minimalism
Q1 Goal - Donate coats while it is still cold enough for people to use them
I haven't tackled this yet. I will have to set some time aside before the weather improves. I have a bunch of coats that I haven't worn in over two years

Trading
Q1 Goal - Do a total of 250 simulated trades with a win rate of at least 50%
I can't control my win rate as much as I'd like, but just know I'm putting in an hour and a half of practice per day. Loweky, I think I have been too focused on my win rate which has led to me doing worse in my backtesting. I am restructuring a few things this week to keep myself honest.

Professional
Q1 Goal - Creating 1-2 reports in Power BI
I haven't had time to play around with Power BI yet. I have tried my hand at revising a few standard reports and my boss has been impressed with what I've brought to the table which always feels good. I will likely jump into Power BI around March at the earliest. I have been reading a book on Data Visualization that I think will be advantageous for Power BI as well as general reports that we share.

Honestly some good goals

 

[Macallik86]

Posted this update in the 6 Certs Random Chat:

Job update

Spoiler

Just got my performance review.... 3.4 out of 5.

I still received my full bonus fwiw, but on the flip side, being seen a C+ worker bruised my ego and is an unavoidable reminder that I am half-assing things daily. I think years with the company (or maybe just a 9-5 in general?) has me doing the bare minimum to avoid complaints at the end of the day.

My personal goal has been to quit and try trading for a living. I've got enough money to give that a real try for a year, & so the job feels like a means to end. Any attempts at improving processes seem pointless to me because I am not invested in the future of the company and I think it shows.

I contemplated quitting in a month when we are forced to go hybrid-WFH, but I think I'm going to stick it out longer for a few reasons:

1. I need a backup plan if trading doesn't work. Right now, I'm seen as a C+ worker which won't cut it. Why don't I improve my skills while I'm getting paid to do it?
2. If Covid flares up again in the winter, they might temporarily abandon hybrid WFH again & I want to be working there if that happens again.
3. Extra guaranteed money & one last bonus check @ the end of the year never hurt nobody

Follow Ups for me

• Create a hard deadline for when I want to quit.
  • Is it after investing a certain amount of $$$ or hitting a new net worth?
  • Is it after getting certs or successfully owning new processes internally
• Reverse engineer my timeline so that I know how much effort I need to put in from now until then
• Research what skills/processes/certs are ideal for my skillset and how I can achieve that in my current position
• Create a schedule that plots out weekly targets to hit
• Execute my plan

My current goal is at least 1hour of Power BI daily during the week. I will alternate each day between taking a course or hands on dashboards for my job.

I started it on Monday and so far I've been sticking to it. As is the case with things like this, the more time I dedicate, the more progress I make. All of the uncertainty and procrastination leading up to this point was a big waste of time.

 

[Macallik86]

Each block represents a day in 2021. Each empty block represents a day that I skipped my review. I have missed 15/299 days. In other words, I've reviewed Flashcards for 95% of the days this year

 

[Swirv]

How’s your trading going?

 

[Macallik86]

How’s your trading going?

I've been using my trade backtesting to work on my Power BI skills. Here are my stats after ~150 simulated trades on Apple:

Spoiler

Notes

• I know it looks like a bunch of disjointed lines, but there's a rational behind that... Some solid advice I received was that you should have 30 trades as a sample size to test a strategy. Each line represents 30 trades that I took when backtesting. I can compare a bunch of trades at once, and if it skews far from what's expected, that means I tweaked something for the better (or worse) and need to continue/stop whatever I was doing.
• Some other quick notes:
  • R = Risk. You can insert any random #1 you want. Let's say I risked $10 per trade. Then R = $10
  • RRR = Risk:Reward Ratio: How much did I make relative to how much I risked? Let's say I risked $10 and made $30. Risk is $10 and Reward is $30 so the RRR = 1:3
  • Scratch trade = A trade that resulted in no real profits or losses.

Overall, I need to figure out how to avoid losing streaks and also continually having winners much larger than my losers. I'm chugging along though and I have a profitable trading strategy for the first time ever. It's a long way from being sustainable enough to live off of lol, but I'm definitely moving in the right direction.

 

[Swirv]

I've been using my trade backtesting to work on my Power BI skills. Here are my stats after ~150 simulated trades on Apple:

Spoiler

Notes

• I know it looks like a bunch of disjointed lines, but there's a rational behind that... Some solid advice I received was that you should have 30 trades as a sample size to test a strategy. Each line represents 30 trades that I took when backtesting. I can compare a bunch of trades at once, and if it skews far from what's expected, that means I tweaked something for the better (or worse) and need to continue/stop whatever I was doing.
• Some other quick notes:
  • R = Risk. You can insert any random #1 you want. Let's say I risked $10 per trade. Then R = $10
  • RRR = Risk:Reward Ratio: How much did I make relative to how much I risked? Let's say I risked $10 and made $30. Risk is $10 and Reward is $30 so the RRR = 1:3
  • Scratch trade = A trade that resulted in no real profits or losses.

Overall, I need to figure out how to avoid losing streaks and also continually having winners much larger than my losers. I'm chugging along though and I have a profitable trading strategy for the first time ever. It's a long way from being sustainable enough to live off of lol, but I'm definitely moving in the right direction.

Which pair and what market was this strategy applied to?

 

[Macallik86]

Which pair and what market was this strategy applied to?

The first 100 trades was via Apple on the 65m and I have committed to doing 100 more trades of AAPL on the 30m for a total of 200 backtested trades

After that, I am going to switch the 10m or 3m and trade EURUSD or the S&P 500 futures contract.