I feel today like I'm getting close to giving up on trading. There are periods when I trade well, but this isn't one of them. I'm trading terribly. It's very possible, that I am just not mentally and emotionally suited to being a trader. The market is going relentlessly down - no crash and no bounces. Like the slowly boiling proverbial frog. Eventually, of course, it will turn around. If the market doesn't turnaround substantially in the next couple of days, I may well just call a halt there and then before I lose too much money. If the market does turn, then once the immediate crisis is over, I'll likely take a break from trading for a little while and get more organized in the other areas of my life. If I decide to give up, then there is the question of what I will do next. I don't want to go back to the kind of academic job I had before, in the unlikely event that one was available here in Canberra. One reason I decided to make the move here is because I was not happy with my career path in academia. After a couple of decades I had gotten bored with the material and was not keeping up with changes in the field to the degree I would have liked. But I don't know what else I might do apart from academia and trading. Unless I come up with a radical idea soon, I guess it's going to be in the area of energy, environmental, and resource economics, which is of course becoming more and more prominent. I guess I'd be in a research oriented position, but I don't want to be in a position where I need to provide leadership at this stage. Given my apparent seniority, that might be a hard sell, though I've had suggestions a few months ago for positions that might fit that description and so similar jobs might be likely to be forthcoming.
Of course, whatever I do, I will still try to manage our finances in a reasonably sophisticated manner including monitoring performance and reporting in this blog.
On the other hand, maybe I am just exhausted by these market conditions.
