12/21/2013: Trading - Week 01 Wrap Up

Trading Wrap Up for Week 01

     The following are the results for this past week.  I took my first 3 trades at the end of my coaching session with Emmanuel.  He wanted to make sure I understood the money management principles and how to calculate the correct position size based on the 1% risk per trade.  Of the first 3 trades, only 1 triggered and it was a losing trade.  Many people would begin to get scared off with their first trade losing.
     After I got home I spent a lot of time reviewing my notes.  I did not take a great number of trades as I wanted to get used to the set-ups and ensure I knew how to calculate position size based on risk, etc.  The following 2 trades were winners.  The 2 after that were losers and the last trade was a winner.  So I had an equal number of winners and losers and ended up the week with a small loss of 0.3%.  During training they told us that most students usually break even in their first month as they are getting used to the new trading platform, strategies and money management.  And they expect us to make mistakes as we learn.
     I am not discouraged at all.  As I stated before, there was a big focus on trading psychology and mindset.  Also, I did make some mistakes.  Two of the trades I took, I really shouldn't have.  I realized after I had already placed the trades.  I learned from my mistakes.  My goal is to end my first month with profit.  I am hoping to show a gain next week.  However, with next week being Christmas week, I do not expect too any trading opportunities.  I expect the market to be flat and I will be traveling for a few days next week.

Winners: 3
Losers: 3
Non-Triggered: 10
Winning Percentage: 50%
Profit/Loss Percentage: -0.3%

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/15/2013: Back in the USA and with my family

 

















 I am finally back at home and with my family.  I ran into the same weather issues on the way home.  We got over a foot of snow at home, so all evening flights into Binghamton were cancelled.  So, I was forced to spend the night in a hotel in Washington again.  I got the first flight out and flew to Philadelphia first, changed airlines and finally landed in Binghamton around 1:30 PM.  My wife was there to greet me with a big hug and a kiss.  I had never been away from her that long before.

     We drove home to hugs from my kids.  My wife prepared a nice lunch and they all wanted to hear all the details.  So, I showed them pictures, told stories and answered all their questions about the trip and the people I met.  It it so nice to be home, but I am beyond exhausted.  I am going to go take a power nap and try to recoup a bit.  Tomorrow, I will regroup and focus on my new life plan.  So good to be home!

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/14/2013: Farewell London, it was an awesome trip!

Well, here it is, Saturday morning.  I am packing to get ready for my trip home.  What can I say, this was an incredible experience.  Greg was phenomenal!  Everyone I met was just great.  Everyone was so kind and supportive.  I am leaving the UK with a wealth of knowledge, new friends and an extremely bright future.  I am sure I will be back before too long.  I am hoping to bring Diane back with me next time to meet Greg and everyone and show her everything I saw on this wonderful trip.  So, farewell for now London, thanks it was a spectacular trip!  But for now, I can't wait to get home to my family.

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/13/2103: Christmas Masquerade Ball - what a ball!

   Last night was Greg's Christmas Ball.  I had been looking forward to it since Bridgette first contacted me with the invitation.  After I finished my afternoon coaching session with Emmanuel, I quickly headed back to the hotel to get into my tux and grab my mask.  As the driver headed out of London towards Greg's house, he told me that traffic can be busy on a Friday evening and it may take a bit longer to get there.  I was fine with that as we were on schedule  However, we no sooner started out when  we started to run into some serious traffic.  The radio indicated a couple of bad accidents heading out of London and that it may add an hour or more to travel time.  My driver said he knew an alternate route, but we would still be a little late.  "It's always good to be fashionably late.. now worries", I told him.

     I took about an hour and a half to get to Greg's house.  We pulled into the driveway and right away I could tell the caliber of people I would be meeting just by the cars parked out front.  Well, first of all I saw Greg's brand new Lamborghini Matador, which was delivered that afternoon.  It was absolutely beautiful!  It was surrounded my Porsche s, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Land Rovers and other luxury cars.  I immediately got a little nervous.  I am not used to mixing socially with people of this level of success.

     The masked door man opened the door and greeted me and ushered me into the main entry way.  Straight ahead I saw about a dozen people all clad in tuxes and fancy dresses, gathered in front of a large light-up bar.  The bar had 3 bartenders busily mixing drinks and puring champagne.  A gentleman to my left reached his hand out and introduced himself as John.  Even with the mask on I could tell it was Greg's father.  I had seen some pictures of him on Facebook from a vacation that he and Greg had gone on the week prior.  I asked if he was Greg's father and he said yes..  I told him who I was and he said "oh, the one working on the book with Greg" I was pleased that Greg had told him.  

John then took me over to the left of the bar where 3 lovely ladies stood wearing nothing but pretty lingerie.  I was greeted by the girls with a nice smile and a glass of champagne.  It was then that I noticed that the girls lingerie was actually just painted on!  John laughed at my expression when I realized this.  We both had a nice laugh at that.  I was glad that I met John right away.  I knew no one at the party.  After we chatted a bit, he took me around and started to introduce me to people.

People kept coming around with all sorts of wonderful appetizers.  And every time my champagne glass got close to empty, one off the lovely lingerie ladies would come up and give me a new glass.  I love champagne and this was excellent champagne.  I met some very interesting people in all areas of business: motivational speaking, real estate, authors, traders, a fashion designer, social marketing.  Most of the folks were very nice to me and offered me some great advice and showed their support.  I was very pleased.  

Greg's sitting room, where we had our training sessions, had been turned into a dance hall.  All of the furniture had been removed.  A mirrored dance floor had been installed and two DJs stood behind a long table spinning some great energetic music.  Greg's assistant Bridgette, called everyone into the dance room for some entertainment.  A Marilyn Monroe look alike came in and did this burlesque style dance.  She finished her dance by spraying the crowd with a bottle of champagne.  She really did a great job and received loud cheers from the crowd.  The next entertainer was a European looking girl.  She came in dressed in veils etc.  She did a dance and threw flames into the air.  Entertaining, but not as good as the Marilyn look alike.  

I mingled and met some more people, including Greg's mother and some friends of Greg's sister.  Greg's sister's friends were flat out fun.  Bridgette then asked everyone to come outside behind the pool area.  Greg had arranged for fireworks, which I heard were common for his parties.  The fireworks were fabulous!  I mean, these were full blown fireworks with an incredible finale' at the end.  You should have heard the cheers from the crowd.  I tried to call my wife and then my father via SKYPE on my phone for them to see, but sadly I couldn't catch them.

I spent the rest of the evening talking, I danced a bit, drank a bit too much champagne.  Finally about 2:00 AM I asked Bridgette if she could call me a cab. When my cab arrived, I shook hands and said good bye to the new friends I had made in the UK.  I arrive back at the hotel about 3:00 AM totally worn out.  I got out of my tux and collapsed on the bed and quickly drifted off to sleep.  What a ball!

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/13/2013: Forex Coaching Sessions and Some Sight Seeing

I started the day with a 2 hour coaching session with my Forex coach Emmanuel (left).  Greg said that Emmanuel is one of their top trading coaches.  He was a really great guy.  Very kind, patient, knowledgeable and disciplined in his trading.  I believe we will work well together.

Emmanuel started out by asking me what my goals were.  He was familiar with the book project and we will follow the project level goals.  We then jumped right into trading.  We reviewed 3 of the 4 strategies that we had learned in class.  However, he showed me more advanced ways of using these strategies in order to increase profits.  He went through each of the strategies and the changes.  I took notes on all the changes.  We broke about 10, with the plan for me to review what I have learned and look at some potential trade set-ups that were forming and return at 4PM for another training.

My driver was waiting for me.  I had told him that I wanted to use some of the break to see some of the sights, since I hadn't had an opportunity yet.  He took me on a quick whirlwind tour to see: Buckingham Palace, Parliament,  Big Ben, The Tower of London and the Tower Bridge and finally St. Paul's Cathdral.  We drove by some, but I was able to get out and walk around Big Ben, Tower of London and St.  Pauls Catherdal.  I quickly went inside the cathedral.  I would love to go back and tour the Tower of London, it looked incredible.

Buckingham Palace

Big Ben

Tower of London (So Cool!)

Tower Bridge

Inside St. Paul's Cathedral

I headed back to the hotel and grabbed a quick bite for lunch.  I then pulled up my charts and looked for any trade set-ups and also reviewed my notes.  At 3:45, I headed out for my second session with Emmanuel.

My second session started with Emmanuel showing me how to create my weekly watch list and the criteria for the watch list.  This is normally done on Sunday for the week ahead.  Basically, I was to look for trending currency pairs based on their moving averages on the weekly and daily charts.  Those pairs that are trending will be the only ones I will watch in the coming week.  He gave me the exercise of identifying the trending pairs.  He returned a while later to check my work.  I was pleased that I had identified the all correctly.

We then quickly looked for some trade set-ups.  We placed a long term trade as welll as a short term trade, jst so I was sure on how to enter them and determine the correct position size etc, based on the correct Risk management.  We finixhed up right at 5:30 and I told Emmanual I would see him later that evening at the party as I knew he was invited.

I headed back to the hotel to quickly get ready and head out to the party.  A party I could not wait to get to.

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/12/2013: Second Day of Forex Training. Dinner at Greg's House

Today was yet another busy day  I started out this morning with my second Forex Trading class.  The first half of the day was spent on going over 3 additional starting strategies.  We were given 2 longer term strategies and 2 shorter term strategies.  The idea is to play with them and see which trading style resonates best with us and which we are most comfortable with.  We then broke for lunch.

After lunch we dove into risk management.  Risk management is key.  I have never used any kind of risk management while dabbling in the Forex.  I guess that is why I managed to blow me entire trading account several times.  I have learned the importance of risk management.  With proper risk management, you can actually have more losing trades than winning trades and still make a profit.  It is all about controlled risk and paying careful attention to your Risk to Reward ratios.  We will never risk more than 1% of our account on any given trade.

After the afternoon break, we reviewed the trading platform and charting package.  We are using eSignal for our data provider.  We then delved a little more into trading psychology.  Again, this is key!  They finished up with a quick review of all the topics covered, highlighting the key points.

We broke about 6:00 PM and I headed to the car to head to Greg's for dinner.

There was quite a bit of traffic, so I got to Greg's about 7PM..  I felt bad because they had been holding dinner for me.  I got to meet Jai, who is Greg's marketing director for Learn to Trade.  He was in from the Australia office. 

Greg had told him all about the project.  Jai was reviewing the makingofamillionaire website I created.  I told him it was fairly primitive, but was more for sharing information.  They clicked on the link to my You Tube channel and watched the video I had uploaded last night, on Greg's confidence exercise.  Greg loved it.  IHe said I had a great camera presence.  He gave me a high five and I smiled.

He asked Jai if he could help me out as he knows I want to build a following for the project and help as any people as I can.  Jai said he would help design a new website and give me some direction on marketing it.  Another great perk from working with Greg.

We had a nice leisurely dinner and we all shared a nice bottle of wine from Greg's wine cellar.  When we finished dinner we were just chatting.  Then Greg started to do some magic tricks.  He did this 3 card Monty trick that just blew Jai and I away.  Greg is truly a man of may talents.

I headed back to the hotel about 9PM so Greg and Jai could conduct the business they needed to get to.  Again, another AWESOME day in the UK!

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

12/11/2013: First Forex Trading Class

Today I had my first Forex Training.  There were about 25 people in the class.  Lee welcomed everyone to the class and gave us  some background information on the course and himself.  A real positive and dynamic guy.  He then introduced Mark, who was the main instructor for the course.  

Mark is a former student and went on to become an instructor with Learn To Trade UK.  He seemed very knowledgeable and was quite a good teacher.  This was a gy who started out with a 500 pound account and now trades a 2.4 Million Pound account for he and his family.  That shows the potential of this information.

The morning was spent going over some of the basics, of which I was already familiar.  But it was a good review.  We reviewed things like: price action, exchange rates, cyclicity, support and resistance and Moving Averages.  We then broke for lunch.

After lunch we got into an important section entitles Emotional Mastery.  Learning to stay in control of your emotions while training.  Not letting fear or greed get in the way of your training.  The importance of sticking to your trading plane no matter what happens.  I know this is key and will be one area I have to focus on.  I used to let too much emotion get me in and out of trades.

After an afternoon break we went over the impacts of news on Forex trading.  What news items to look out for and when to trade or not trade based on news.  Then we started getting into some of their different trading strategies.

Class ended at around 6PM.  I headed back to the hotel and grabbed some dinner and reviewed my notes.  I ended the evening with a SKYPE call to my wife and kids.  I am now off to bed so I can be fresh and ready for tomorrow's class.

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus

2013/12/12: Live session with Greg Secker

    Today I met Greg face to face.  I arrived at his home about 10:30 this morning.  Wow, what an incredible home!    Bridgette welcomed me at the door, was nice to meet her.  She took me into Greg's study where he was working. He welcomed me with a handshake and a bi smile.  He asked about my flight in and we made some small talk.  He asked if I wanted a tour of the house before we got started.  I said sure as I was anxious to see the rest of his incredible home.  He showed me around just the first floor of his house and I was just blown away. After the quick tour, we headed right into a nearby sitting room to get started.
     We started out by reviewing our earlier sessions, the What and the Why, etc.  We discussed in more detail and Greg pointed out some interesting things.  He said: "We don't get what we deserve or want, we get what we tolerate".  He said if you want to change, you have to get totally fed up with your current situation and do not tolerate anything less than success.  He said all change happens at a place called threshold.  Then he drew a picture of Heaven and Hell with purgatory in between.  Heaven being your perfect life and Hell being the least life you can tolerate.  He said most people live in the area called Purgatory and when things get bad and we near Hell, they then get fed up and shoot closer to heaven.  At each level between Hell and Heaver there are levels of tolerance.  He said we have to continue to work to move our tolerance level up.  So, in other words, you have to tolerate less and less bad.
     We then got into an exercise on monet beliefs.  He asked me to tell him all the things I was told about money as I grew up.  I told him:

1.      I was often told "we can't afford it"
2.      There seemed to be never enough money
3.      Be careful with your money
4.      Save for a rainy Day
5.      Be frugal

      He then went on to say that "we don't do as we think, we do as we feel".  He said that we needed to reprogram my mind with regards to money.  So, we took my negative money programming and turned it into positive programing.  He wrote these new statements on index cards and I am to read them every day.  He said eventually it will sink into your unconscious mind, which is associated with feelings.  So, we created the following cards:

1. I can afford ANYTHING I desire
2. Let it rain every day.  There's always more tan enough money
3. Do whatever you want with your money.  Be extravagant! Be outrageous!
4. There's an infinite amount of money that grows daily

     Greg then added the following cards:

1. You don't get what you deserve and are worth, only what you TOLERATE!
2. Everybody dies, but not everybody lives!

     I am supposed to read these cards every morning.  Over time, they will seek into my subconscious and start to change my feelings about money into more positive feelings.

     We then broke for lunch about noon.  We had a nice lunch prepared by his housekeeper Rosario,  a wonderful lady and great cook!  We enjoyed a nice bottle of wine with lunch.

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     After lunch Greg took me through his "Confidence Exercise".  He promised it would be very interesting and it was.  The premise of the exercise is to teach you how to draw instant confidence right out of thin air right when you need it.  And believe me it works!  It is hard to describe in words, but I created a You Tube video.  I encourage you to watch this video and go through the exercise yourself.  It is VERY beneficial!  The Confidence Session video can be found at: Greg Secker's Confidence Session (Video)

     Greg then said I need to define some "Board Members" for my business.  These will be the people I go to when seeking advice or council when things go wrong.  He said these cannot be negative people, or those who will bring you down or not support the project.  We listed various people and weeded it down.  I am focusing on other traders, entrepreneurs and positive successful people for my board.

     Finally Greg gave me a daily routine to follow, which is as follows:

1. Get the body moving with some light exercise or a walk.
2. Deep breathing: Breath in through the nose for a count of 4, then out through the mouth for a count of 4.
3. Confidence exercise ("Launch!" 25 times).  I plan on playing Hanz Zimmer's "Now We are Free" while I do this so I can recreate this powerful session as close as possible.  (Again, please watch the Confidence Session Video referenced above) 
4. Focus on gratitude:  "When you are grateful, you are rich"  This is the state you must be in.Who do you love?  What are you grateful for?  Who are you?  Where are you going?

     After our long, but very successful, session we just chatted over a couple of cold beers.  It was an awesome day!

Here's to your success!

Bill McManus