Purpose of Focus Plan Trade

What is the purpose of FPT. The purpose and reason why I am creating FPT is to document my journey of learning to become a trader. I want to focus my initial effort on becoming a swing trader because I do have a Full Time day job and swing trading is something I can do in the evenings to supplement my income.

Where did the want to become a swing trader come from? Earlier this year I started to look into investing and saving for retirement. Because who wants to work for ever. For a long time I have had a Roth IRA that was handled by my tax accountant. I never really paid much attention to the IRA. I had the money in the same mutual funds for most of the time I have had the IRA which was a good ten years. I just contributed to the IRA each year for the tax benefit. Mostly only contributing to it in years were I would have to owe taxes if I didn’t contribute to it. At the end of last year my tax accountant decided to retire from being a financial advisor and turned over my account to a different financial advisor.

The new financial advisor started contacting me for a meeting and to move my IRA into different funds or accounts. He sent me some information on some managed funds that he wanted to offer to move my money into. After looking into these managed accounts I started to realize how much money I would be giving up to have someone else manage my money for me. That didn’t sit to well with me. So after some extensive research I decided to tell the financial advisor that I would manage my own IRA.

At this time I still wanted to be pretty much hands off as much as possible. In my research I saw that Index Funds were easy to manage and had really low fees. So I decided to transfer the IRA to Vanguard to take advantage of their low fee index funds. I deployed the Boglehead investment philosophy and divided my money up among 3 different index funds.

After getting the money invested in the IRA I still had a sizable amount of money that was in need of being invested properly. Initially I was going to deploy the same Index Fund investment philosophy. But before I did that I decided to read up more on investment strategies. I realized that Index Funds were great for passively investing your money and would do well over a long period of time. However Index funds will take a hit when the market goes into a pull back or a correction. I don’t really want to throw away my gains every time market decided to go down. After many hours of reading, listening to books and podcasts I discovered technical analysis. Technical analysis really spoke to me I liked how I could use a chart to try and determine where a stock was going to go and see patterns.

That brings us to now and why I decided to start this website and document my journey of becoming a trader.

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