Having now been pursing my chosen lifestyle for almost 6 months, I'd like to offer a bit of self reflection. What has this pursuit enabled me to do, and by consequence, not do?
Having freed my time, I still find myself quite busy with the pursuit of hobbies. I now cycle over 100 miles every week and ride my bicycle every day. Bicycling more has been a desire of mine for sometime and indeed was a huge motivator for moving to a warmer climate. In addition, I was able to "accidentally" experience the joys of going "car-free" for over a month. My car broke down, and I resolved to fix it, but had to wait for the part to arrive. The car is now fixed but the lesson remains. Unless I'm going on a long distance trip, the car sits. All my day to day activities, errands, shopping, etc are now done by bicycle. I'm much happier for it. Of course if my plans for doing some long-distance bicycle touring come to fruition I wouldn't need the car for the trip across North America.
In a similar vein, I have begun spending time with family, finally growing my own food via a garden, and pursing my goal of contributing to open source projects! The interesting thing to note is that none of these actually involve trading. It seems my lack of focus on trading has made me a better trader. I've had my first profitable months ever manual trading. I attribute this to most of all dumb luck (haha), but also to being patient and in some ways trading on less information thereby filtering out the noise. Shockingly these last few weeks have seen me really busy on non-trading things and I must confess to not knowing what the euro or other currencies are doing everyday. It's freeing to think I don't have to worry about how my trading is doing every moment of the day. I am no longer living or dying by my NAV. Further because I trade at a sane leverage (2:1 or 3:1) I literally am not making or losing fortunes on an interday move. This is a stark contrast to my first week as a trader. I had huge NAV gains (and losses!) on as little as 10 pips.
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