I am sort of on holiday, and I didn't look at the market until midday, and it looked like a not so great trading day... but the market at the moment I was looking at it was screaming out that it was about to make a move.

So I took a small position, even though I am having a break from the market (you know how it is :)) and it turned out to be a fantastic trade. Why, because it was in profit all the time and I had no doubt that it was going to work out. I love these trades because I (almost) know what is going to happen.

This is not because I am some kind of abnormal genius... far from it, I am an ordinary guy who has been enthralled by the market ever since I first heard of trading in 1992. The only real quality that I can make claim to is that I am stubborn... I have stayed with my ambition to be a trader through thick and thin. I have gone bust more than once and that includes the time that I worked through £15,000 ($30,000) in one trading day. That was all the money I had at the time and it was a mighty blow. And lets face it, no one looks at a losing trader and thinks 'Hey this guy is going to really make it one day'. No a losing trader looks like a loser to everyone, even their nearest and dearest.

There are two things that helped me turn the corner as a trader. One was developing trading discipline and the other was developing an understanding of exactly what makes the market move. As a floor trader the ability to 'read' the market was instinctive. There would be times when I was talking to someone outside of the trading pit and not paying conscious attention to the market, but I would get this nagging feeling that the market was about to make a move up or down and I would be almost compelled to get into the pit and trade. These trades were great because they were (almost) always profitable.

When I started trading on the screen I despaired, because I could not see how I could ever get these insights from a noiseless, characterless screen. In a way all my work since leaving the floor in 1998/9 has been about translating that instinctive ability into a methodology that I could apply to screen trading.

Amazingly, not only have a created a method that enables me to read the market with surprising accuracy, but I also have my old feeling back and today's trade was a good example of that. Not only did I get in at the right moment, my exit target turned out to be the exact close.... bingo!