Okay! So… day 1 of my comeback, and I am here to report that I don’t know shit about fuck (thanks, Ruth).

Oh, before I go on, I should probably mention that I trade, or at least have historically traded, Crude oil futures, its products, and their cracks and spreads. Yes, I am aware that it is the most volatile of the markets, and I should just trade Beanie Babies, or puppies, or something else adorable, but here we are. This is where I am comfortable (I guess, sort of), so this is where I’ll start….again.

In the interest of learning to trade responsibly, I signed up for Topstep, a prop trading program that allows traders to trade within a very restricted simulated environment, which would then earn them a funded account, which then forces them to trade within those same confines, otherwise their account is disabled, and they are forced to reset at a fee. This is what I need. Left to my own devices, I am the jeep full of models spraying each other with gasoline at the beginning of Zoolander. Wake me up before you go go.

The company also hosts a number of webinars, led by their senior staff, as well as what seems like other funded traders. From what I’ve read in reviews, it serves as a very good base to build up from for both experienced (albeit flawed) and inexperienced traders. It’s meant to create discipline, and that’s what I need.

So, I signed up for the most basic trading combine right out the gate (5Ok account with a 500 daily loss limit). That was my first mistake, because I discovered later, that this package has a ticking clock. I have three months to prove myself a worthy trader and shoot for a funded account, or the offer expires. I could have signed up, I believe, for just a free trial, but oh well. Three months is a decent amount of time, right? Right?

After I got all signed up, I was faced with an entirely new trading platform. It has an interface that I have zero knowledge of navigating, and it does not seem nearly as fluid to me as the platform I’ve been using the last 14 years, but I suppose that might be said at the start for anyone switching platforms. Already I’m feeling like I know absolutely nothing, and I’ve barely turned the key.

Once I got the basics laid out on my screen (very haphazardly, mind you), I decided to check out some of the previous webinars posted onto their YouTube site, and it was here that I started to realize that I may, in fact, know even less than I thought. I chalked it up to “perhaps they just trade in different markets than I do,” but then I joined in on one of the live group coaching sessions, led by veteran trader John Hoagland (HOAG), and I confirmed….I know nothing, John Hoag.

He was bringing up charts with studies on them I had never seen before, and the users in the live chat were tossing around terms I had never heard before (lookin at you, NPOC).

My father, a once very successful heavyweight in the New York pits, taught me to trade, and I had never heard or seen most of the things being thrown around in this webinar. He always told me not to over complicate my approach, and for years that worked, but then it didn’t, and now it feels kind of like I’m going into nuclear war with a slingshot.

But that’s okay! Right? Because the whole point of this is to start over with an empty plate. So, I’m dusting off the old textbooks, arming myself with a Mead composition notebook and a ballpoint pen, and, uh, oh yes, um….Google, and I’m going to take it one chart, one term, one webinar, one trade, and one day at a time, until I figure this shit out. Again. Maybe. Hopefully.