Vacations & Day Trading, feat. Becky

We love having these periodic check-ins with ourselves, our progress, our experiences, and our general growth. There’s the saying: what you measure changes. Just the fact of measuring our outcomes and growth and experiences and then reviewing what that data is showing us week over week provides valuable insights into where we are headed and how it's going! For this episode, Becky speaks to her executions for the trading week of September 16-20, 2024, both in technical detail and in psychological impact. But that was only 2 trading days for this mama, as she took her family on an amazing vacation!

Here at the Market Mamas podcast, we have no help. No staff, no crew, no additional cameraman or lighting and editing queens setting us up. We are it. We both continuously manage our visual and audio settings, plan and write the content, and schedule our recording sessions around our children’s schedules to mitigate house noise and interruptions. Kendra is our video editing, thumbnail and short-making queen, and Becky writes and edits the blogs with each episode on our website and focuses a bit more on schedule & finances. And honestly so much more. Moral of the story being we are a 2 woman team who are wholly dedicated to growing Market Mamas as an authentic, productive, and helpful podcast to contribute to the trading space at large. We honestly feel that talking so openly about the realities of learning to become a consistently profitable trader in real time as we are doing just that is showing up for whoever is also in this journey and wants to not feel like they’re alone, especially on the struggle days, which are inevitable in this pursuit.

But, this is no small feat, if we’re being real. Both Kendra and Becky are literally mamas of 3 kids each, with full and beautiful lives outside of trading AND Market Mamas. So, when anything disrupts our day to day flow, it requires immediate attention and action to keep on schedule with all this. Such as a trip! Yes, vacations are wonderful and can be adventurous or relaxing, site-seeing or dancing all night and sleeping in. And they can provide much needed quality time with our loved ones. But, in order to be so busy in our normal day to day activities AND take a trip - It is a heck of a lot of work on both ends. Now for most aspiring day traders, you guys will likely get this point, podcast aside, because often a growing day trader also has a day job, family, and other responsibilities as well, like we do. So, you know what it is to be very busy.

For Becky’s family, we don’t, or at least yet, haven’t been very frequent big vacation takers. We will visit out of town family or go camping for long weekends every year for sure. And those are fairly easy to accommodate and definitely create great memories. But a week or more long trips are a whole different deal. In September, Becky went on an Alaskan cruise out of Vancouver BC with her family of 5 and her parents. The party of 7 explored historic Alaskan sea ports, took the train through the mountain curves of Canada, saw all manner of sea and land wildlife, swam in the pools with the boys on sea cruising days, ate way too much delicious foods and made great memories with her parents and boys that will be cherished forever. For anyone considering, we definitely recommend it. It was adventurous and smooth. Cruises really do have such a streamlined process for making guests' experiences seamless and wonderful.

But goodness, the work ahead for Market Mamas for this trip and then catching up upon return was legit, as it has been for Kendra similarly for her vacations since we started this podcast. Life is always a big balancing act though, right? We all have to deal with this on whatever front we decide to engage with. Choose what our main priorities are, schedule our time to meet the needs, do our best, catch up when we can, work ahead when we can, ask for help when we need to. This is life. And we are blessed to have these busy, tightly scheduled days and pages-long to do lists some days. Because this means we have opportunities, goals, projects that drive us closer to said goals, and loved ones to do it for and with. You guys know Becky is a nerd for gratitude. But, it seriously helps her manage the potentially overwhelming moments. To take a second some days and see that she is feeling rushed and a bit anxious because she is mid-pursuit for dreams, plural, that she is obsessed with and will not quit at. Becky is a 6 figure day trader. And that the small gains she’s locked in so far are nothing compared to where she is headed. So that keeps her showing up every morning when her alarm goes off. And similar with MM. She will work on her every day in some way to keep the consistency and quality that Kendra and Becky so are dedicated to. So, thank you again to all our subscribers, both new and since day one. We love you guys and are so thankful to see people showing up and gaining value from these conversations that we pour into.

Now, when we get into some of our technical systems regarding our day trading in a Market Mamas episode, we want to be very clear that we are not offering trading advice or technical support for traders at this time. But we will start to discuss how we see the markets and choose to execute as traders more and more with you all for the purpose that these real, data driven experiences are shaping us as traders in real time and hold tremendous value in hindsight analysis. We recorded this episode on Sept. 22nd - the Sunday after this week when the trading sessions were still fresh and relevant in our minds. For blog purposes on the website, we will not detail much of Becky’s executions and the jargon she speaks to. To gain that, you will definitely want to watch the full episode on YouTube or what ever your preferred podcast program that you utilize.

So, Becky got back from that cruise on Wednesday, and then only had 2 trading days available for her. But she spent a good half of her drive back to the Portland, OR area from Canada on Wednesday studying video recordings from her mentor and community for the purpose of catching up with what Miss Market did while she was away and the thoughts of her teammates on how this week was going for the markets. And when she went to do her charts Wednesday night, as she always preps her charts the night before a trading day with the pertinent levels and data from the day’s session, Becky actually felt ready and as if she hadn’t missed much at all. This is number 578 on the list of reasons why a supportive mentor and community is invaluable as an aspiring trader, for her at least!

When Becky got to her charts and started creating her Thursday morning’s trade plan from where she left off the night before, she was pleasantly relieved to see a great setup coming. For all our early traders out there, this is an excellent next level to get to in your learning stages. When you have a handful of bread and butter setups that you can start to identify ahead of time and prepare to execute on with a higher degree of probability of the trade’s success rate. It’s a truly great feeling to be easing into ourselves. And we never want to take it for granted or think that we are too certain in a trade and over-leverage or cut corners on our processes. Because that can get dangerous. But Thursday, Becky did see one of her favorite setups (further detailed in the full podcast episode linked above) and was right back in trader mode, capitalizing on Miss Market’s abundance with a nice win to welcome her back!

Becky’s other trading day this week was Friday. And she has mentioned before, she is instinctually more of a scalper. And she is not afraid to leverage a bit with that in order to lock in a healthy P/L for her day, when she sees a good setup. On Friday, she saw a solid trade setup. Long story short, this morning, Becky got into her trade early, expecting a quick scalp. But ended up holding her damn trade for 3 hours!! Literally 37 x’s her normal hold time for her early market trades! She seriously had to manage her nerves and jitters. While in the trade, she pivoted to getting her older kids off to school and her toddler up and fed. The urge was strong to just scratch it at a small loss, breakeven (BE), or a small win. Just to end the discomfort of holding.

But then she had a Fuck That moment. Choosing to channel that she knows how to read the market and her data is telling her that her targets were still in play and her support is holding. The market was just slow. So, she left with her toddler to go to her middle’s jog-a-thon at his elementary school and let the trade play out, inside a protective bracket order of course. And it was 3 hours into the NY session that her target finally got hit, the alert on her phone pinged, and her trade was done. Sweet relief! But also - reinforcement that when her data supports a good trade, she need to breathe, analyze purposefully and then not over manage. Becky is at the messy middle of her trading career where she has great setups but is still growing her confidence in the actual moments of execution and management. It is way easier said than experienced. So this was a P/L victory as well as a mindset victory. Not only did Becky lock in a great win to end a very short week of trading, but she honored her intentions by staying present with the market and holding her trade when nothing was telling her to get out except her own anxiety. This is the growth that we crave and want to reinforce as we continue our trading journeys.

Thank you to everyone who is subscribing to our podcast, reading our blogs, and providing us feedback! We are here to talk openly about everything that may help us all level up within our lives, be it day trading or otherwise. We wish you all the very best for your lives!