Weekdays:
1. Wake up at 5am
2. Rub eyes for 15 minutes
3. Maybe eat breakfast
4. Catch a ride to work
I'll elaborate a bit at this more interesting part. I'm living in a complex where one of my coworkers Tom was already staying, so most mornings I'm going to work with him. We leave around 5:40am to get us to work by 5:50, 40 minutes before the NYSE opens at 9:30 eastern time. In that 40 minutes I usually grab some coffee and bring up our software where we plan our trades for the opening bell. This is probably the most active part of the work day, because most good trades are available at the opening bell given all the overnight activity that can dramatically effect the price of stocks between yesterday's close and today's open. I won't go into too much detail but it's a good time to trade, usually the most profitable part of the day for us.
After the open there's a good amount of down time. Some of the traders go to the gym for an early run, some go home to nap because of the absurd hours. Personally I just stay at my desk, usually I'll read up on today's news or some new poker stuff on the forums. I'm also going to be keeping track of a few different mid-day trading strategies involving either pairs trading or momentum signals. I'm not actually trading either one of these strategies (yet) so this doesn't require a ton of attention, but it's something to keep me busy and learning about the work I'll be doing soon enough. If it's a real slow day, I'll open up my laptop and play some poker. I run really well at work btw, I think I'm up like 5k playing there =D
I eat lunch at like 10:00am which makes me feel like a doofus but oh well. A lot of days I'll go to starbucks because they have awesome food and delicious iced tea. I don't buy coffee there anymore because of the large abundance of free office coffee. If I woke up decently early then I made myself lunch and I eat this instead of dishing out $6 for a breakfast sandwich. I also recently discovered a nice frozen yogurt joint that I'll probably go to more often, especially sine the amount I ordered last time only cost $3
Around 12:45pm we begin planning our closing trades. I'm not really great at the close and for the most part I'm just logging the things I notice but I do 100 shares here and there for practice. I've been lucky enough not to lose yet. The strategies on the close are decently complicated so I won't really explain them here, but they revolve around the imbalance between buys on the close and sells on the close, and the fact that the specialist on the NYSE is forced to correct this imbalance by buying or selling extra shares himself (which will inevitably shift the price).
5. Leave Work
6. Go to the gym (50% of the time)
I'm signing up for a membership with Gold's Gym out here, just finished a week long trial and they have really nice facilities, it's convenient, etc. I might do a conditioning class that's geared towards MMA type stuff but it's at a pretty inconvenient time of day so I don't really expect to make it all that often. A few of my coworkers work out here anyways so we can pretty much do our own thing and it's motivating enough where I'm not really dying to join any classes. Either way this is a good step for me because playing poker and ordering delivery all day isn't great for your health, if you didn't know.
7. Get back to the condo
8. Make dinner
9. Play poker
10. Sleep
Pretty much my weekdays rarely shift from this. There's not a lot of time in the day when you get home from the gym at 4pm and you've already been awake 11 hours. It's pretty hard for me to even play poker at this point and a lot of times I just end up napping =\ but I'm getting used to it. A few times I've done differently, such as going to the driving range earlier this week and also going to see Cirque du Soleil tomorrow night. Thinking about going to an NBA summer league game later this week also but I haven't bought tickets yet because I'm unsure of how fun it is. I do want to see John Wall though...
As far as poker I've been putting in some effort to coach and also learn PLO. It's obviously difficult with this schedule but I feel like I can learn PLO pretty quickly and coaching revolves around my own schedule of course. I'll only be able to do 2-3 hours a week but there's nothing wrong with making some variance free money when losing $2k is a fairly average day in the office. I've been doing well this month in heads up but I haven't played a lot of hands, action is pretty scarce and I'm taking what I can get. I've been playing regs more often and actually booked a few decent winning sessions against them so I'm happy about that. I've played a small sample of husngs this month also and I'm up a few buyins so overall things are going well. I figured this was a good time to withdraw to cover my expenses and after I buy some cash off my roommate I'll be set for at least two months or so, probably more if I can find some new roommates soon.
With my free time I've been posting more on twoplustwo again and to be honest it's getting worse and worse as I read and post there. Yes there are a few very good posters but for the most part nobody good is going to elaborate on their reasoning and almost everyone who does elaborate is wrong about many things. It's not unusual for the forums to evolve in that manner but at the same time it's disappointing. I'll probably end up writing the second part to my Pooh-Bah post in the near future, but most likely not until after my 21st birthday passes and I've made a good amount more money. Hopefully I can shed some light on the important takeaways from a forum like twoplustwo and also the proper way to move on from it and succeed in whatever your goal might be with poker. If you haven't seen my crosspost on facebook there was a great thread posted by Bond18 a few days ago in an MTT forum that everyone should read, discussing the rewards from hard work and the proper way to apply that work to the poker world:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=20034710&postcount=1
Well I've got work in about 5.5 hours and I'm still not tired so I'll wrap up this post around now. I'm really enjoying vegas and I'm glad I got to meet a good amount of 2p2ers so far (including icarusjam, xscwx, et al tonight) but it's disappointing that my job/age is stopping me from getting to spend any real time with them all. Hopefully some people will come out after my birthday (August 7th!) and we can enjoy Vegas but for the time being I've got grind on the mind. Hope everyone's running well, especially my horses in the main event :)
Kevin
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