The Quest @ 3-10%

So what in the world is the quest, and the attached 3-10% mean you might ask?  It is what I have embarked on this year, then stopped, and then started on again.  You see, I lost my job in December of 2009.  I had a small trading account and did some swing trades now and then, as I worked during the day and had little time to monitor any positions.  Well that changed when I was laid off, and I suddenly had lots of time to trade at that point.
Unemployment sure helped with paying the bills and I was able to scratch up a little more money to get around 5k in my account to trade with.  My goal has been to make 3-10% a week off my capital to grow my account and be able to take out some funds to help pay bills.  Crazy.  Impossible.  Maybe.  But a task I was willing to undertake.
This was not my first time trading, to back up just a bit.  I had tried to day trade full time, several times, and left good jobs on 3 prior occasions.  All 3 times I did OK, but was under so much pressure to pay bills due to our debt load, I made poor choices.  I was the guy who sold my winners too soon, way too soon, and held my losers way too long.
But that is not the case any more.  I had no job, so I made trading my job.  With less than 25k you are under the PDT rule, or pattern day trader rule which limits you to 3 day trades per rolling 5 days.  I am fortunate to be around enough network groups of traders and scanners to find plays and slowly built my account up to near 10k.  It could have been more but I did not take big risks.
I decided to study for a license for insurance around July and August and hung up trading for several months while I did this.  I moved my trading money over to our checking account to survive.  Fast forward to late September and the insurance gig was going slow.  So I went back to what I knew and felt I could make money doing.  I put 2k back in my trading account.  Through a series of very good trades and a few other events which I will chronicle in my next blog, I have gotten my account up near 7k now.  I will detail more about how this all came to be in my next blog called The Tithe & The Coin.