Dice Man

The hour that precedes the next hour I'm going to be trading.

Stopped out at B/E.

That's me done for the day, the market isn't much fun.

That was a sharp down move... the stops/exiting of people who went long like you perhaps?

Quite possibly, that area is highly contested as you can see from PA.

I'll let them fight it out and return tomorrow.

i usually dont read trading journals as it distracts me too much from my own trading (learning), but this is just crazy

Congratulations and keep on rolling!

It's making me go a little crazy.

I had an unsteady day today, I missed a sitter for 35 pips, didn't take ~40 pips of profit and allowed both to B/E. I managed one winner and then yet another B/E thereafter.

Ok on face value, no losers, sounds good, but the whole day has been a bit of a mixed fortune for me because I've been doubting my trades.

I might stick with 10-20 lots for now and protect my profits, just to cool off and see how things pan out longer term. This needed be about greed.

yeah, you dont have to rush things too hard
if you continue your performance, you can lower your position sizes and still have fantastic returns

From what you've written I gather that you are trading this system part time, on top of a full time job that is? So do you just look at the charts/market at a certain time say 6.00 - 8.00, 15:00 - 17:00 GMT or do you have alerts set at certain levels or do you just turn up whenever and wait for the next opportunity - or ....? Basically how do you juggle a full time job with your part time trading?

Kind regards,

This is the problem.

I trade when I get free time which generally means trading during working hours and technically breaking the internet usage policy... not ideal!

I don't typically set alarms until I'm in a trade or if I do it's at congestion levels where I expect break outs.

My typical trading day consists of logging on for an hour whilst the office is quiet first thing, then again near lunch time and sometimes in the afternoon before close - so I'm most definitely juggling my full-time role around my part-time trading which isn't ideal.

For me to trade full time I need a buffer of around £50,000. I wont go in to the reasons (there are many), but that's a rather large buffer and will take time to build and maintain.

Hi Bleek,

Do not doubt your trades!! I know you have a really simple system and those are the ones that work. Take a look around this forum and you will see thousands of people all trying to filter trades, increase the win rate, increase the risk:reward, tweak things to keep them out of bad trades etc. These people all have one thing in common..........too much effort analysing and not enough effort trading.

Trading is simple: REALLY SIMPLE!

The reason people balls it up so spectacularly is because they have trouble accepting simple probabilities. They'll have a bad day, or a string of losing trades, and think they need to change something, so they never trade one style long enough to get familiar and confident with it. If every person who came on this forum, took one system and traded it by the letter for even just 6 months without "tweaking or filtering", I would be confident the success rate for new traders would be 100 times what it is now. And it would make almost zero difference which strategy they picked. You can make money with just about any style, with any set up, on any time frame as long as you stick with it. Trading is simple....discipline isn't!

Stick with what is working for you and see how it balances out after maybe 100 trades. You will take losses. On a day like today you were lucky to get away with any profits at all, so just take a losing day for what it is.....part of a winning strategy in the long term. Never doubt what you're doing. When you see your entry or exit signal, take it without question and just accept the outcome, be it a loss or a win.

What you may find difficult is the money involved. You're jumping from small lots to high figures in a very short time frame, and your sub concious may not be able to cope with that too well. If you're not used to taking 5 figure wins and losses on a daily basis, you may just blow a fuse in your head. Maybe slow down a little with your increment rises. You've made some incredible gains on your account and if you're not ready to handle that kind of cash in your account, your sub concious may start working very hard to give it all back to the market just as fast as you made it. If you're feeling that you are starting to doubt your trades, it may be a case that you are actually doubting or struggling with the units involved. It might be an idea to scale back a little to give yourself time to adjust to each new level that you trade at.

If there's doubt in your mind, it shouldn't be with your trades. Take a look at your leverage, risk and position size and make sure you're utterly comfortable. Think about what you are prepared to lose in a single day, or as a maximum draw down on the whole account. With 5% risk per trade as you have now, it only takes 10 consecutive losses to take 50% off your equity. Are you prepared to take that? If I understand your system, it is very similar to one I trade, and it's practically a certainty that at some point you will take 10 losses in a row. Are you prepared for that?

Don't let a choppy day like today put any doubt in your mind. This is normal. Losing trades is normal. Once you've been trading this strategy a little longer and see how the losses and wins balance up, you will be indifferent to winning days or losing days.....they all blend in to an overall long term winning strategy.

Keep your confidence and belief mate and there's no stopping you getting to any level you want.

If I could give vouches for posts, you'd get one.

Thanks for the wise words of encouragement.

One more question for now How do you handle news?

Regards

Ignore it, always. I trade through fundamentals like they aren't even there.

But the spreads during news can affect your strategy right? I mean like you might get in with a 10 pip spread. Assuming your MM doesn't use fixed spreads.

Ok let me qualify my response, I ignore news unless it changes the market, if spreads widen then I'm out because I use such a small stop.

The only time I ever see spreads at my bucket shop widen past 3 points is during NFP and typically I don't trade Friday afternoons anyway so, I'm not bothered.

If I'm already in a trade before news, who cares, if it takes me out it'll take me out but 50% of the time it takes me with it, it's 50/50. If I try and second guess the news then I'm moving the goal post and that 50/50 'luck of the draw' becomes distorted, perhaps in my favour but more than likely not. So as I say, I ignore it. When it comes to intraday trading I really, really, really... dislike fundamental analysis.

So to indirectly answer the original question, do I look at the ForexFactory calender during the day before taking trades? Absolutely not!

Well I actually got the drop for 30 points but the platform wouldn't let me close, so I tried to reverse as the hold lot came back on me and I got re-quoted way high, this all happened in a minute... what the hell is going on!?

Closed out of the madness for -16 ($3,200).

Well done for posting your loss. Remember this is normal.

I was in the same short trade on that rapid drop, and I also had trouble getting closed. I actually took 20 pips slippage before my order was finally filled with 11 pips of profit instead of the 30 I was looking at. Slippage like that is absolutely expected and again normal in these situations. If you put an order to get filled at a certain price, you will only get filled if price hits that level (i.e. a bank quotes that price).......but in this mornings case, the price was moving so fast it was jumping in 5 or 10 pip increments and so would skip most people's orders...........the risks of trading :-) But remember slippage works both ways. If you had tried closing out at 10 pips as the price was moving down, you may well have found you finally got filled for 30 pips profit instead. It all balances out in the long run.

Whatever happens now, don't try and chase the loss or force trades to get back to even. If the loss is bothering you, close your charts for a few hours and re-group your composure.

I thought it was something bizarre with my platform, I literally got frozen out of profit. Talk about volatile.

Anyway, I stepped away for a few hours to let things settle down.

I don't often hold positions but I saw an opportunity on my jotter and knew 99% that it would go my way so I entered short targeting 150-200 points on 10 contracts.

I'm using 10 contracts instead of 20 because my stop is considerably larger than I normally use, that's a $5,000 mental stop.

Filled
Cable - Short 1.4497/TP +150-200/ST 50 = ???

Just to comment on last week, I went a little quiet because I was suffering from flu like symptoms.

It's very true what they say, if you're not 100% don't trade, I made several mistakes last week that I've since analysed and in retrospect there's no way I would have been so 'slack' if I were operating at full health.

So if you don't feel up to the task, step away from the trade! I didn't and it cost me money; we're learning all the time.