Patience Paying off

The high I wanted to end the year on came along today! I started very late today at 10.11am and finished at 10.20am with one perfect +2 pip buy trade.

All I now need to do, is not get all excited, remain calm and repeat what I have been doing this week – stay patient, wait for the perfect moves with all the criteria being present. That criteria being, good correlation, strong momentum, and being confident that if the trade is entered into, it will go positive straight away – as it did today, the trade lasted 4 seconds!

So this weeks round up....

Mon – No Trades

Tues +1 pip

Wed – No Trades

Thurs – No Trades

Fri +2 pips

Therefore, I finished the week for +3 pips – and most importantly a positive week and feeling good that I followed all the rules this week.

Time to enjoy the rest of today and see in the New Year.

Preserving Capital

Yet another session of maintaining discipline and preserving my capital. I started at 8.36am and finished at 10.21am for a total of 0 pips off no trades again.

What can I say, I saw no opportunity where I was comfortable enough to trade. I did however, see plenty of jerky movement by the Cable during parts of the 8am candle, during the whole 9am candle and part of the 10am candle – but none that had the correlated support with momentum of the other currencies. In addition, when I asked myself the question, would the trade go positive straight away if I got in, the answer was always no.

In fact there were a couple of scenarios where I for a moment contemplated getting in on a trade on momentum alone, but at the points that I would have got in during my gambling days, the candle reversed abruptly and if I had got in, I would have ended up with a big -6 or so pips. This reminded me again of how important it is to follow the rules and wait for the right opportunity, rather than gamble.

So, my capital has been preserved this week and I feel a hell of a lot better with my performance in the last 5 sessions than I have done for the last couple of months.

As I said a few posts ago, I was to finish this year on a high......

Another day of no trades....

It’s bizarre, I sat down to trade today between 9.20am and 11.02am and found no opportunity to trade. I stopped at 10.27 because of an announcement due at 10.30am that would have an effect on the Swissy and in turn, possibly on the Cable and Euro, but continued to watch. At 10.30am on the dot, the spread on the Swissy increased to 5 pips and did no revert back to it’s normal 1 pip spread, well, at least not by the time I closed down the platform at 11.02am.

There were points during today’s session where I began to wonder if I had gone from getting into too many trades at the wrong time to not getting into any trades at the right times. But I quickly dismissed this thought, as you have to feel confident in a move, see all the criteria and only then get in – this did not happen today, therefore no trades undertaken and my capital is preserved.

If I step back and look at the bigger picture, we are in the holiday season, so it’s understandable that the markets are slow or behaving strangely. The market behaves strangely in normal times, so what has been experienced this week is nothing out of the ordinary.

I am extremely pleased with myself though for not risking trades when criteria were not present. There was a point today where the Cable in the 10am candle started moving up with reasonable momentum, mostly little 2 or 3 pip moves upwards, but back to back upward movements. But at the same time, the Swissy was moving upwards and the Euro was moving downwards – so no correlation and therefore no trade. I am proud to have stayed out during this time. Seasoned and experienced traders would probably laugh right now and say something like, “.....yeah and? That should be the norm...”, but I know that has not been the norm for me, I have jumped head first into trades that had no correlation, momentum or the slightest chance of going positive straight away, on many an occasion, so this is quite a big deal for me.

Time for me to go and get on with other work that I have to do – we’ll see what the market brings tomorrow.

1 hour, 1 pip

Another day of practicing patience. I started at 8.38am today and finished at 8.48am for 1 pip off one buy trade.

Staying awake, let alone remaining focused, after 30 minutes certainly becomes tough. I entered my one and only trade today after watching for 11 minutes or so. After that, it was a bit of a battle to stay awake. But I endured the duration, watching and waiting and after an hour I decided that it was time to close down for the day. There just wasn’t enough momentum in the market and correlation was strange and on occasion doing the opposite, anti-correlation?

Looking at the 9am candle on the Cable, it looks like it would have been easy to bag at least 10 pips on a sell trade. But that candle grew in such a slow fashion and without any real correlation with the other currencies. There certainly wasn’t any momentum between the currencies, that’s for sure.

The main thing though, is that I sat through the session in a controlled manner and preserved my capital again.

There might be more movement in the market tomorrow as it is a working day in the UK, time will tell.

No Trades

I stayed disciplined again today. I started at 9.48am, quite late in comparison to the norm and finished at 11.12am. But I saw no opportunity during this whole session and so did not trade at all today. This means, my capital is also preserved. I couldn’t stop yawning after around the 30 minute mark, but remained pretty focused though.

The candles hardly moved at all today, and for obvious reasons I presume, the bank holidays. I’m sure it will be the same again tomorrow, but will take a seat and see what happens.

I forgot to do last weeks’ round up on Friday, so here it is;

Mon 0 pips

Tues -12 pips

Wed -19 pips

Thurs 0 pips

Fri +1 pips

Total -30 pips for the week (a small improvement on the week before).

Optimistic finish on Christmas Eve

It feels good to finish the weeks’ last session on a high. One sell trade today for +1 pip. I started at 8.44am after checking the announcements due for today on Forex Factory, my daily routine, and there were no announcements due that affected the currencies I work with. But the currencies were moving extremely slowly this morning. Not just that, the Swissy had a 4 pip spread compared with its normal 1 pip spread, the Euro had a 2 pip spread compared with its normal 1 pip spread and the Cable had a 3 pip spread compared with its normal 2 pip spread.

A sell opportunity arose for me though and I followed all the rules. It cleared 1 pip of the 3 pip spread and held for a good 30 to 40 seconds before clearing the spread in full and going positive by 1 pip. As soon as that happened, I thought that should be it for me today. Finish on a high, close down and enjoy Christmas until Monday, which of course is a bank holiday in the UK, but a normal working day in the US.

So, that me done for Christmas and on that high that I wanted so badly.

Zero Pips

I was relatively disciplined today. I started my session at 8.55am but stopped at 9.27am as there was an announcement at 9.30am that affected the Cable. The spread jumped from 2 pips to 15 pips between 9.30am and 9.33am and then reverted back to a 2 pip spread. I checked the Forex Factory announcement website to ensure the announcement results were published before commencing my session again at 9.33am.

I didn’t enter my first trade today until 9.47am. However, it was a poor trade. It yielded 0 pips, but by no means was this a well executed trade as you can see from the duration of the trade in my activity window – the length of this trade wasn’t the only thing that I did wrong. This aspect of my mindset, I have to, have to change – better GOWID and better entry points. I would then be in a much better place.

Trade number 2 took place almost 30 minutes later. This sell trade on the other hand was better, in that I GOWID to break even again for 0 pips. The trade held as soon as I had entered but it didn’t of course go positive straight away – the Swissy fired off upwards, the Euro pushed down, but not a great deal and the Cable held. So I felt relatively confident that the Cable would go down eventually. But after holding its position for over 3 minutes, I decided to GOWID for 0 pips. I then made the decision to close the platform for the day. It felt good in making this decision instead of going for a third trade.

My session today was quite long again, almost 1½ hours, so I am being quite patient, that’s a good thing. It is tough though, I was stopping myself again at various points from entering hopeful trades.

Zero pips for today, a first for me since starting this blog anyway – and on to tomorrow, Christmas Eve, my last day of trading for the week.....

Off Colour

I was up quite early today and during breakfast I wondered where I was going to be in a couple of months. Was I going to need to draw on the capital I have with OANDA to survive? That sought of thing. I then dismissed that line of thought, thinking there’s plenty of time and I will make my Forex trading a success.

That did not prove to be the case today. The old bad habits that I talked about yesterday were ever present today. The first two trades were me just practicing the bad habits. I incurred hefty losses in terms of pips, but I’m trying to see these losses as big financial losses as in theory, it would be large financial losses if this kind of behaviour takes place when trading for bigger pip values.

So instead of finishing off for the day on a low, I wanted my third and last trade to be a good one, and low and behold, it was. So I took my screen shot, shut the platform down and got on to my blog.

So, I started at 8.16am, finished at 9.03am for 3 trades totalling -19 pips for the day.

The year is coming to an end, 5 more working days left this year and I still seem to have a long way to go. But I’m sticking to my guns, slow and steady, I’m getting all the shit out my system, this will all come together, I will get there!

Danger in frustration

I got frustrated after the first couple of trades today. I started at 8.24am today looking forward to the session. I got into my first trade at 8.31am and spent 5 minutes watch the candle hover and hold around the -2 to -3 pip mark. I eventually got out for -2 pips as I was in doubt, to then see the candle move into profit by 2 pips. So this pissed me off, I was thinking typical, I get out instead of waiting like I normally do to only watch my trade become a bigger and bigger negative, and what happens? It goes into profit after I have got out.

The second trade followed a similar tack – I sat in the trade for 6 minutes to get out for 0 pips, and soon after, it goes positive by 7 pips!

So, after to two frustrating trades, I enter the third, clearly, still pissed off, and the old habits in me kicked back in to produce -10 pips for my final trade of the day. Which finishes me off for the day for at -12 pips.

What lessons did I learn today then? The most important is to not get frustrated and keep sticking to the rules, it will eventually come together........

Moving in the right direction again

Late start again this morning – a result of a late night yesterday. However, I am quite pleased today. I started at 8.48am and finished at 10.31, my longest session in a long time and boy was it tough to sit and watch and do nothing during 99% of that slot. Today’s overall result was 0 pips! A marked difference to the daily average of last week.

Having said this, my first trade was a no no, and I was lucky to end with a +2 pips on this trade. Enough said about that.

My second and third trades however, were controlled and GOWID helped me close out the second trade for -2 pips and the third trade for 0 pips. Excluding the first trade, I didn’t rush into my remaining trades today. I waited and waited for an opportunity to arise and only then got in. Fair enough they didn’t yield positive pips, but then that is the nature of the beast right? The right trades will eventually come along, I just have to keep my head and wait patiently for those perfect moves.

Though I felt like I had my head stuck in a text book studying by the time a finished today, I felt good. Tired, but I felt good.

5 more days to Christmas, 4 more day of trading remaining before Christmas, I plan to make this a good week!

Weeks round up

Started at 8.36am today, later than usual again, it was tough night. Three trades, -8 pips in total.

Entry points and GOWID – these are the most important factors that I’m getting wrong at the moment. I got these wrong today as well. Oddly however, I feel relatively calm and not too disappointed. I know what needs to be done, it’s just a matter of getting there. The scoring system I talked about yesterday didn’t really work for me today, but I will try again another time.

So, let get down to the weeks round up shall we?

Mon -8 pips

Tues -2 pips

Wed -20 pips

Thurs +2 pips

Fri -8 pips

Total for the week, -36 pips. How coincidental is that, I produced the same number of pips last week!

All I can keep saying, and I’m sure I will say it again, it will get better! Much better!

Time to trick the mind

I started off this morning at 8.35am, later than usual, determined to make a change to my norm. But as soon as I start trading, a gambler comes out – I am a big risk taker right now, this is has to change. I finished today for +2 pips, but the method used in attaining this was wrong.

My first trade was a lucky -3 pips. My second trade was a lucky +3 pips. And my third trade was a somewhat lucky +2 pips.

What I say and do is fundamentally different. Why is that? Before entering the first trade today, I said to myself, I’m trading at £50 per pip (though in actual fact it is less that 10p – I haven’t broken this rule) so I can’t afford to lose even a pip, I have to wait for the right opportunity, I have to GOWID if I have the slightest doubt as to where the trade is going. But these affirmations, did not materialise in any of my trades today.

I also remember saying to myself last night in bed that before entering a trade, I must be 100% sure that it will go positive straight away and if I’m not, I should not enter the trade. I said to myself that I must remember this today before trading – now that I put it down in this post, I didn’t quite remember this point before trading today. However, this is crucial for my success right? It may take some time, however, practicing this rule along with GOWID should ensure that I have far few trades, far fewer negatives and leave me in positive territory every week. I remember in one of Sid’s Sunday calls, one of the members said they used a scoring system to determine if they should enter a trade or not. All you had to do was, in the split second before entering the trade, give it a score between 1 and 10 to determine how likely you thought the trade will go positive straight away, 10 being 100% sure it will. From past experience, I know tricking the mind into doing the right thing works, perhaps this will work for my Forex trading.

I have one more day left this week and it would be great to finish this week on a high where I followed the rules fully in at least one session.

Get busy living or get busy dying!

The classic line from a classic movie and it applies today. The old habits took over today. I executed all three trades incorrectly. I have finished for the day but for whopping -20 pips!

There was no real reason for today’s events, I wasn’t tired, I was in a good mood, I was relaxed. This has to be down to the fact that I have all the wrong habits ingrained in me, there is no other explanation.

Now – how can I leave today’s session on a positive note? I stopped for the day after three trades and I am consistent in this? I did for a split second today, consider entering a fourth trade though. It can only be onwards and upwards from here? It must only be onwards and upwards from here.

Having a good session on the Forex markets first thing in the morning sets me up for the day, so I will be patient. There are two more days left in this week. I have to go back to the basics and wait for that perfect entry point and still be ready to GOWID. The perfect entry point is when there is sustained correlation between the currencies with sufficient momentum for me to grab 1 or 2 pips and get out without having any doubt – there, I have spelt it out!

I visualise as best as I can, that there will come a time, when I have grown my capital to £400k and I will be trading at £1k per pip, the maximum allowed – pure financial freedom. I have this in me, far lesser people than I are successful in Forex trading, it can only follow that I will be successful in this too.........

Staying Disciplined

It’s so easy to stray – that I know more than anyone else. I started at 8.05am today and my overall result for the day was -2 pips. In comparison to the last few days of trading, from a pip point of view, this is a big jump in the right direction.

Having said this, my application of GOWID still has a long way to go. My first trade yielded -2 pips and for once, GOWID was applied almost on a reactionary basis. This minimised my losses during the 10 second duration of this trade. This is how GOWID should be working.

The second trade however, lasted too long and GOWID was not used appropriately and hence, produced a large -5 pips. The duration of the trade, 54 seconds, is another indication of this being a poor trade.

The third and final trade for the day produced +5 pips. This however, was a risky trade. I could justify it all day long by saying I knew it would go positive, but the crux of the matter is it could have easily reversed, far more than it did at quite few points during the early part of the 3 minute 11 second trade. I maybe being overly hard on myself here, but if a trade has gone negative even for a second, there is doubt in my mind, and when there is doubt GOWID should come into play. So in theory, this trade should have been a -3 pip trade, as that is how far negative it went at one point.

I have to improve the choice of my trade entry points. When the entry points are better, there’s a smaller chance of the trade going negative. This automatically means that I am less likely to be a hopeful trader which is ultimately what I was doing in the last two trades today. And I know too well what hopeful trading can lead to.

So to summarise today, the bad habits outweighed the good habits and I was lucky to have finished for -2 pips. The good news is that I still limited myself to 3 trades, even though the Cable looked like it was going up beyond where I finished my last trade. Some discipline is still in place!

I will get there.

I’m trying

My GOWID still needs to improve a hell of a lot. Not promptly applying GOWID and being hopeful is what caused my first and third trades of today to produce such large negatives. Overall results for today, -8 pips.

On the flip side, I sat down today at 8.26 am. Noticed that an important announcement that affects the Cable was due for 9.30am and this time, I decided to do some other work while the announcement was made and came back to the table at 9.36am and didn’t enter my first trade until 9.43am. So some good news – I didn’t trade during the announcement and get myself in a pickle. I have been forgetting about the importance of preserving my capital though – I am sure if this was at the forefront of my thoughts as well, I would naturally be looking for better entry points and applying GOWID a lot more strictly.

Another good habit – I am also limiting myself to 3 trades per day, win or lose. I am staying focused as best as I can.

The goal is to get one positive week before the end of this year, even if it is for + 1 pip.

GOWID, GOWID, GOWID

Another poor day and end to the week in terms of pips. I finished today for -11 pips, why, because the connection between my brain and my finger must have been weak when my brain was saying GOWID at various stages in my third trade.

My entry points were not great today on any of the trades, but as I said yesterday, GOWID is there to protect me in those situations. However, in today’s case, after bagging +2 pips on my second trade, I could see the candles going again whilst I was opening new order windows and I rushed into another sell trade, which of course reversed and that’s when the connection between my brain and my finger was broken and GOWID didn’t happen as soon as it should have and I became hopeful of it coming back to go positive. But fearful of having another stop loss kicking in, I got out for -10 pips, better than -20 which is the stop loss doing it for me, but at least I got out. It was such a pleasure as always, to then see the candle go back down to the entry point of my third trade whilst I was taking my screen shots......

So my weeks round up, Mon -7, Tues +3, Wed -12, Thurs -9 and Fri -11. This gives me a grand total of -36 pips for the week – all because of impatience and not using GOWID when I should.

Still, I am somehow managing to stay positive in all of this and will be back on Monday to change things around, my pip value will remain unchanged at 10p.

GOWID

This is the single most important rule that I am breaking time and time again. I reflected on yesterday’s afternoon session. On all three trades, there was doubt in my mind soon after I entered each trade and all that needed to be done was to GOWID and my overall losses for yesterday would have been around -4 pips.

Same with today, as soon as I got into the first trade I was in doubt as to it going positive straight away – and that is what is key, I must know or feel the trade is going positive straight away – and I exercised GOWID. The second trade however, was a repetition of yesterday afternoon, I was in doubt right at outset, but stayed in instead of GOWID. The third I reigned myself back in and GOWID for +1 pip. The overall results for today, -9 pips.

I am staying positive. Yesterday afternoon, has emphasised to me again that I have to be mindful all the time, I just cannot be trading on a whim or being hopeful. GOWID is key, even if I have got the entry points wrong, GOWID will protect me and minimise my losses. Though today’s second trade was a repetition of yesterday afternoon, the other two trades executed today were within the rules.

It’s obvious that the last couple of weeks knocked me for a six, but I now know this is not going to be easy transition from fucking up to getting things right. It’s my fault this is going to be tough, I did all the wrong things for too long, I have accepted that fact.

I am going to get there, it now just a matter of time, I may have said this before, I probably have said this before, but it is simply a matter of time, it will happen. I will take care of the little picture every day and the bigger picture will take care of itself!

I have to find other things to do

Or I will just pay dearly as I have just done now for -15 pips. I feel gutted – but can’t do anything about it now apart from stick to the fucking rules from now on!!! I’m clearly suffering from schizophrenia – there’s the angel on one shoulder, calmly uttering words of wisdom and then there’s the devil on the other shoulder screaming, fuck it, go for it, you are going to be a billionaire! The devil is winning at the moment!

System problems

OANDA had system problems today. Either that or my internet connection was poor. So my session was very short and fortunately, didn’t require me to have to contact OANDA to recover losses due to the technical glitch.

After setup I started at 8.57am today. I was fully conscious of my progress yesterday in a good way, and I would like to say I was relaxed when I sat down to watch for my opportunity today. I mentioned to myself a few times this morning, remember GOWID, preserve my capital as a minimum and only trade when criteria is perfect.

The remainder of the 8am candles didn’t produce any moves that I was happy with. But 3 minutes into the 9am candles, the currencies started to correlate well with momentum. I jumped in to a sell trade only to find that my sell order window froze after clicking submit. A good few seconds later, everything shut down, error messages came up asking me to confirm a restart by clicking OK – to cut a long story short, within the 90 seconds it took to get back up and running and close out my trade that was active when the charts reappeared, the activity window showed that I had made 3 pips off the back of 3 trades – the last 2 trades being created as a result of me trying to close out my first trade and OANDA doing some strange stuff.

So since I was somewhat startled by what had just happened and I was miraculously in profit, I chose to finish for the day with a sigh of relief.

Having said this, the fact that the one trade that I consciously (as opposed to OANDA doing funny stuff after) entered, hadn’t gone negative by the time everything had come back to normal, gave me confidence, that my entry point was good and I my decision to enter this trade was sound. Poised to GOWID of course – and I did as soon as the system came alive.

So good news so far......

A move in the right direction

I waited patiently today to yield my +3 pips in 16 seconds from the one sell trade I got into. I started at 8.25am after setting up my charts and inserting my datum lines. I kept saying to myself that there is no rush to get into a trade and that I have to wait for criteria.

There were a few occasions when I wanted to jump in using old bad habits, but I managed to hold off. As I said before, it is apparent now that I have some very bad habits ingrained in me, and it may be some time before I start trading consistently and feel confident again, but today was a step in the right direction.

I am proud to say that I was able to sit patiently today for 28 minutes before trading. I have to remind myself that I may have to wait a lot longer before finding the perfect criteria to trade and that there will be occasions when I will go the whole 1 hour 45 minutes and not have traded at all. I also noticed that during the 28 minute stint today and though my old habits tempted me to trade, ultimately, I was just not confident with what was happening with the currencies and I said this to myself at the time, “if you are not happy with the moves, don’t trade” and it’s true. In the past, I have been trying to get my pips quickly in order to close down for the day as soon as possible. When in reality, good moves do not occur as often as you like, if they did, everyone would be a Forex success.

I have to say though, I am so happy with today’s results, I needed a confidence boost.

Still not there

I am still nowhere near any sign of recovery from last week. GOWID isn’t working, nothing is really. -7 pips today and achieved over 5 trades. I don’t know how to reign myself in anymore. The first trade today last almost 30 minutes. The others were all ridiculously long in duration as well. And what ever happened to no more than 3 trades a day?

I’m now on 10p per pip, so the impact of these continuous negatives that I am racking up aren’t as bad as they could be, but I can’t just keep going this way.

I have to find my feet again, it’s almost Christmas and I have gone backwards. I have to identify why I am going wrong or I am going to need therapy as a gambler – I’m not a trader now am I?

Going backwards

-21 pips today – I’m going backwards. I’m not trading anymore today or tomorrow and will be trying to get my head in order – it’s clearly not there.

I can’t go back to demo trading, I will feel far worse than I do already. I have reduced my pip value to 10p though so there’s not much further down I can go.

I am way too eager to get into a trade at the moment. I must be, I am, in revenge trading mode. It’s not like I’m going to claw back my losses at 25p per pip or 10p per pip now, but that is what I am doing.

Hence, no more trading for the rest of this week. I will collect my thoughts, try my best to put all this behind me and will be back on Monday. I may even go over the old course material and see if I can get any help from there to get my mindset sorted.

The rules are so simple and yet I’m not following them. Follow these simple rules and I will be financially free a year from now, even with the current level of capital that I have left, and yet I’m not following them. What the fuck is wrong with me?????

Am I just giving myself too hard a time? I deserve it, that’s for sure. I don’t know how to explain what I am going through anymore......I’m at a loss!

Still feeling like shit

-19 pips today! I haven’t quite got to that clean slate I was hoping to be at by this morning and I haven’t got much else to say really, I’ve said it all before and it’s not good. But I am done for the day.

Now what?

I don’t know what to say right now. I know I have been here before. I am embarrassed. My confidence is shot. I feel sick. Should this be the end to my Forex journey?

What can I say apart from that I have truly fucked up today! All that I thought had been put behind me came back and hit me hard! I lost over £800 today! Every rule I can think of was broken. I decided to sit down for an afternoon session and it all went wrong. A stop loss took me out of a trade, stop losses were moved, pip values changed, being hopeful with trades, entering too many trades – and everything else under the sun that should not have been done, was done!

I am right back where I started. I have now effectively lost almost £4k since originally investing £20k in September, an average of £2k per month, not bad huh? What am I going to do? My ultimatum from last week means this is it for me......however everything in me is saying I can still do this. But at what cost – the rest of my capital? The bad habits that I have got into are ingrained in me now – I fear that the steps I have to take to get back on the straight and narrow are so far ahead of me, I might never reach them. Am I simply deluding myself into thinking everything will be ok?

Sid at Forex Training Works warned us all that once you start down the wrong path, turning back becomes very difficult. He was right. The stories about others who had strayed now apply to me. I am one of the statistics. And what worries me, is that I don’t recall hearing any stories about those who strayed and came back........

If I am going to continue with my Forex dream, I need a plan and have to stick to the plan, so I am going to put something down now;

-          I’ve just reduced my pip value to 25p per pip.

-          This pip value will not be increased until one full week of good trading is achieved. If this is achieved weekly, I will double the value weekly. If I don’t follow the rules for even one day in a given week, the next move will be back to demo trading. I have to right?

-          GOWID must be exercised at all times.

-          I will improve my trade entry points. This will involve me being a lot more patient than I have and ensuring that there is strong correlation between the currencies before trading. Not doing this is probably the biggest contributing factor for why I have been going wrong.

-          No more than 3 trades will be entered into per day. At least until I have systematically worked my way up to the £40 per pip level – this now being the appropriate pip value based on the capital I have left. Executing numerous trades in one day or session is another reason for my fuck ups – Sid used to call it revenge trading.

-          The maximum duration of each session will not be more than 2 hours.

I think that’s it.

If I was a reader of this blog, I would be cringing right now. How many times does one need to learn from their mistakes? I hope this is the last time, I couldn’t take this again – could you? I use this blog because I can no longer speak to anyone about this, it would be too embarrassing. I am finding it hard enough to continue with this blog with all that has happened so far.....

More Good than Bad

I’m going straight into the results today, I started at 8.11am today, entered 9 trades that yielded the following and finished at 8.49am:

Trade 1 – Sell for -6 pips

Trade 2 – Sell for +1 pip

Trade 3 – Sell for -4 pips

Trade 4 – Sell for -2 pips

Trade 5 – Sell for +9 pips

Trade 6 – Buy for -6 pips

Trade 7 – Sell for -6 pips

Trade 8 – Sell for +10 pips

Trade 8 – Sell for +5 pips

The bad news is that my negatives are clearly too high, and way too many trades were executed.

The good news is, not one of my trades got kicked out by my stop loss – granted getting kicked out by the stop loss is difficult for normal traders, but in my case, I seemed to be at the mercy of the stop loss with relative ease in the recent past. So this must mean, that GOWID, to a certain degree is working for me, though the 4 out of the 5 negative trades today were too high. This simply means that I was using a combination of GOWID and HOPE, and I know all too well what HOPE can lead to in this type of trading. The last piece of good news today is I finished overall for +1 pip.

I’ll leave it like that for today!

Perfect start to the week!

I couldn’t have asked for a better start to this week. I finished today for +3 pips off one sell trade which lasted 36 seconds and the whole trading session lasted 6 minutes.

I haven’t explained what the white and yellow lines in my graphics mean before, so let me attempt to do so now. As you can see in my snap shot today, the white datum lines show my starting point today, this is when I sat down to watch after my setup of the charts. The yellow datum lines within the Cable chart are approximately 30 pips either side of my white datum line which I aim to match against the top and bottom of wicks off prior Cable 1 hour candles in the same day. This helps me gauge the range of the currency’s movement, without having to watch the actual price every second. This also provides an indication of points when the currency might break through a previous high or low. I never used consistently use these datum lines before, but have been for several weeks now and it certainly helps.

Now that I have explained what my datum lines are, just look at how great today was. You can see the price of the Cable when I sat down and that there was a 20 pip (there abouts) red candle on the Cable already. Before entering by sell trade today, the currencies seemed to be correlated, but were not moving in one direction with any kind of momentum in order for me to enter a sell or buy trade. But then, out of the blue, the Swissy began to push up with momentum, the Euro began to push down with some momentum, but the Cable, at this point, wasn’t doing much. Then the Cable decided to jump down around 4 pips from 1.5617 to 1.5613 to catch up with the movement of the other currencies. Then, the Cable gradually reversed again, back up to 1.5617, along with some respective correlated gains and losses by the Euro and Swissy. If I remember correctly, this happened in both directions a couple of times, when after a couple of minutes, the Swissy decided to push up further, the Euro push down further, to the point that there was no wick at the bottom of the Euro – and I was lucky enough at this point, to enter a sell trade on the Cable at 1.5614, before the Cable had started its corresponding correlated movement. The Cable held at 1.5614 for a few seconds, then cleared the spread and held for a few seconds, went positive by +1 pip but quickly went back down to break even and hold for a few seconds, it then moved up by +2 pips, which is when I exited the trade. But by the time the system took a split second to close the trade, it had moved to +3 pips.

I hope I’m not jumping ahead of myself as it is still early days, but something is different compared to the last few weeks. I feel a lot more relaxed. I think I have finally got it clear in my head that when a trade looks good in terms of criteria and I decide to jump in, I just have to be ready to GOWID, not just when such a trade has gone positive, but even if it stalls right at the beginning even before clearing a spread. This way, I am limiting myself to small negatives as opposed to the negatives that you have seen me do in the past. But the equally important aspect of this type of trading is that I have to wait for good criteria before actually entering a trade, this is key to avoiding lots of small negatives resulting from me exercising GOWID well, but not getting the entry points right.

As I said in one of my posts last week, I think I am getting there – slowly but steadily – but one thing is for sure, I feed great today!

I’ll be back tomorrow.....

Distracted

Today’s session was a prime example of when not to trade. I was quite rushed off my feet this morning before sitting down to trade, and I brought this attitude with me when I sat down to trade at 8.48am.

GOWID, to a certain degree, kept me relatively safe, but there was a lot of luck involved again today. So to keep it short and sweet – 5 trades today, yes I know, way too many – results were, +1, -5, -4, +7 (this was an old style crazy hopeful trade, so shouldn’t count really) and +3 pips. Leaving me +2 pips up for the day. But I reckon it was around 50% rule following and 50% luck today.

So, the weeks round up;

Monday:                      -30 pips

Tuesday:                      +2 pips

Wednesday:                +3 pips

Thursday:                    +2 pips

Friday:                         +2 pips

Total for the week:      -21 pips

I’m not going to dwell on this week, I think the penny is beginning to drop, even after the events of this week.

I’ll be here again on Monday to report on my results.