A good day!

I started at 7.35am and finished at 7.40am for +3 pips off one sell trade today. The trade did last 30 seconds, slightly too long in my opinion, but did not go more negative than the spread. I met some friends on the OANDA Forum which may have something to do with today, time will tell.

Keeping it short and sweet today, and staying positive as ever.....

One good trade!

One out of the two trades I executed today was done well – it’s a start. I started at 8.15am and finished at 8.35am for +6 pips off one buy trade and one sell trade.

The first buy trade wasn’t executed very well at all – it was one my old style trades where I was waiting and hoping for it to go positive. Though it yielded +5 pips it could easily have been -5 pips or worse......the errors made – 1) not waiting for a better entry point, i.e. not waiting long enough from the point of sitting down to see better trades develop and 2) lack of GOWID.

The second sell trade could be argued as a well executed trade for +1 pip. I had been watching the Cable jerk up and down between a range of 7 pips a few times and on each occasion there were correlated moves by the Euro and the Swissy. So at what turned out to be the beginning of a downward move, I got in on a sell trade, grabbed a pip and GOWID. This trade was quite risky, but the fact is, following the rules worked in my favour.

What do I say?

I started at 8.46am and finished at 9.11am for -5 pips off 3 sell trades. I ask myself, what do I say, because, I’m still not doing as I should. Since I have been beating myself up quite badly recently, I going to try and keep today’s post to the point and move on.

The first trade was ok, I got in on what I thought was a move and at the first sign I of doubt, I got out for 0 pips. So GOWID worked and the duration of the trade was respectable at 26 seconds.

The second and third trades however, were not that great at all. I lost 6 pips on the second trade because I didn’t GOWID and the last trade might as well have been a loss as well, because I didn’t GOWID at the right time again. I convinced myself that it was ok to stay in these trades until they goes positive – it’s just crazy how my mind is working these days.....

Since I have used up my trading slot for today and I promised myself that I wasn’t going to be ultra hard on myself, I’m going to leave it at that today and wait until tomorrow to exercise the rules correctly and feel good about myself – even if, I finish tomorrow for zero pips – I have one goal tomorrow and getting pips is not it, I simply want to finish the session feeling good, it ok if I don’t trade at all, it’s ok if the odd trade produces a -2 or -3 pip loss, it’s ok if at the end of the session my total is -2 or -3 pips – I just want to make sure that I don’t rush into anything and above all, follow the rules.

Foolish

This is the only explanation for today. I categorically stated in the blog yesterday that I was done with trading for the week – but I sat down again today at 11.11am and finished at 12.15am for -7 pips off two buys trades and one sell trade.

Why did I sit down to trade today? I wanted to prove that I could survive a full trading session without entering a trade if I wasn’t comfortable. And I wasn’t comfortable with entering a trade today for 37 minutes but then I dived in. Without going into all the detail, all three trades were executed purely. And my biggest issue is not being able to GOWID when I should. GOWID is the main tool I have to work on. Today is the perfect example of when that luck I have been living off ran out. Staying in trades that have gone negative and hoping for the trades to go positive is just wrong! It’s like Lien said, put the fire out early whilst it’s small!

In a way, I am glad that I traded today, because it shows without a doubt that my results prior to today were purely down to luck and not skill. But I have to stay positive or all of this will continue to eat me up inside. I now know for a fact that I severely beat myself up over my shortcomings and this has to stop. It doesn’t mean that I do not acknowledge my wrong doings, but it means that I have to simply learn from them and not repeat the same mistakes and curse myself for weeks on end.

I think that’s enough self analysis for one week, so I will finish with the update to my week’s roundup;

Mon +4 pips

Tues +9 pips

Wed +3 pips

Thurs +8 pips

Fri -7 pips

Total +17 pips and I am thankful for this.

Positive pips but not quite there yet

I had an early start today and was only 10 minutes later than planned. I started at 7.10am and finished at 7.40am for +8 pips off one buy trade.

However, this trade was not as good as it sounds. Again, I’m not going to play this down too much as it did produce +8 pips. But the question is still, would I have GOWID if I needed to? The issue with today is that it was a very risky trade. The spread was 4 pips from the time I sat down to trade and only reduced to 3 pips after I had entered the trade. The worrying aspect is that from the point I entered the trade I was between -5 pips and -6 pips including the spread so really speaking I should have GOWID then as I was not 100% sure the trade would go positive straight away, which it didn’t, and acceptable losses on a trade is between -2 or -3 pips maximum. But I waited for nearly 4½ minutes before the Cable and the Euro shot up and I GOWID for the +8 pips.

It was a strange day though. As seen on the charts all three candles were quite large and green, so where was the correlation one might ask. The truth is there was some correlation, but not much. I noticed on two occasions, once at the beginning and more prominently towards the end of my session, that when the Swissy was moving up, so did the Euro and Cable – with momentum as well – so this means that there wasn’t any visible correlation and in those situations trading is risky. It’s clear that my trade today was only on the back of momentum, but the horrifying aspect of today, is that in the same fashion that the Cable (and Euro) shot up to give me my pips, the reverse could have happened and even if I had GOWID, the loss would have been high considering I was holding between -5 and -6 pips for over 4 minutes before it shot up to go positive.

Between the duration of today’s trade and the behaviour of the candles, the trade as I said was very risky and I was lucky to have ended up with positive pips – I have to learn to avoid trades such as today’s however tempting it might be.

I’m not going to trade anymore this week as my target of 10 pips per week has been achieved and perhaps I do need some time off from trading now until Monday. I may have really high expectations for my trading, and some may argue that I did well today – but my gut feeling is that I haven’t. I did some calculations yesterday to determine when I would be at the correct pip value of £40 if I followed my rule of doubling the pip value (which is currently at 5p) every week but only if I successfully complete each full week of trading within the rules and finishing on positive pips for the whole week – it worked out that I would be at the £40 level in 11 weeks – that’s my target. This week does not qualify, so I will be on 5p for another week. The approach I will be attempting next week is one of patience and the one daily goal of finishing each session feeling good in that I followed all the rules and if that means that I do not enter a single trade all week, so be it. I have also just put in a reminder to read this blog entry again before sitting down for my session on Monday to remind myself of these goals for the week.

So to finish off a week in the usual fashion, the round up;

Mon +4 pips

Tues +9 pips

Wed +3 pips

Thurs +8 pips

Total for the week, +24 pips.

A good day at last

I started today at 10.13am and finished at 10.38am for +3 pips off three sell trades. And I am pleased to say that all three trades were executed quite well.

The first trade lasted 9 seconds to produce +1 pip. The second trade lasted 54 seconds to produce +1 pip and the last trade lasted 25 seconds to produce +1 pip.

Whilst I was writing the above, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have GOWID for a small loss if these trades had gone negative, or would I have waited allowing large losses and hoping they would reverse again. The answer is I don’t know for sure. But I need to hold on to the feeling after these rare good days of trading and have to be confident that I would GOWID if a trade goes bad and keep the losses small.

I found an article yesterday in City A.M. titled Forex traders should tread carefully to avoid mistakes and they talked about three major mistakes that we should be wary of. I thought two of these had quite a bit of relevance to me. The first was about Boredom Trading and the other was about Being a Possum. I noticed that I have in the past resorted to trade, in fact, I did it yesterday, to give me a bit of boost – the lady behind these concepts, Kathy Lien warns this simply should not be done as it can go drastically wrong. Being a Possum on the other hand is all about GOWID or a lack of GOWID, and I have done this many times in the past as well, the last time I did this was last week, Lien captured this concept really well when she describes it as: Trading is a game of survival and closing your eyes, hoping the fire will put itself out, is not the right decision. If it is a small fire, it is smarter to put it out before it even comes close to burning down the house; if it is large one, it is better to abandon your home and call in the fire-fighters. In trading, if the reason for the trade is no longer valid, then get out before the losses grow – sounds familiar to me.

I think today was a result of reasonably good entry points and as long as I am ready to GOWID, I will make progress.

A second session

Ok, I’m not going to be too hard on myself this time as I noticed that the emotional impact on me as a result was quite detrimental. So I am going to write about this second trading session for today as positively as I can.

I sat down again at 3.38pm and finished at 3.46pm for +5 pips off one buy trade. The trade wasn’t great due to the duration being nearly 5 minutes in length and I know the consequences of such a trade going wrong. The trade held at -3 pips for quite some time before eventually going positive. And I am more than aware of getting used to saying it’s ok to repeat trades like this – it will stop.

I just needed something to feel better, I know the market was kind to me again with this trade but I do feel better for it. I won’t be sitting down to trade again today, that’s for sure. The next session I have available is for tomorrow between 7.15am and 9.15am and if I miss that, the next slot is between 10.15am 12.15pm. I am looking forward to trading tomorrow, hopefully my mindset will have improved more by then and I can begin my path to recovery slowly.