Monday, October 20, 2008

So what happened today? II

I changed my mind I want to put on charts. If you missed there is post number one below this one about today.

There are two things that I want to take from today.

First death spiral of moving stops, not having stops, averaging is experience that I had too many times for my taste. If for anything I want to take max of -20 pips on full position just not to experience death spiral again. There are two kinds of freedom, freedom for and freedom from. Stop loss is freedom from death spiral.

Second I want to play around with stop line on chart trailing it from time to time. Just to get the habit of trailing my stop. I never trail, usually there is no point in trailing, but if I don't have a habit of doing it ever than I'm missing on something important. My first trade today was at the top of 400 pips downtrend.


Full size trade, first short, got 27 pips on it. Premature exit, reasonable as a scalp because at the time of exit eur started to go up, so I expected gbp to follow.


Gbp trades were half size and eur full size. I was trading with discipline on. I was trying to scalp picking the bottom, didn't get it on gbp, but did on eur.


Whole day. Death spiral after long trade in gbp, in few minutes it was -100 pips and than I realized that it's full size trade. I wasn't prepared for half size loss of that size, but full position...
After -170 pips I started heavy averaging going full margin in it, didn't get a bounce but more pain.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Freedom to, and freedom from... where have I read that before?!?! its bugging me.

I'm glad you ended up posting the charts, because they are ALWAYS important. You look back on them later and see things you never saw before.

I am sorry to hear about your mishaps today. I am wondering why you kept on trading after having such success early in the day, learning to leave the market with a profit is another trait that is hard to put to practice.

Lately I have been making a reoccurring mistake that has been costing me. I enter with a market order and forget to switch the preference to "Limit", so as my next order is triggered and I reenter the other order, it actually cancels out the new trade with a loss. I need to remember to change it to limit immediately or simply stop using market orders to enter.

As far as trailing, I have suggested before that you simply take a portion of your trade off the table. You can leave your stop where it is, or move it to b/e. It takes some stress away.

I lost about 5-6 times today but managed to make my 2% goal. I simply held the last trade until it was 1R ahead of all the losses.

Keep us posted!

Anonymous said...

HAHA Yeah, funny AND true!!!

MarcoA said...

FX, you're in the wars lately, but this too shall pass. Your honest exposition of the woes involved is a great service to all.

FX said...

Thanks to all, as marcoa said I'm in war :D
Having this after nice profitable start of day is a bitch.
My intention with this blog is show all, the path of starting trader whatever happen bust or boom.

There is not much to say. Crazy year. I had for first nice positive months but also ugly days that wipe me out.
If nothing this blog is showing why stops are important and how does it look when people struggle not honoring them.

Now I don't know what to say, yesterday I was positive that I will honor stops and that all of this is behind me. How I turned to the dark side in a second. I'm little demoralized right now.

Anonymous said...

just keep going, boom or bust.

FX said...

haha