January 2009. results

-209 pips
-21 %

What can I say? Maybe blow ups will be behind me someday.

Heat in the start

Not so nice trades, I would say hard ones because there was pain in the start of the trades. I was right so I made a profit, but I didn't want to take a loss if things didn't go my way. It's hard for me to judge should I stay or should I go :D when things don't go in my direction immediately. First one I shorted because gbp/jpy on third chart didn't look promising for going up. I got 0.7R on that one.
Later in eur/usd 0.9R win, I shorted because I expected that stop levels circled on 5min chart will be cleaned.

I'm not a trend trader yet. Before I was just reversal trader, now I'm also "break out in the direction of the trend" kind of trader. It would be much easier if I could trend trade but I'm not on that level yet. But for now it always was profitable to stay in my niche of competence. If I look at my new monthly target of 5R it's enough for achieving it and avoid trouble.
+16 full size pips

There were two very nice posts lately from bloggers that I read, so check them out if you missed them.


Proprietary Trader

Boogster

1R

I'm glad that I got exactly 1R on this trade. I don't remember when did I last time see green dot on my screen. It means that I was waiting until the target was hit. It was tempting to get out before it. I was thinking "what if it comes back and you are just 5 pips until the target". If it was the other side I'm sure I wouldn't get out 5 pips before stop is met. I would want then to move it for 5 pips. Well I got to commit to trading as correct as I can. Trade was about 1/3 of full size with 30 pips R.
I was thinking about some changes that I want to implement. First of all I will cut down my goals. They will be on small enough level 5R/month so I can take all the stops and still be able to meet my target. This 5R/month if I succeed, with elevating position size from month to month, will be good enough for yearly goal that I'm happy with. If I isolate my blow up/avoiding stop problems on trading related stuff thing is in too big goal. I wanted so much profit that I couldn't get it if I take the stops. Pure greed and frustration. If I take myself back to the ground I can agree that 5R would be enough and that I don't need to go for the moon. To put things in relation to before 5R will be as 50 full size pips before. There absolutely isn't guarantee how will my trading go with this new setup but that is step that I'm willing to take.
Also I will stop talking about full size, half size from next month and I will put initial R amounts for each trade, winner or loser.
+10 full size pips

Guess what?

I had another of my famous blow up days. Last one was three months ago, before that in August. This is still learning that trading as a business is consisted of profitable and losing trades. On the other hand trading as a gambling is consisted of winning trades and denying of taking a loss. I could see it last couple of days and I shrug it off. For me obviously big losses are only thing when I say stop and try to learn something.

This time I'm emotionally absolutely fine. I'm little out of balance, but I don't have suicidal thoughts regarding my trading career. I really don't want to dwell on details of it. Because I know myself I don't keep so much money in account, now about three monthly checks from my day job. Yesterday shaved quarter of that. Let's say that I was on trading seminar yesterday, so I hope that I learned something and that money spent will do me good in the future.

Now I have to concentrate on taking losses. I got to learn that. It's not important how will my trading go, how unprofitable it will be. I need to integrate part of taking of a loss as my second nature. Maybe I'm trying to match up with my blogosphere friends (I don't mean only you who comment here, but everyone) too hard. Maybe I need to take my learning and progress more slowly and not expect so much from me. I'm simply trying to jump steps and that can't be done.
So now I'm pretty much positive about it all because I got direction. I can't face problems until something radical hit me. Now it is and I find calm in it.

Use for metatrader profiles option

Today I played a little with metatrader profiles option. I made profile for each currency making visible all of the crosses with that currency on one screen. So I have USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CHF, AUD, CAD, NZD and METALS profile. I want to pay more attention on what is going at higher time frames. With dividing each currency with it's crosses I can more easily see what is going on with it. So I can catch better idea of strenght or weakenss and overall trend for each of them.




First I had to find metatrader client that have all the crosses which I have on Oanda. Fxpro was the one that I found. Then I opened all the crosses of one currency, arranged the layout on the screen and saved that profile. So for CHF I have usd/chf, eur/chf, gbp/chf and chf/jpy because those are available crosses on Oanda with CHF. There is no cad/chf available on Oanda so i didn't include it.



For all of you that are heavy on various indicator setups it's great tool to use and leave screen uncluttered. Metatrader is loaded with so much of custom indicators that you can find all over the net. You can save profile for TA setups like Murray math, Pivot points, Rainbow MA or any other setup that you like for each pair separately. Try imagine all of them one one screen. :D



You can easily navigate with your saved profiles with click on current profile name in the bottom of the screen in the status bar. Yo can also use hot keys Shift+F5 Previous Profile Ctrl+F5 Next Profile.

Good trade

I'm satisfied. I found nice little trade that played out perfectly. In a days when I can't find good scalps, because of crazy volatility and no follow through, this is as good as it gets. Positions in eur/usd and eur/jpy were 1/4 of full size each. I just took the scalp profit when I had it. I didn't even want to think what will happen next. Also those were reversal trades against main trend, so no place to fool around.
Reason for the trade is on third chart. Eur/jpy just had a run of 150 pips breaking on the way resistance level of this week and morning high. Now it was hitting into heavy supply zone from Monday. That is good enough place for some kind of a reaction.
+10 full size pips

Dark side

I really don't understand what do I want. I had 20 pips profit immediately after my first trade. I didn't take them. What do I want? 50? How come that 20 pips isn't enough? How come that I strained from scalping path looking for who knows what?

Than when finally market changed from long to short I close my position around b/e for a day. Than I went long and bring myself new pain. Addition to that I start to bottom fishing in gbp. Just crazy.

Also market is totally strange for me. Some new movements. I'm totally out of sync with good trading behavior and market is hard to trade.

+5 full size pips

As bad as it gets

For first I'm terrible at understanding what is going on in market and usually get it the wrong way. Add to that bad habits that popped out and you get a disaster. I averaged today, than averaged again with double size. Well I really got to take step back. If this market is to volatile for trading as before I got to make new plan. I certainly don't intend to average because it will sometimes work, like it did today, but if not I lose control and it cost me too much. Well it's better not to trade at all than to do bad things and bad trades. I got to leave that feeling of hurry and need to make profit behind me. I've got lucky today and that's all. I'm really not proud of how I handled things today. I just hope that I will stand still for as long as it takes. It's not necessary not to trade but at least understand that market is hard for me and that I don't get it quite well. I really don't. So I need that negative bias to stop being so reckless.
-7 pips

Random

Not very clever, market wasn't in the mode that I thought it was. +6

Bear's winter sleep is finally over

I had idea that was pure imagination but you got to start somewhere. When NFP didn't came as bad as expected and European currencies didn't break on new highs I expected that now we will see a reversal of longer term EU and UK strength last days. It was just from thin air so I didn't want to risk on that and get myself in trouble. So leverage on position was none, 1:1. This month my leverage for full size position is 10x, so this was ten times smaller trade. I figured if I lose 100 pips it's like ten and I can except that.
Well it started to go my way. But, I expected that gbp/usd will melt down so I was trading it and not eur/usd. My second idea was that eur/gbp will bounce again and go higher, reverse it's downtrend. It didn't play that way.
As you can see, I had clumsy first add-on on worst possible place. Well it's a little bit new for me to add on after 80 pips lol.
In the end I exit all three of them when eur/gbp didn't bounce strongly and things were enough extended that anything could happened. Well I was holding my fingers crossed for gbp/usd to lose 500 pips but it didn't, so half success. If I had those trades at exact time's in eur/usd I would get 50 pips more. Anyway, 108+27+10 for 14 full size pips.