With talk of stricter regulations coming, I decided to open a live account, that way if some of the restrictions only apply to new accounts I might get around it, worst case scenario I’ll have to close the account when the new regulations start.
I’m not comfortable risking my planned starting balance yet so decided to open it with £100, I’ve spent way more than that on things that I’ve used once or twice then forgotten all about, I wouldn’t be happy, but I could loose it all and nothing bad would happen!
My first few trades were all very small, I made 8p, 5p and 8p, then stepped up slightly and made a whopping 95p! I was pleased that my first 4 trades all ended in profit, I carried on with roughly the same risk for a while, picking a place for my stop loss then adjusting the position size to make the stop loss around 30p, sometimes I would set a take profit around where I thought the price would go but most of the time I would just keep checking on it to see how it was doing.
I won some and lost some, the first 3 days I kept above my starting balance, another thing that I was rather pleased about! Then I stated looking for longer term trades, I thought I’d found a nice opportunity for a long trade on GBP/NZD, I got what I feel was a good entry, the stop loss was fairly close but I was confident it wouldn’t get hit, I set the lot size so the stop loss was £2, the maximum I was willing to risk (2% of starting balance), I left it to do it’s thing, came back to check on it about an hour later to find the price going against me, still a way off the stop so I was happy, then out of nowhere the price shot UP but my stop loss was triggered, I had no idea what happened at first, then I noticed the spread had jumped to 30 pips!! It was already a bigger spread than everything I had traded so far, but it was still less than 10 pips, so that’s how my stop was taken out and £2 gone in the blink of an eye (it was actually £2 and some change, more than I had set the stop to, but I understand why). I tried again, entry wasn’t quite as good as the first attempt and the stop was further away so position size was smaller to stick to £2 risk, the spread was around 17 pips, higher than I like but I was still confident the price was going to go up, shortly after the same thing happened, price dropped a bit then spread jumped back to 30 pips, turns out my calculations were wrong, I didn’t take into consideration the distance I would be from my intended entry because of the spread, another £2 gone!
After that I decided not to play with big spreads anymore! As it turns out the same thing would have happened again, seeing as the price dropped and the spread is currently 60 pips, even if I calculated for 30 pips I’m sure 60 pips would have hit it, so yeah, I’m keeping away from big spreads now!
I also missed out on a good win on AUD/CHF because I failed to notice the price hitting resistance 3 times then turned into a down trend, had I have taken it at or close to the resistance I would have made around £2.50, because I didn’t see what was happening it carried on falling to my stop, luckily I’d moved it to above break even after it had gone up so far so I still ended up with 11p profit.
I went back to smaller trades, around 30p stops, again I won some and lost some, in total I’ve won 12 and lost 12, problem being the losses started when the position size was bigger, so I lost more than I won, now I’m back to small position sizes the wins should go back to being bigger than the losses.
I’ve got a couple of extra days off work next week, I don’t go back until Thursday, so I’ll be spending Monday - Wednesday practicing!