Well, I just need to throw some brain vomit out. It’s just staying up there and it needs to get out. Can’t really talk about it to no one else around me cause they all look at me and go " ohhh ok " in an understanding tone ( when you know they have no clue at all about anything you just mentionned ) after I’m done talking about my trading…And I learned that just getting rid of garbage on the brain helps “free” you, and it really does help. So here I go! And hey, maybe this will give you noobies stuff to think about when you actually go live with your trading.
Basically, this week was my first week in testing a new strategy live. I’m only investing 1 lot of micros while going through the motions. Next best thing to demo money is very very little money after all. But it wasn’t a very good week at all! Partly because I also started using a whole bunch of features I’d never really used on my trading platform. But from looking at my backtests, this was the worst week since April 2010, apart from 2 weeks where my strategy would have given me a loss…so it just HAD to be this week…oh well, plenty of good weeks to go ( it still WAS a profitable week…at least on paper…more on that below…)
I basically used to just sit in front of my computer, put a mental stop loss, and profit target, and patiently waited…but sitting for 12hrs in front of a screen when for 8 of those hours your trade barely moved 20 pips and has spent most of it’s time hovering in the 0-10 pip range, wasn’t how I wanted to spend my trading life.
Anyway, I was excited this week, since the previous week was spent doing a whole bunch of tests to determine how much my bid price should be in relation to my account capital to make sure I’m well protected from margin calls ( poor poor eyes…oh how many days & nights I’ve put you through looking at tiny numbers… ) . And those were the last tests that I was going to do, since I had spent the better part of my free time in the 2 previous weeks doing MORE tests ( I wanted to make really REALLY sure! ).
There was just one thing though, all my testing was done with MT4, but I’m trading with fxcm, so I’m using Marketscope for my charts since they only have MT4 available for their standard accounts. In the beginning, I was planning on using MT4 to show me trade setups, and only using my fxcm platform to make the orders, but I thought that this would just slow me down. So then I went on the hunt to look for custom indicators for fxcm, and I found one! the other one was a mix of EMAs so I just put the EMAs on there for now until the actual indicator is coded for the platform.
I ended up really liking the platform, I mean you can enter trades lighting fast, and I learned that I could put SL and TP all on there and I could close my computer down without fear of orders not being completed! NO MORE SITTING ALL DAY IN FRONT OF A SCREEN!! Boy was I relieved…Anyho. The big day arrives and trading starts…I’ll just give you the mistakes…it’ll be faster…
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Make sure you understand new indicators before actualy trading…Didn’t quite know how to recognize signals with the 2 EMAs…that cost me a couple of losses…Still can’t wait until that indicator is coded though…
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Make sure if you go from MT4 to another platform, that your indicators behave the same way. I put the same parameters into the custom indicator in my platform, yet it didn’t give me the same results as in MT4, but I only realized that after wondering why the hell I was getting so many false signals. Upon checking MT4, I realized the data wasn’t the same, so I tweaked the parameters to something different in my broker platform, and voila, now they are the same! Better friggin work properly now!
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Not watching spreads!! I actually didn’t think this would matter much. you know, I thought all spreads were around the area of 2-5 pips. But oh no, come Sunday opening, AFTER putting in my first trades, I realize that I had just bought a pair who’s spread was 20!! Even the majors were in the 7+ range…No more trading Sunday openings for this guy…the next mistake is related to this one in a way.
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Not putting SL and TP properly. Alright, so this was my first time using these, I admit. But according to my strategy, I’m looking for 30 pip gains, from candle opening. But what I was doing, was simply putting my TP at 30 pips. Now if the market moved fast, I wouldn’t get in the trade at openning price, so I kinda wasn’t listening to my strategy. " Well so what?!" you might say, " it’s just a couple pips, it would have most likely hit it anyway!" but this little pip difference there cost me a couple of trades. Trades that if I had put my TP properly, would have hit target. I also learned another thing, I learned about how there are 2 charts, for “ask” and “bid”, and how they’re different. I didn’t even know about these!! I noticed that the difference between the 2 could actually mean my TP was reached or not. So now when I put my SL and TP, I make sure I’m on the proper chart according to my trade!
Anyway, even though this week was “supposed” to be profitable, I made so many rookie mistakes that it turned out to be a looserrrrr. But, at least I didn’t loose that much money because it was all done in single micro lots. I did have a lot of winning trades though, just…more losses than wins… I’ll make that up in 2 hours work hehe. AND, most important is I learned from my mistakes, so next time I trade, things won’t be the same!
Oh yeah, an advice to rookies, keep a journal. This is actually how I came to realize where most of my losses were coming from. If not for that, I’d probably be pretty cluless and saying " WTF WENT WRONG?!!! DAMN FOREX!! YOU ARE THE DEVIL!! ". I just checked my account statements, and checked MT4 as well to see what I would have done in MT4, and what I did on my brokers platform that was different to realize my boo boos, or see that, that particular trade was indeed destined for a loss. Because you can’t win em all!
So all in all, this week wasn’t a total loss ( it was money wise…but …yeah… ). I did learn things and I will be a better trader for it next time. The thing that sucks is that I leave for work for 2 weeks at a remote location…so I can’t trade live there…Oh well…
Well I hope you were entertained by my extrmely long post and maybe learned a few things if you’re new to this whole thing as I am. I feel a lot better now that this is out there! Now I think I’m gonna go read the pip my system blog before sleepy time. Hope your week was more rewarding financially than mine was!