Novice trading journal - journey to consistency

Hi there,

I’m new to this forum and would like to start off by saying that the forum is great and I have learnt allot from it.

I have read tymens thread about trading and did some work on it. By that I mean I gathered the information about naked trading that I find useful. This is the first 25 pages.
By this I also would like to point out that I trade naked. (Only wear socks :cool:)

Obviously I am a novice and I am not profitable. I am aware of my ignorance of trading and therefore seek knowledge.
While other have an approach of bombarding the forum with questions, I will try to keep a journal.

The idea behind this journal is that I will post my trades, winner and losers (mostly losers :D) and let other members shed some light on what I did wrong/what I could have done instead.

The trades will look something like this:

  1. Look at 4HR chart and identify trend

  2. 1HR chart is the “maintenance” chart which will be where I decide to take the trade and when I decide to exit.

  3. 15/5MIN chart is the “timing” chart where I will try to find pin-point entries to my trades.

Now, what I will be looking at is S/R-zones and round number support and resistance. By round number I mean 1.3600, 1.3650 etc… 00 & 50’s.
Oh and almost forgot, lets only choose ONE CURRENCY PAIR. I pick EURUSD.

Obviously the trading will be trying to catch trends and retracement, and therefore we need the traders best friend: TRENDLINE.
Add candlesticks to this and we are set to go(lose?).

Now, I will most likely find more things I would like to add. But this is enough for now.

And to my friend Magnus(Honorary FX-Member): Allot of this is what I will be asking you about, and what I don’t understand, so keep an eye open here to understand what all the jibber-jabber I talk about is. :o

So, the conclusion is that I am trying to create a thread where many novices (including me) will learn thru VISUALISATION and trial & error.

Let the journey begin!

Thanks for starting this, you sound like how I trade. I look forward to what you see.

from a right brainer

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test | Perth Now

Good initiative.

I’ll be following along!

Subscribed! Looking forward to this! I’m in the same boat as you haha.

Okay so here is my first trade, and the reasoning behind it.

On 4HR chart we have an clear uptrend, strong trending market, however, we have approx 300 pips with no good retracement on the 4HR.

On the 1 hr chart we have(where I wrote candlesticks) shooting stars, hanging man (twice) and a spinning top, also they are all in the same “price area” as the shooting star so they are more or less inside candles.

My reasoning behind this is that the market will retrace a couple of pips down to last S/R being 1.3850. Also stated before that my exits are at round numbers.

Stop loss is 2 pips higher than shooting star so 1,3950.
Take profit is 1,3850.
Entry is 1,3928.
This calculation gives us a stop loss of 32 pips and take profit of 78 pips.

2,44:1 profit ratio. Which is above ‘legal’ 1:1 so I will take the trade. :smiley:

The market will either hit my stop-loss or take profit, no bull****ting in between.
Let’s see how it goes and talk to you tomorrow in the morning, sleep tight!:slight_smile:



looking forward to the results!

Allright so it was late yesterday and I forgot to thank everyone for the encouragements. I also look forward to learning from my mistakes.

Now, I deliberately took this trade counter trend yesterday to show you how I tend to “think” and how I “see” trend.

Obviously I was wrong. In hindsight we see that I was partly correct, we had a small retracement of about 40 pips from the high of the candles after the shooting star.
Many of you would have lowered your stop-loss to breakeven but this is not in my interest(not yet) as price can spike up. I’d rather wait for the price to either hit my sl or tp.

Now perhaps some more experienced traders could help me out here, we all know that we shouldn’t trade counter-trend in strong trending markets. But at some place there will/have to come a retracement, and when it gives clear signals; like the one yesterday, how should we trade it?

Also, looking at the picture I have attached a 1HR chart as you see. The blue trendline is derived from the 4HR chart. This is the “main” trendline.
Wouldn’t there be, at some point, a retracement back to this trendline? As the trendline is starting to be inefficient.

In the picture you see the big blue trendline(4HR). This trendline is inefficient to the ongoing price action.
However, we can draw another trendline to the 1HR price action. Which as you see, it is the red one. :smiley:

Is this possible to do? By that I mean to trade this to cath the move down to the blue “main” trendline?
Also the market is making a spinning top, a bearish engulfing and two other spinning tops now.
Isn’t this a signal? Wouldn’t you take this trade?

Looking forward to many ideas.


You can’t predict a retracement, well you can, you can predict anything, but you might get it wrong. Those candles can influence you but I wouldn’t trade them just on their own. Look to see if they coincide with a resistance area. I was just zoomed out on that chart looking for S/R areas and it’s hard for me to pick them out. I guess I’m not real good at that yet. I wouldn’t have counter trend traded that. Sometimes I do but not on that strong of a trend. What I would do is wait. Wait for a retrace and then trade long with the trend. I wouldn’t trade EU until a better setup appears… in the meantime while waiting… I would look at other pairs for a better setup. Well, that’s just me and I’m still a noob so take it with a grain or two of salt

Thanks for your reply.

Ok so let’s go thru this. The way I tend to think about candlesticks (which obviously is wrong since I am negative) is that they react as much to round numbers as they do support and resistance. This because round numbers are psychological S/R zones.
That’s why I took that trade, you see that the high of the shooting star was just at round number 1,3950. But guess I was wrong.

[I]Sometimes I do but not on that strong of a trend. [/I]
Aha! This was something I was looking for, because I do not use this as a variable when executing my trade.
Could you define your definition of “strong trend”. What makes this a strong trend?

The reason I took the trade yesterday is because the pattern was just like todays pattern. The blue main trendline is inefficient and therefore price action should go down to it.
So what makes this a “strong trend” - it is clearly inefficient?

Ok this was a good advice, wait for the retracement and trade with the trend.
May I ask you, on yesterdays price action after the retracement - where would you have gone long?

Thank you very much and sorry for the million questions.:slight_smile:

“Someone, once reminded me that I once said a retracement will come. Now it seems it is here.”

No just joking is not as if I called the retracement. But let’s walk thru this.
In my last post I had two trendlines. One big for the major trend (blue) and one smaller which is for the 1HR price action (red).

Now, if a trendline breaks that indicates a change in trend, not necessarily a FULL change in trend but most likely to a small retracement, consolidation or even a downtrend in the “home” timeframe. That is, being a downtrend @ 15/30/1hr chart and only a retracement in the 4HR chart.

I talked about trading retracement back to the blue main line, but this thing is waaaay to big to trade with proper money management. OR, AM I WRONG HERE?

This is one type of situation where we noobies trade wrong and get out with a loss. To you pro traders:
Would you trade this? Is this the way to think about retracements?
Would you jump right on a break of the trendline?


only have time for a short reply right now. just looking at EU, it made a high for the day and is headed down close to the low that it made earlier. If I see it slow down and start to consolidate here then I may look at this as a place to enter a buy. If you draw a trend line from Tuesday’s low through Wednesday’s low you’ll see price is hitting that line right now and having a little difficulty staying below the line. Looks like a bit of a long bottom wick on the current hourly candle… you can see that on the 15M also

Also it’s hitting yeserday’s high rigt now and that can be a support area if it fails to stay below that and starts heading back above 1.3946 I would think it has more upside potential… but if it stays below that then I might start thinking that’s resistance and look for some downside potential… Just trying to ‘read’ the chart and as usual caveat emptor, I’m no expert!

Thanks for the respond. I think it will continue down a bit more. Did some experimenting to the principle that "after a big candle (up/down) at the top or bottom the market will most likely continue in that direction.
That candle was quite big and at the top so lets see.

However it is as you state, if this 1HR bar turns out to be a hammer and the market starts making inside candles and consolidate. I’m buying aswell…
Let’s see.

one other thing I look at is a daily chart with bars instead of candles and with a 2sma set to the high and a 2sma set to the low to form a tunnel. if you look at the daily chart you can really see that uptrend that’s been going on for about 18 days… in an uptrend I like to look for price to be near the bottom sma to go long, and vice versa for a downtrend.

On the 15m you can see it doing some consolidation right there at yesterdays high. Resistance becomes support? We shall see…

That sounds good and hope it works well for you, but I’d rather stay away from indicators. Don’t even like the word. :eek:

Now there is something I’ve always thought about, it is consolidations.
Do people really see consoldations as accumulation/distribution patterns? And also, do you “play patterns” on them? Like symmetrical triangle etc. to know the direction, or do you just wait for the breakout?

Btw, seems like we’re heading for the blue main trendline. I should’ve taken the trade :D:(

Well it looks like it wen’t on through yesterday’s high after pausing just a little and headed down. looks like it’s testing some more support about .3860? If I have them set correctly… looks like that is also near daily pivot and 38% fib, but these are things I’m just starting to get familiar with after trying a bunch of other stuff so… who knows…
anyway maybe this is a good area for a bounce back up? well that’s what I thought before and turned out wrong.

edit:
Also looks like average daily rainge has been reached as well as afternoon NYC when things slow down so maybe not a lot more down movement today?

I would be tempted to buy right about now but goining into NFP tomorrow I’m still waiting util next week to do any trading.

Do you set out your SR-areas? I just look at the last reaction point.
You see that the last one was the confluence of candles at .3850 yesterday.
Also I tend to look at round numbers as SR so price action was 5 pips shy from the round number support.

Let’s see what we can make of this. Either a retracement and a continued move down. Or, consolidation and continuation of trend.

Btw. Now we also have an inside candle!

I entered long at 1.38833, You can’t pick tops and bottoms but… maybe you can get close? I got in close to today’s low and will try to exit close to tomorrow’s high.

I guess you’d call that a tweezer bottom on the 1H chart. was up 40pips at one point but it’s come back down some, going to hold on to it overnight though and see what London does to it. Target is 1.3978, just short of the 00

if the uptrend continues then tomorrows daily bar should have a higher low and a higher high than today’s and my entry should be a good one.

we shall see… :slight_smile:

now watch it turn around and head south !

I’ve always had a goal of 20 pips a day, currently it’s plus 31. If I had any sense I’d close it now :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s great man! Really happy for you!! Hope the trade goes your way and you get to your T/P.

Now I was wondering, on WHAT did you enter the trade? Candlesticks or just area of support?
No, for a tweezers it takes the exact same high/low. This is more of a inside candle/harami. :slight_smile:

Yeah and as I said before, hope it turns out you way but I was wondering, why don’t you put the stop-loss at break even?

Good luck man, I’m sure you made the correct decision. The probabilities are on your side :slight_smile:

may not be a real tweezers, I’m not that good with official candle patterns but two long wicks showing that the sellers were having difficulty pushing lower and the buyers were pushing them back up and at a resistance area, things like that… I could close half position in profit and move stop to BE but just figured I’d let it all ride…

If I jump in countertrend, I’m more likely to move my stop up to B/E a lot sooner than later.

If I’m with the current long term trend, I give it more rein.