AP's Trading Journal

[anastrader]

Hello everyone, first time on babypips forums!

Background info: 22 y/o, living in Chicago, IL. Been learning Forex specifically for the past 3-4 months (back-testing and forward-testing on and off in that time frame).

I’ve gotten good winners and have gotten consecutive losers that draw my account right back down (if not lower to where I’ve started).

The goal is to become consistently profitable and I hope to take all of you guys on my journey.

As for strategy I’m still learning and I will probably tweak my strategy here and there as I learn, but for the most part it’s overall smart money concepts with a bit of ICT flavoring in them .

[steve369]

Welcome aboard. Looking forward to following your journal. Consistency will be improved by focusing on trading selection and following the same process for every trade.

Best of luck.

[anastrader]

Higher TF view:

Trade Taken.

[anastrader]

Trade taken.

Lower TF view:

Reasoning behind it:
I entered off the retracement to fill the FVG to take the market higher. You can see that the market respected that FVG and filled it, almost down to the micro-pip.

My target is right below previous highs (accounting for spread and all that).

From my higher TF view you can see that there’s actually another FVG in the discount zone which needs to get filled. I anticipate that if this uptrend is broken we can see a retracement down to that FVG, fill it, then take it higher.

[anastrader]

Reasoning I’m bullish (at-least for the short-term):

As you can see from the 4H view there’s a period of consolidation which broke down causing a ChoCH and a FVG that I’m anticipating will get filled before taking the market lower. There’s high levels of liquidity between that main FVG which serves as a catalyst to drive the market towards that position. We could definitely be seeing a few retracements before the market overall gets to that position.

[anastrader]

Update on this trade:

Moving SL to BE and taking partials off after significant BoS, letting the trade run risk-free at this point.

[anastrader]

Stopped out.

Ended the trade with profit still.

On to the next

[Jason2782]

Welcome. I like what I see. Good charts with some insights into the trades. I look forward to updates

[anastrader]

Thanks for your feedback! Let me know if you have any suggestions or anything of that sort

[anastrader]

Looking to enter aggressively at this POI.

Confluences:
Premium pricing.

Reasoning:
We saw a big impulsive break downwards to break a previous strong level of support.

[anastrader]

[anastrader]

It’s currently the weekend so I’m back-testing NAS100 today.

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First off you can see that impulsive move downwards. Overall my sentiment to take a trade will be to short since it broke a lot of structure from the impulsive move.

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Zooming in to the current price action:

I’m looking at this unmitigated supply zone. Currently, price action wicked into it and is showing momentum downwards which is favoring my bias.

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Zooming in a little bit more to analyze the structure and see if it lines up with my confluences (candlesticks, market structure & order-flow):

Let’s look at the first sign of weakness occurring in Area 1. There were lots of candles which resemble bearish pin-bars which is an indicator of bearishness especially if seen at the top of an up-trend.

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Looking into another area:

Bearish engulfing candle in Area 2, another sign of weakness but I’m still not entering because I like to enter off a rejection from a supply zone. There will be more opportunities I just had to be patient and let the candlesticks play out.

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Area 3:

Believe it or not, but this sign of strength is good because this shows that the market’s going to rally slightly and possibly find another place to mitigate off of. When seeing this sign of strength I look closer at the chart because I know that my entry is probably going to be coming soon.

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Last but not least, I saw that there was a ton of liquidity being engineered below asia lows which was cause for it to be taken. I saw an OB and an impulsive move down that broke structure and took liquidity from asia lows right before rallying back up.

Initially I had missed my entry point (which was to take the liquidity and ride the wave down) but it came back up and so I had set a sell limit (agressive entry) at the bottom of the OB and the stop loss at some previously engineered highs.

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This was the trade I took and the final result of it.

Final risk to reward was 1:4 RR

[anastrader]

Small loss today.

I entered into the trade based on market structure. I had actually put a sell-stop entry and the price movement is actually kind of funny:

It did create some liquidity in the process resting above those highs:

I’m still overall bearish. I think we could see a run of liquidity first before the price reverses and goes down in the direction I intended it to.

[anastrader]

Took two L’s on NAS.

I entered based off confluences I was seeing. It seemed like a overall high probability trade and it seems that the only reason I really got stopped was for a run for liquidity.

I do have a successful trade on EU running:

I’m going to probably take partials at the short-term high just left to the current point on the chart.

I might also move my SL to BE at that point and let the trade run.

I want to experiment with trailing my stop loss and letting it run downwards because of what happened to my previous trade on AU:

I think that if I can properly trail my stop-loss and let the trade run then I’ll be able to secure some better profits.

[anastrader]

Been a minute since I’ve been able to trade due to finals and the overall semester winding down. Overall, I was watching a potential set-up. I didn’t really get to enter in on it but I still want to reflect on the trade and post the analysis.

It’s good to see that despite me not entering into the trade that it would’ve still gone in my direction:

My overall reasoning behind this was that I saw how there was a large expansion on GJ and I wanted to catch the reversal / down move. My entry point was off the FVG (it was to mitigate an imbalance). It basically mitigated it but I think I was like a pip off from entering so that’s unfortunate.

Overall though I’m happy that I had the overall idea correct and the trade went in my direction.

1.41 RR

[anastrader]

Finally finished my finals and ended my semester.

Took a trade today on EU:

Direction: Short

End result: Got stopped out (seems like a stop-hunt almost)

Reasoning for trade:
First I looked at the weekly timeframe:

Noticed that overall it’s just very bearish.

Next I went into the daily:

Same story, very bearish. I went intraday from here and found this area:

A series of lower highs. I wanted to get in on the latest lower high to take the market downwards.

Here’s the final outlook with my chart marked up a bit detailing why I chose my entries and my targets:

[anastrader]

Took a trade on NAS:

So far:

TP 1 Hit, moving SL to BE and letting it ride risk free to TP 2 and 3.

Reasoning: Overall on the HTF I saw how bearish NAS is, I wanted to get in on downwards move. Waited for NAS to go into my POI and waited for confirmation before I entered.

There were two other POI’s I was watching (just to the left). I never entered in a trade on those because I never got the confirmation of bearish order-flow. If I did enter blindly (or off an aggressive entry) I would’ve been stopped out both times.

[anastrader]

Final trade outcome:

Hit TP 1, profits secured and then hit SL for BE. Overall trade ended in green.

[anastrader]

Took another trade on NAS.

Position: Long

Confluences: 1H OB:

Was a zone within a zone

I entered based off this:

The reddish rectangle was an impulsive move upwards on M1. I set my entry point to go long on the .5 fib retracement on that candle.

Stop loss was set just below the overall 1H POI that I highlighted (I could’ve maybe gotten a better entry had I waited for some additional confirmation, but I wanted to work on something else so I just set my limit entry and left it).

I’m targeting liquidity resting above previous highs. My overall sentiment for NAS is bearish though and currently I’m trading counter-trend.

I’ve hit my TP 1 target so I took some profits and managed my trade by setting my SL to BE now. I’ve got an alert set for when it reaches TP2 and will trail my SL after that point till it reaches my TP3.