Robust Feedback ! I love that. It’s a little like me and my wife. We don’t have arguments. We have open and candid exchanges regarding core priorities and beliefs.:30: Usually right after I tell her I’m golfing on Sunday !!
However poor your initial Entry, you were trading with the most likely market direction. Also, as you said, you have a day job, so are not around all the time, so missed a couple of opportunities to close the trade with a modest profit. Many other traders have made far worse mistakes, and been punished worse for them, myself included. More than once! So I just wanted to say hats off to you for doing this in public, as it were, and keeping us all updated with your thought process and emotions throughout.
Funny thing is ST, I STILL don’t believe my entry into this trade was a bad one. I looked at my charts, looked at my S/R and placed the trade because of that. Once I was IN the trade was the bad part and is when it all went pear shaped. My initial stop would have been hit if I had not moved it. Had the second stop been hit I would have lost almost 30% of my account purely on the hope price wouldn’t rise above a recent daily high. Which, as we all know, can easily happen.
It could be argued that price did eventually come back down in my favour, but had I been stopped out originally for 7 or 8% of my balance, and then taken the next 3 range moves, up to the high 1-44’s and over 1-45, which I honestly did see, I would have ended the week, assuming I made no other trades, over 100 pips up for the week. But I couldn’t take those trades because so much of my balance was tied up with that one trade. So that one trade effectively kept me out of the market for the entire week, except for taking 21 pips on Thursday from a tight stop trade.
But I still believe, as I say, the actual entry itself was ok, and I refuse to accept otherwise. I just made an arse of it afterwards, that’s all.
And as for doing it in public, well that’s sort of the reason for this thread in the first place. I originally started a blog to share the whole experience a beginner goes through, warts and all, because I know I’m not the only one out there going through it. But after I found this platform it just seemed like the natural place to share it all. It may bore some people and that’s fine. But others may just see their own concerns in here and stick around. Luckily I’ve had some good contributors, your good self included, to help it along.
This has been a great learning opportunity for many people now, yourself included. You put your hand up to it being a crappy trade, you took the criticism on the chin, and you do seem to have learned a lot from it, so overall for your future trading character I would say that it has been a positive experience. After all, if someone had offered, a month ago, to sell you the knowledge, personal insight and market feel you have gained for just 70 cents, you would have bitten their arm off!!
It HAS been a good learning curve. This one trade has taught me more than the victories that have brought me back up from $43 to $92. As for taking a bit of heckling, don’t worry about me ST, I’ve learned to deal with that in the toughest school of them all. You only need to be a cab driver in Glasgow for one weekend to learn you’d better grow a thick skin, and grow it bloody quickly if you’re going to survive;)
You said, yesterday, that you don’t have a system; you simply try to identify and trade Support and Resistance levels. Well, so do I, with a few other things thrown in. S&R can form the basis of a great system, so this whole period is invaluable to your trading career. Layer up the knowledge from that S&R foundation and you should find yourself in a very happy place at some point. Price Action and S&R are the basis of many successful traders’ approaches.
Again I think this is a mistake a lot of newcomers make, most definitely me included. There seems to be a perception that there “MUST” be more to it than this. Surely it HAS to be more complicated, the “EXPERTS” said so. So we go in search of all kinds of complicated nonsense and end up just confusing ourselves.
I must confess at the start of this thread I was rather dismissive of Demo accounts. I believe I may have said something like they teach you the nuts and bolts but nothing about the emotions. Well obviously you won’t feel the same emotion with pretend money as real money. But for testing strategies, support and resistance, testing if candlestick patterns really work they way they say they do, finding the best timeframe to work from, Demo accounts are FAR MORE important than I gave them credit for. They ARE your putting green, they ARE the driving range. That’s where you should iron out the mistakes, not on the live account. So for that I admit I was wrong, AGAIN !
And as for the happy place, I’ve now included you in the Vegas deal whether you like it or not. First one on this thread to a million takes the others to Vegas for the weekend !! I’m safe, I’ve got a long way to go 
One question, if I may, while I am rambling - how come you trade in USD while living in Scotland?
Nice work on your thread - keep doing what you are doing and learn from the odd backward step.
ST
When I first started reading about forex, one of the first things I read was that the Euro Dollar was the most traded pair in the world. Thus it had the most liquidity so had the most price action. Other pairs, the article noted, tended not to move as much, but could produce more violent moves when they did. So I guess that article more or less told me to trade Eur Dollar, which I still do mainly because I feel more comfortable with it.
Recently, you mat recall, I asked the question - Do you need to be familiar with a pair to trade them successfully or is all the information you need already there on the charts of ANY pair?
When I look at charts for other pairs, I never know if that is the price they normally sit around, or is it abnormally high or low. Now I realise I may well just have answered my own question by saying all you need to answer that is easily checked back on the charts. But I don’t know what it is, I just feel uncomfortable with other pairs.
I know I will need to get into other pairs, but I am unsure of correlating pairs. Which pair is the same as trading which pair? Which pair is the opposite of which pair? Any suggestions on good reading material on that subject would be appreciated.
Anyway, as usual, this has turned into another mega post so I’ll leave it there. The wife is brewing for one of those open and candid exchanges I spoke of earlier as she wants to take the laptop to bed to catch up with her pals on facebook so I’d better go.
It’s funny but I’ve enjoyed this week.( believe it or not ) Thanks to yunny1, Nikitafx, Buckscoder, SimonTemplar, akeakamai and all who have contributed this week. It’s been a journey for sure.
Be safe and happy this week everyone.
HoG;)
… today I took a trade that I was expecting in the 8H chart…