Years in the construction industry has left me taking medication ( epilepsy medication which is also a muscle relaxant: I don’t have epilepsy ) to help me with my back problems. last time my back went I couldn’t walk for nearly 3 months.
Mind you, that story is familiar to almost all construction industry workers at some point as they grow older ( I’m now touching 45 ).
The lovely Michelle ( Mrs HoG ) has dropped some heavy hints that she would like an iPad for Christmas. The latest one being, “I want an iPad for Christmas !” Pretty clear if you ask me. Trouble is she turns 40 just 4 days before Christmas and she says she would like "a surprise…or a running machine !"
OH WELL, I suppose we need a new coat hanger anyway !!
As far as the trading goes, I’ve had a very fortunate week so far. Starting balance for the week was $107.88 and current balance is now $130.56.
Trying my hardest now not to repeat mistakes of the past. Trying not to rush back in through over confidence. Trying to make sure I pick my entry points rather than just jumping in. Trying to pick points of Target and stop BEFORE the trades opens. Trying to manage my risk and money. Trying to use S&P levels, ( even let a few trades go just to see if they DID adhere to S&R levels ).
So I’m working a bit harder at this. I know there still will be losses, but trying to minimize their effect. We’ll see how it goes.
As I said in an earlier post, I feel the “novelty” of trading has worn off a bit now ( mainly due to having so many losers ) and I know that if I ever stand a chance of this becoming my primary source of income, I need to become a lot more sensible about it. I hope that doesn’t sound a bit “know it all” because I know I don’t, and I apologise if it does.
Anyway, if Coke is your choice, that’s up to you. Our Grand-fathers fought so we could make these choices. Obviously some grandfathers may be a little bit more disappointed than other grandfathers but hey, it’s a free country.
Incidentally, try a bag of frozen peas on your back for about twenty minutes. DON’T put heat remedies on it, they increase the swelling and therefore the pain. PUT COLD remedies on it. Trust me, been there a few times mate !!
Just make a list of your needs and what are you going to use the computer for… may be the best choice is a laptop but consider all your options…
I trade from two computers, one is a laptop the other is a desktop… the laptop is best if I have to move around but the desktop is more comfortable, I have it with all the ergonomics measures…
Situation, as I’m sure you’re all aware of, as I write is this.
S&P closed 2.79% down
Dow closed 2.48% down
Nasdaq closed 2.89% down
Futures as I write, are looking like this right now;
S&P 1.98% down
Dow 1.81% down
Nasdaq 2.23% down
4H Chart
4 Hour chart looks as though it’s failed at the daily S1 pivot, ( 1-3733 ) and possible next S2 is around 1-3618 ( although RSI showing oversold.
Daily Chart
Daily chart has bonced up from Daily/weekly support ( both approx same level interestingly enough ) . RSI pointing lower.
More down side to come ? Or a recovery day for tomorrow ? I’d probably guess lower for overnight but nothing clear yet, only going by indices right now. I’m going to watch them closely for an hour or two until closer to Asia session
Call me crazy, but I have a long running now. It’s definitely oversold on h4 plus we have massive demand imho at that level below 137. That’s why it didn’t dip too much.
Futures now pointing up slightly ( Dow down 0.01 %, S&P up 0.11%, Nas up 0.14%) may look for a little jump if things are still the same an hour or so from now.
Daily pivot S1 now down below 1-36 ( 1-3586 ish ) Dunno what to think right now. So I guess best trade is no trade til something stands out
According to my RSI (14 period) 1h, 4h, 8h and daily are now back above 30. Futures are holding at levels mentioned above and daily pivot is around 1-3730 ish. ( only +30 from where we are just now )
Can’t call you crazy as who does know where it’s going. I don’t see anything either way right now so I’ll sit this one out. Who knows, things may change my mind later but for now I’ll watch.
I know I keep mentioning futures, and I don’t know how much weight some people give them, but both CAC and DAX futures are pointing down over 5% right now. I may look to short any possible jump tonight rather looking for a long position. Nikkei also pointing down just now
Ha ha, I unfortunately got stopped out with my target at 13820 at 136ish b/e. SL was too chicken, but better nothing than a loss.
As I said yesterday, we had a cheap eur on h4, but still expensive on d1. Now it’s not that cheap anymore at h4, so I wouldn’t bet on anything actually. Even my bots said no today. The underlying longer term outlook is bullish, because of the interest rate, the short term outlook is rather bearish til medium ranging. On the other side it’s crawling inside a new upside channel. Oh and then it turned down at the 61 fibb. Imho all a little like scrambled eggs without fish or meat. Frankly, today it went 190 pips around already and that’s almost the atr 14 vola.
As I’ve read something from others, saying oh the markets are not anymore as the markets were to be (don’t know exactly who) I now had an enlightenment. No, not that I mean that I learned something new about markets in general. I knew that the markets are ever the same and so different every day at the same time. Just a contradiction which defines a market.
No, but I watched a lot of linear regression lines over the last dozen of months. That’s like living statistics. My conclusion is that price likes to oscillate around those average mean values and the reason why price is sometimes not doing anything is simply that it is locked up in different timeframes with opposite mean average lines. If price is locked up, it hardly does move and that’s the time I guess it’s better to do something else. The reason behind all that and explained via supply and demand is that people watch different timeframes and if some are bullish and some are bearish then it is like equilibrium. You may see some erratic little moves, but not something what we want to trade on.
Frankly, we all know that price is ranging 2/3 of the time (just to say a number) and I guess 1/2 of this time is just price doing almost nothing tradable. If you try, you get whipsawed like a bloody noob.
I agree with you, but my feel is that within the ranges PA is less reliable than it once was, and for the past month or two things have not played out with the consistency that they once did, even allowing for the fact that the markets are never totally predictable. I have dropped my higher timeframe trading and am now simply looking at the Hourly - it is working fine, but is not my preferred way to make money. The end of day trading I did is simply not paying out at the moment, whereas previously it was a cash cow, so I do think that something has changed. I hope that the market returns to its old normal soon, but am not particularly optimistic.
Personally, I have been looking to short EUR/AUD all day off the Hourly, but it just hasn’t given me anything I am happy with. Frustrating.
I thought I had it bad, Mrs Templar has her birthday three weeks after Christmas, always find that a pressure. Twice the ideas needed, as always seem to run out of time between Christmas mid-January so don’t get much shopping done. Plus we’re generally snowed in! Four days before Christmas, and a ‘significant’ birthday at that, I don’t envy you at all. Like her style with the specific hints… sounds like Michelle and Claire were separated at birth lol. Tough to manage specific requests and the need for a surprise element without heading for both the I-Shop and the jeweller with the credit card braced for impact… Just think how easy it will be next year when you are but months from the first million.
Nice work compounding up the account, percentage-wise that is great progress. Don’t put it all down to luck, far from it. A soldier needs a certain amount of luck to come through a war - doesn’t mean that that is all there is to it. So nice work, particularly at the moment. You might find that when the market calms you suddenly find it comparitively easy - train hard, fight easy and all that.
Certainly I can relate to what you say about the novelty wearing off. One thing that leaps out at me, going through my records, is that my frequency of trades has plummeted since my early days - and my profitability has increased dramatically (like when it was new and I overtraded I was not profitable lol); I do think that the novelty wearing off makes it easier not to overtrade, which must be a good thing.
Thank you for the tip on frozen peas - I tried one of those heat pads and it just didn’t help.
And don’t worry - I’m sure that your ancestors would be proud of you despite the Pepsi thing. Nobody’s perfect!
Well, I do not know on which rules you trade. I was just wondering a bit when you said you could make consistently 10% a month. I believe that, no question. I believe also that a very few can make more. On the other hand we have guys like him, who should know what he is talking about:
Just browse around a little at his website if you like. It is an eye opener, imho.
Plus then we have the average industry performance of anywhere between maybe 20% and 100% roi per year, but sometimes with huge drawdowns. Consistently maybe on average anywhere around 25% roi, which is already awesome if one can do that for 10 years. I guess eremarket anywhere in this forum jungle wrote that Ed Seykota made 40% consistently year after year and this guy is the crown jewel of traders.
So, that boils it down to my own conclusion that if you have sort of 10% roi per month, it likely won’t last for every month for say 10 years, if you are not extremely outstanding at it. I guess that just needs time. Maybe more than 5 years of trading to become that good. If ever. I am definitely not in this class right now after almost 2 years and I doubt I can do that anytime in my life.
So, maybe you get now through a passage what every trader goes through: That what you gained more in the early months above average, you pay back now with higher drawdown. Which at the end leads to rather I’d say healthy expectancies of your system.
In addition to that my backtesting of a dozen hundred bots shows me all the same. With the best bots, those are very few I can count with one hand, you can have a risk:reward ratio of maybe 1:3, speaking in drawdown:roi per year. That means if you go for a gain of 100%, you would have a drawdown of more than 30%. This with a very best bot, which is 100% accurate, down to the second of entering and closing orders, etc. and the rules always respecting without emotions or exceptions.
So, that’s then maybe the price you have to pay for, that your account can go through that drawdown. The positive thing is that if the drawdown comes to an end it is used to recover very fast and the best years usually come after a huge drawdown. Those huge drawdowns are btw. imho the reason that only a few traders succeed. Because many of em, particularly if they have no plan and no faith in their system, would give up before the recovery sets in.
I read a lot of books and made a ton of backtesting to come to my conclusion. That’s why I write sometimes that if somebody has extraordinarily gains it comes usually with the price to give all that back to the markets sooner or later. So, I think 100% roi is possible per year, but not with say a drawdown of just 10%. Maybe for a few years, but not over decades. That’s also why most traders imho blow their accounts. They may see a drawdown of just 10% with gains of 100%, then they screw the leverage up and when that drawdown comes, no account with that leverage will survive.
It’s a little say you would just have one bet. If you would just have one bet, 50% would win, even if they bet with high leverage. If they would stop then betting, you would hear a lot about people growing rich quick. On the other side, the equal number of ppl would just go broke. To leave the bet expenses away for a minute. Albeit we are all human beings and desires are infinite, so it will not often stop at one bet. And if you bet in a row, we all have to surrender to the mechanics of risk versus reward. The higher the edge is, the better that ratio can be, but as those highly successful traders show already, it is very unlikely to have more than say 40% roi a year like Ed Seykota had. If you have, it’s not likely to stay over decades.
Shorted GBP/USD @ 1-5938 looking for 40 pips down to 1-3890 area. Maybe not the most liquid time in the day to take that trade but the 4H right now looks ok for it. Tight stop so may just get taken out with a sudden bump in the road.
Since I have started 2 debates already this week, ( laptop or desk top, coke or pepsi ) I thought I’d make it a round three with a trading related question. Had this discussion recently with my brothr who dabbles a bit in equities.
Do you think there are professions which make their participants predisposed to be good/bad traders ?
I’ll give you my opinions so you get what I mean.
Personally I believe professional sports people, who have taken part in INDIVIDUAL sports, ie Golf, athletics, boxing ) would find it harder to succeed in trading FX. My logic for that is very very simple.
Professional sports people are conditioned to win, full stop. Surely the idea of accepting a loss ( in the form of being stopped out ) would be alien to them and harder to take.
All thoughts welcomed while the GBP/USD hangs around doing nothing at all.
Whoever can manage a business can make it in trading if he spends enough time and desire to learn. Why? Trading is imho just another business. You have a fx market and if you understand to manage a business around a shoe/computer/car/… market, why would that be different in the fx market? I think this is less a question if you have do with gambling or winners or losers. Consistently profitable traders manage it like a business. They know enough about risk and risk management, money management, having a sound plan at hand etc. etc.
So in my conclusion, every business manager has an advantage in trading if he can leave his emotions out (what professional managers also do).
Oh my, just scalped 7 pips on eurusd on a long from 13732. I knew some would buy at 132, but I guess there will be more demand around that 137ish figure?
