I’m going to write a journal of my trades, more as a reminder to myself of the mistakes I’ve made, but feel free to share any feedback or comments that you have. I’m not going to put much about what or why I did, but mostly I’m looking to follow a trend on longer time frames. My S/L and T/P is not honed, I’m looking to refine that as I learn from my mistakes. Position sizes are small until I build up more confidence that I will get the direction right more often.
I have a myfxbook account, but can’t share it as they won’t verify any MT5 accounts until they fix a bug where results can be manipulated. I’ll edit this post when it becomes verified.
I’ll picture post and edit until I can link… updated 2/7/2019
EURUSD - Short
Profit - £1.06
Pair was on a pullback during a fairly sharp downtrend. Decided to place the trade and it carried on nicely as I wanted. Some bad EU data was good for my trade. Fed decision was due, and trade was up ~£8. I foolishly decided to leave it open betting on the EU situation to be a greater effect. Lesson learned, don’t leave trades open with major news as it wiped out most of the profit.
AUDNZD short
profit - £0.69
The pair were in a downtrend and I wanted some of the action. Again, went in the right direction quickly, but pulled back. I paniced and got out of the trade whilst still in profit.
note, I’m back in the trade hoping that the gold bulls rubs off on the NZD combined with AUD weakness
CHFJPY short
Profit - £3.56
Fairly happy with this trade. Got into it based on a downtrend and reading through some technical analysis. TP was set at virtually the low point before it turned around (after the fed rate decision and statements).
Hey Chester.
Cool concept and keen to follow you.
What is your strategy, are you following a rules based approach?
I always focus on risk to reward trading.
Good luck
EURAUD long
Loss - £5.85
Lots of people stating EUR would rebound (despite no fundamental reason that I can tell) and AUD weakness. It was on a downtrend, so bet on the EUR recovery that didn’t happen. Lesson learned, don’t believe everything you read on a beginners forum.
NZDJPY long
Profit - £2.23
This was a more short term trade, taken from a strategy I used to use and was often successful. Basically wake up and see which currency is strongest, which is weakest and trade that. Tighter TP and SL positions, but it worked well today
XTIUSD (crude oil) long
Profit £7.49
It’s on an uptrend and consensus is that oil will keep on rising. I wanted to take a small position trade as per my testing of this strategy, but didn’t realise that the minimum position size is 0.5 lots. So I just waited until the trade was in profit and manually closed it because it’s too much risk for what I’m wanting to test right now. Main mistake was that I put the trade when it was high rather than waiting for a pull back, this was because I had to leave for work and didn’t have time to watch and wait. Not a huge problem, but could have had more profit and less risk by waiting. Won’t put a chart, because it’s the risk and large position size why I closed it
I don’t have a very complicated strategy, the main one I use is to find a chart, preferably 4H+ with a trend, draw support and resistance lines and try to enter a trade when it’s heading towards one of them. Like I said, this is a new strategy for me, so it will be as much about me learning as anything else.
A strategy I used often before was larger position sizes and short term trades, a few hours following the daily strong and weak currencies, but this is too time intensive for checking in case anything means it swings the wrong way. I’d rather get out before the SL if news or something turns a trade around, so it was taking too much time.
I have an open trade, that is probably stupid, but it’s long GBP with a positive swap rate, so it’s sort of a position trade in the hope that it turns around. Either way, a large drop in the pound won’t wipe me out, so it’s staying as a position trade. I might get out of it if it comes into profit before the conservative leader is decided.
Oh and I should add, my risk is fairly small. Typically less than 5% (or even 1%), but since I’m mostly trying to follow fairly strong trends, I’m hoping that I’ll not see too many losers, just small winners when I don’t time it correctly
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Focusing on accuracy is one of the biggest traps in trading. Instead, I focus on average win lose and ensuring my draw down isn’t silly.
Great shout on the 5% risk. Slow and steady wins the race!
Good luck!
Can you explain what you mean by that Jon. Being attached to
a specific outcome? or the feeling of certainty that the market
will behave in a predictable way - with no flexibility nor recourse
when it decides to do the opposite?
Can you give an example of how a trader can fall into the
accuracy trap?
Cheers
GBPTRY short
loss £6.59
I’d noticed that just before midnight, there’s usually a big bear candle on the pair as people try to trade the swap. I decided to get in before this so I could get a few pips before the server shut down. I also thought that being triple swap night, it could work out profitable from the swap if I got stuck in it. The big bear candle formed, but the spread was ridiculous. The ask price didn’t budge at all, so I couldn’t close it. I left a SL on around an area I thought it would be bad if it broke through and eventually it did. Won’t be making that mistake again…
AUDCHF long
profit £0.02
Took a bad entry point trying to jump onto a turnaround in the pair, it’d been at record lows and thought it broke up. Trade never really got going and I got out ahead of the AUD interest rate decision because I don’t want to get caught by that again.
USDCHF long
profit £1.66
After hearing the political comments, I wanted to take this trade at market open, but was busy so took it first thing in the morning when the uptrend was confirmed. Went up nicely then suddenly turned around so got out whilst still profit in there.
GBPAUD short
profit £3.09
Following my old strategy of getting onto a daily trend early on, but with a much smaller position than I would have used in the past. No point blowing my slow and steady progress with one mistake…
One thing I’ve found is that I’m terrible at keeping logs of what I’m doing. Thought I’d revive this thread to give an update on progress. Since starting this account about 9 months ago, it’s gone fairly well. Trading a mixture of strategies that have all been positive overall.
Long term strategy is to trade using a stochastic and that has been overall up. This strategy is on hold whilst the world settles down.
Another strategy is trading a sort of fundamentals based on big events (brexit, coronavirus). This has far fewer trades, but more certainty on the direction and much bigger moves.
Performance so far is way above what I expected, but the current black swan event is a large factor in that, it won’t be like this all the time.
If anybody is reading and trades on their phone and computer. Be very careful, the default lot size on the phone is big and if you happen to arse dial an order, you can get a huge loss. I’d be up about another 60% if that hadn’t happened 
And another flaw with it is that when I looked at a chart on my computer, then went to place an order on the phone later, it happened to be a different pair that looked similar, but the move went very different to the one I intended to be on. Basically, pay attention!
Today marks a special day for me. I am overall in profit. I have made enough profit on my current account to replace the account I blew very quickly when I first started trading.
I have to self isolate for the next week, so will have more time to spend trading and picking better entry points should I feel the desire to trade. Hopefully more of the same for this year:
I didn’t trade much during January(or the last couple of months of 2019) because of other commitments.
Start of trading seems to be seeing very big moves the last few weeks. Last night I happened to have some time about 10pm to take a look at the charts. Caught a lovely move down AUDJPY and got out just before it changed directions, so I went to sleep feeling pretty happy.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near done on these downward moves, particularly stocks. The consequences for the economy are going to be huge:
- Airlines have no customers, they’ll see huge losses, redundancies, unpaid leave and some will go bust without government support.
- Oil price is down and could well go further, oil companies profits drop.
- People are staying away from shops, restaurants, cinemas. Spending is way down.
This could cause thousands of small businesses to close down. Thousands of people losing their jobs or having unpaid leave. People not affording their rent or mortgage. No money to spend on luxuries.
This is all on top of the economy having not really recovered since 2008 anyway. More government debt is going to pile up keeping things going and we are going to be in a right mess. I’m thinking the FTSE100 could go down to 4000 before March is over. These are worrying times, not just because of what the virus can do, but the after effects could be another decade to recover from.
Realistic synopsis! B.Johnson has related 18 months of possible
virus. That is a mighty long time to place entire world population
under house arrest, and to seriously expect little more than a
blip on the world economy!!
but how safe do you think Broker’s are during this crisis? what
would cause them to fold ( with our money ) ?
