After going live on the 12th October, thought I’d share how its gone for me. I have been trading using my eyes rather than indicators so looking at candlestick patterns, S+R lines and trends. I also traded the NickB 4H Scalping system which worked out once before taking a few losses so decided to go back to doing my own thing.
A few stats:
Trades taken = 100
Pips = 101.4
Average pips per trade = 1.01
Best trade = Long on GBP/USD on 3/11 (200.9 pips!)
Worst trade = Short on EUR/JPY on 02/12 (-131 pips, 2 entries :()
My account value history:
As you can see, the last few weeks have been appauling for me, not sure if its to do with people saying there’s less volatility over Christmas etc but it hasn’t been nice and I have spent quite a lot of time looking at what I’ve done in detail.
Main thing I’ve noticed is that my support/resistance trades didn’t do anywhere near as well as my candlestick patterns did up until 25th November so I decided to switch tactics and use just candlestick patterns which, in short, just hasn’t worked!
I’ve now started to look back at S+R Lines on the daily, then watch the price action around those areas. This is mainly because one of the trading strategys I really like is NickB’s and he has just recently released a new ebook which describes going with S+R Lines and I have been extremely tempted to buy his video course (If anyone has any reviews, would be great!) and it all seems to be based on this kind of way.
Anyway, as I seem to be rambling a bit here, I’ll just leave a few more thoughts…
I have definitely improved on my emotions, the first few weeks, if I lost a trade I would think to myself, “why am I doing this? I could just go out and get a normal job with (almost) guaranteed income :mad:” but now I can usually look back, see what went wrong and why and then move on
Still a way to go with emotions as if I have a good trade, I will always be looking to enter with more lots for the next trade as I have more confidence, although I usually just look at my trading journal at some of the losing trades and this levels my head out a bit.
Another thing is slight overtrading, for instance, last Monday and Tuesday were really bad for me so by Wednesday, I was in the (F*** it, give it a go) state of mind and realised this through the day so switched back to demo trading, put a few random trades on to suppress my trrading urge and stopped until the new week
Anyway, comments and suggestions on how to improve are most welcome