I went with Oanda. Some other brokers with better spreads but as I understand it Oanda is a large company and well funded. I don’t want to start making big money someday and be unable to withdraw. Also they have a lot of CFDs tradeable, I can trade the Nikkei Nifty CAC DAX FTSE Nasdaq SPX DOW oil gold silver etc. They also have Autochartist (I don’t use it but nice to have) and free webinars. While I use MT4 primarily I also use their FxTrade platform every now and then because of the feature that allows you to close all positions in a given asset/pair with just two clicks. I looked at Rakuten Australia (another large company Rakuten in Japan owns Viber) too but didn’t have many CFDs, though their spreads are fixed 90% of the time and a little cheaper than Oanda for a lot of majors. For minors and crosses though not so much.
GBP is now on rally mode, for those interested…
Good day today. Shorted Nasdaq again and went long oil. Made very good money on Nasdaq, lost some money in oil. Ended the day with $1,063, pretty good for 6 hours of trading. That brings my equity to $17,388. Only about $8K left to take me back to $25K, where I was before the whole DAX debacle. $5,133 for the week so far, about $1,280 per day.
Hoping for a good day tomorrow. Lots of chop and uncertainty in equities lately. Take care everyone.
Edit: It seems that had I kept the oil long trade on it would have made very good money. 8 lots average price around $62.90. Brent Crude hit 63.50, would have gotten 60 pips. Oh well. That’s the life of an intraday trader I guess. Things can turn suddenly on a bit of news.
@dpaterso asked me what changed in my trading on chat. I have been thinking about it for a while. The answer I think is that I now am more willing to close losing trades. Just really need to accept that a losing trade is a loser and cut it.
Compare this with my record before.
I HATED taking losses and would keep holding to positions. Most of the time that allowed me to get out at breakeven or smaller losses but then DAX came along and when I was wrong I was VERY VERY WRONG.
Too embarrassed to post the two week period where I screwed up in DAX. Maybe someday I will.
Just need to remind myself to take the loss when necessary, my account will be much healthier for it. Holding losing positions with no chance of a pullback takes up not just margin but more importantly time and attention. Take the loss and look for other opportunities. Have missed out on so many opportunities just holding onto losing positions, even if most of the time I was able to get out at breakeven.
Very very nice post.
We’ve all done it. Look at my Gold trade last year. Ended up being a very bad trade and for pretty much the same reasons i.e. had an almost unblemished record for four years or so at the time so did no want to tarnish such record with a loss. And the losses just got so big that one could not bring oneself to realize them so held on in hope. End result was the same. And eventually had to take the loss for the very same reason as you. So don’t beat yourself up. But maybe that is wrong i.e. I beat myself up for that stupid trade every single day to this day and maybe that keeps me from repeating the mistake.
Just made another $921 shorting DAX since London opened. That puts me at $6,055 for the week, another personal best. Equity is now at $18,309, only less than $7K remaining to make back everything I lost. That’s it for me probably today. Nothing stands out to me after scanning the charts. A few things look interesting (CADJPY short, GBPJPY short, USDJPY short perhaps) but I think I’ve made more than my quota for the week. Would not want to be overconfident and lose money.
Good luck everyone with your trades! I’m outta here, gonna find some alchohol and get wasted.
Edit: And of course after I get out DAX falls over 20 pips more. Ah well. I gotta stop watching the charts and get me some food and beer.
Edit: DAX hit my target price 65 pips more from where I closed whew what a wasted opportunity.
Edit: Made another $300 while drinking. Damn it, should have been $1000 had I held my Nasdaq shorts. Again, I should trust the system and hold on to positions after taking partial profits. $1,219 final tally yesterday, $18,607 equity. Only $6,393 left to get back to where I was before.
Thank you for posting it! this lessons are hard to swallow but they are much needed in order for us to grow in this business.
It is very interesting to follow your journal, keep up the good job!
what you do when you have a series of loosing trades?
I don’t know, I rarely lose more than two consecutive trades these days. In the past I would push on trading and be more selective with entries, but that didn’t really work. That’s not something I need to worry about these days with my 78% win rate, thankfully.
Gilas thank you so much . i am struggling hard these days with a series of losses and depressed now a days. Would you like to change the way i am thinking or any trader at this stage may think about market and trading??? what is your stop loss strategy? i had bad habit of widening my stop losses and consequently blowing account… Please guide me brother so that we may recover losses before the next EID that is EID UL AZHA
remember that you haven’t lost until you close the trade. So learn to manage the trades that go against you.
78% is really nice. I am currently backtesting my second strategy and the highest winrate thusfar is 61%. And that probably will be lower when I’m going to trade with real money.
How do you backtest a strategy? By hiding candles and guessing the next candle???
If you use trading view, you can use a replay tool which enables you to replay historic market movements from your chosen point.
Indeed as what @APCity mentioned. However with a free account you can only use the replay button on the 1 year timeframe.
I also recommend you to watch the following videos:
What indicators do you use in this strategy?
What’s funda bias?
What are the major rules of your system?
Can you elaborate on that?
r u english?