Hello fellow traders. Welcome to my second trading journal.
Introduction:
I am in my early thirties, I have a wife and two kids and literally no time for anything anymore. I am trading for a little more than 3 years now. A part of my journey you can read up here Previous Journal. I have one big problem: bad discipline. I was profitable a few times but I had a bad day every now and then, where I didn’t follow my risk management, pulling me into red again. This is why I came up with my current strategy, which is still very early. I don’t know if it is going to work, so…lets just see ok?
My approach:
I am trading DAX/GER40. In the morning, usually around 7 or 8am, I open a 1h or 2h chart and look for one long entry and one short entry. I place my orders with a 1:1 RRR and leave them be. I repeat that every morning. This takes around 5 minutes at most. This fits my current situation with two young kids and a fulltime job. But it also fits my personality of an emotional unstable trader. There is nothing I can do wrong. Well except those entry points…but in the past this wasn’t much of a problem.
I risk 2% each trade. I trade live. I won’t tell you my account size. When you read through my last journal you will see that I tend to increase my account size pretty quickly. But telling you my current size means pressure for me. Sounds weird but…I just have to minimize every possible distraction. I even thought about quit babypips, but I think this is such a great place…even if I fail, there is someone that can learn from that.
Wishing you the best possible and purest good luck, but the combination of an unproven method and 3% position-sizing would honestly terrify me to the point of inability to trade.
Fingers firmly crossed that you prove me completely wrong (always possible!!).
My concept is somewhat proven. I trade it since the start of 2024. Just my approach of a fixed 1:1 RRR and fire and forget orders is fresh. I looked at my past data and saw that it would have been best to trade like that.
1:1 will work if you are at 75%. Risking 3% a trade would be considered bold, but then it all depends on the size of the account. Good luck on your trading and I hope you continue to have success with your method.
Thank you for your reply J! At this time my account size is small enough to be so bold. For me the % risk depends mainly on the win %. If this drops significantly over the long run, then I will reduce my % risk to account for the higher probability of a long losing streak.
Morning Dushimes. No I set two orders in the morning. One long and one short order. I do nothing over the day and let price do its thing. This means that in rare cases I will take two trades. This has happened once in demo forward testing.
I can’t tell. Only a few minutes, as I just look at price and scan for 1 level I want to short and 1 level I want to long.
Of course, the time for this babypips journal is not included in those 5 minutes I wrote above. Apart from that I only journal in a spreadsheet: date, direction, position size, win in €, win in points and R value. This doesn’t take long and can be done in 2-3 minutes at the end of the day, when kids are asleep or on the weekend, when everyone is still in bed.
As I only trade one instrument I don’t really need to follow up. I look at the results in the afternoon or evening from my phone. Again this is not included in those 5 minutes.
Looking at other time frames: I analyse and set my entry points on the 1h, 2h or even (like today) on a d1 chart. But when I look at my losers, I zoom in on the lower time frames like the 15m or 5m to see price action more clearly. I don’t bother looking at my winners.
Thank you for your interest. I appreciate that! Have a nice day dushimes!
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re interested in as little screen time as possible. Well, I’m the same way. That’s why I was asking. When you said ¨5 minutes¨, it was music to my ears.
Well, I can’t trade like him because I am to emotional. I don’t want to just blindly copy his trades. This is why I stopped watching him. It takes a lot of time to trade like he does and I don’t have that anymore.
Also I think that I learned enough from him. My strategy is basicly a version of his price action scalping where he agressively buys support or sells resistance. But for working people who don’t want to sit in front of the screen all day.
Have a nice evening Johnny!
Edit: Also I don’t like where he is going with his channel. He is promoting a little bit to much for me.
Yes, I don’t copy TH - he seems to have been going through a strange time recently. Had a flurry of messages on Telegram over the weekend saying he was packing in Telegram, and then as you mention he seems to be promoting his ‘new software’.
Hi @Worker_Bee , If you have tight schedule. You may consider having a good Expert Advisor.
The challenge to run an EA is Money Management (MM). From my experience, it’s easier to manage MM compare to other aspects ( disciple, emotion and mentality).
Best of luck to you! Maintaining a family and trading daily is quite a challenge, but you seem to have a hang of it. For starters, one trade per day. But the discipline is necessary, in order to succeed in both aspects of your life at the moment. I am in my late 20’s and have been trading since 7 years now. I went from aspiring lawyer to a full-time trader. The decision to transition from lawyering to trading came with the sacrifice of breaking myself down, and rebuilding myself to understand, appreciate and encapsulate risk management and tactful discipline. But even with all that conditioning, it took me three years before actually “finding my way.”
Now, having refined my methodology through dedicated research and experience, I eventually, converted my strategy into an Expert Advisor, that respects my trading plan. It fits into my schedule, because, for starters I don’t have to review it until end of week or month. Just 4 days or 1 day of each month on the charts.
Given your lifestyle, and challenge with discipline, perhaps you can attempt the same, get a programmer to code your strategy for your use, and ensure that it follows all risk and money management that you may overlook when trading manually, but fits well with your trading plan.
I’m replying to this cos your life seems to fit my profile, exactly!!
I think that you can have just a little peep into the future by examining the past. This has saved me lots of money. BACKTEST, BACKTEST, BACKTEST.
What I do now when I come up with any fancy strategy is that I put it in a strategy code and test it over some period on the pairs I wish to trade on. It lets me clearly see the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy over some period in the past and saves me time testing on demo and my money so I don’t go live immediately. I will highly recommend you backtest. It should tell you if the RR ratio is also good or bad.
What I did, is to backtest with market screenshots of which I took some myself and some I got from a trader I followed quite a while.
I am not good with coding a strategy etc. I once tried to backtest with pinescript in tradingview but than didn’t work out. Also I would have to buy data to backtest a longer period.
The big problem I have with automatic backtesting is that I regularly make judgement calls if price looks weird. I can’t teach that a computer.
This is one reason why EA’s are not for me. Another one is that I don’t want to use metatrader.
