Hello Babypipsters,
This journal will be for me to track my own progress as well as my thoughts as I progress through my journey as a Forex trader. It will be available online for your viewing pleasure but please do not post in this thread. I will not be giving signals, offering trade advice, or debating about anything as I am not a proven profitable trader yet. Again, please do not post here. What you can do, however, is take a look at my open and close prices and match it up with your charts to see the type of drawdown I had to endure and if I closed my position too early, late, etc…
I started learning about Forex about 2 years ago. I had some disposable cash and no job so I went online to look for some type of investment with good returns. Somehow I ran across Forex and it brought me to babypips, where I learned about the markets from a couple mentors. I was dabbling in the stock market at the time as well, and 6 months later I had lost about 50,000, half in stocks, half in forex. It’s been over a year and I’m back at it again. I’m 3 months in trading with no mentor and feeling like I’m making progress.
Take a look at my pips this week. This is the most I’ve ever had at once so I’m excited.
Closed
Open
Unfortunately I’ve learned about risk management and these are all small lots. I’m aiming for approximately 5% equity growth over 400 pips. So this week I’ve gained about 20%, which is great for me. I don’t think these weeks will come often, but when they do, I’ll be sure to enjoy them.
Week 1 (Officially declaring this week week 1)
Week 1 Recap:
Pros: Made 4x my goal.
Cons: Left a lot of pips on the table. Was not able to pay as close attention to each pair as I preferred.
Lesson: Precision needs improvement. Reason for entry and exit needs to be concrete.
Notes: Still have 4 open positions with roughly -40 pips but I’m ok with keeping them open to see how they develop next week.
Goal:
400 Pips/week or ~4.75% a week (using USD pip values)
Week 2: Honesty and Professionalism
I think it’s important to be honest in a journal, even a public one. I fell back on old habits this week and successfully shorted the low across 6-7 pairs, 5 of which were highly correlated (JPY). Price moved against me, three days in a row, doubling my pip losses each day. It started on Sunday, when I was having a bad day. Nothing was going right in any area of life that day. Had I been smarter, I would have stayed away from the charts. But what happened already happened and there’s no need to talk about what if’s. Fact is I entered a bunch of positions without stop losses and this is the result.
On the Open positions pic, notice my second mistake. My lot sizes changed. After closing out my 1300 pips of losers, I ended up opening a larger position to try to make back what I lost, an amateur mistake right there. What’s worse, though, is at it’s peak, this large position was +115 pips while I was sitting at the computer and I didn’t close it. All my losses for the week had been made up by this one position. What I did was, I moved my target from the 100 pip mark to around 280. So I would have broken even. Now I’m stuck with these 5 positions and a big losing week.
There’s the honesty. Now the professionalism. I still don’t feel like I’m treating this like a business. I’ll enter if I want to. I’ll lose if I want to, and I won’t really care. It’s like a game to me that I don’t even care if I win or not. If I want to win, I really have to … want to win. That’s the best I can describe it. No more messing around.
Week 3:
I created a first draft of my trading plan, finally. It consists of 8 different market conditions and 3 types of entries so far. It’s a bit of a hassle to post every day’s market type and entries across all the pairs I’m trading here so it’s going to be offline on an excel sheet.
As for my profits this week, my GJ came in at a loss of 27 pips. and had an overall bad week. I’m unable to post it here because I closed the platform mid week and the closed position tab no longer shows the closed positions because it’s refreshed every time you re-open the software.
I think I’m going to discontinue this journal and do it all offline for now. When I become somewhat profitable I’ll post my myfxbook here. Thanks for viewing and good luck all!