Keeping confidence

[KianMcGrath]

I am by no means a beginner nor a professional, I have come up with my own strategy and always used a fixed SL and TP. After back testing it proved pretty successful. I had a few good days and my 1st week was very profitable, nearly up 18% but I have no idea where it went wrong.

All of the time I stuck to the parameters of the strategy and like I previously said, used a fixed SL and TP. On a post the other day, somebody recommended I found my own SL and traded at the volume to meet my risk management, however after spending one trading dy with it I really didn’t feel comfortable so I reverted back to the fixed SL and TP.

Sometimes the markets just don’t move in the way I want, I accept that but for a strategy to consistently lose, I have had my confidence shaken in it.

Could anyone offer any advice or steps, even some motivation techniques, I want to stick to it as I consider it my baby that I have spent many days building up and testing (all manual)

Very much appreciated

[Treeny]

No strategy will win consistently, you just have to win more money than you lose over the long run.

You are 3.9% up there. That’s a good result over 2 weeks

[KianMcGrath]

Another update on my strategy:

I have now dipped below my initial margin, this would usually lead me to withdraw all my funds and have a break from trading but I wasn’t about to give into my emotions.

After these results, I had 3 options: either carry on with this strategy that I have little confidence in, change it slightly or completely scrap it and find a new one. I chose to change it slightly as I felt confident in it’s ability but maybe it was my trading mindset that didn’t work well with it.

So I previously used the 4hr timeframe to determine the trend and entered on the 30m, apologies for not disclosing much about the strategy itself. As of today, I used the 1D to determine the trend and entered on the 4hr, so clearly my trades have entered the swing trade duration and I feel more comfortable already even though all of my trading career I’ve been a day trader.

These are my open positions and as you can see all is well. In the future if I’m up to it I’ll continue to update on my journey.

If there are any comments please say, I love interacting with people

[Johnscott31]

@KianMcGrath

Are you trading this with real money? if so maybe better switch to demo and continue at it.

There is little worse than switching strategies when really all that was happening was a few losers

As a beginner a few losses is all it takes to dent your confidence and when this happens you are not thinking straight.

Which can lead to new problems.

At one point you did have confidence in your approach - so what changed?

When we do back tests and see a run of losers we think we have the courage to whether the storm when it comes to real money.

But in reality we often overestimate our emotional control

So trade demo with the same system - or reduce position size with real money so it’s so small it makes no difference.

When you stop bleeding money you’ll view things with more perspective

[KianMcGrath]

@Johnscott31

This is actually a demo account that I am testing it with, I set myself 3 months to make some degree of profit

[KianMcGrath]

Daily update:

As Myfxbook shows, I am back into the positive only by a slight margin. Coming into the evening for me (GMT), I do have 2 small positions open that I expect to run for a few more days, due the low volatility in the market. I hope that by the end of the week I could possibly be up by 3%

Over the weekend I really needed to improve my fundamental analysis, so that is what I did. I revised that chapter of the BabyPips course as well as looking at other websites.

Calendar | Forex Factory and Trading News & Analysis for Forex, Commodities and Indices (dailyfx.com) proved very helpful. Not to mention the BabyPips calender Forex Economic Calendar (babypips.com) which proved very helpful.

I also want to give credit to BabyPips for their weekly reviews as well as their forecasts, it really helps me and I’m sure many others, reinforce confidence when looking at macroeconomics.