Lesson Learnt: Never trade on my birthday!

hey everybody!

i have been posting on this forum quite awhile now and im guessing most of you are quite familiar with my posts.

for those of you who are not i have been trading full time since early this year and have gone from a £400 account to a £30k account using purely price action and reasonable money management.

however tuesday just gone, the 24th of november was my 19th birthday, this year i had an absolutely excellent time! i spent umpteen hours with my son, my girlfriend cooked me a great birthday meal and treated me in many other ways. the day was great and i was just on a natural high!

now i have my driving test in 2 weeks and was looking to treat myself to a nice BMW 116i sport once i’d passed, however the very same day a porsche carrerra had caught my eye and was slightly out of my price range. but it was my birthday and i wanted it! so being the impulsive person i can sometimes be i completely threw all money management out the window and went for the big ONE aiming to make a £20k profit to £50k. early hours wednesday morning after one hell of a day i began looking for my set-up, i saw the usd/chf trading near its yearly low, bouncing around a trendline and support lines i’d drawn up earlier and saw my opportunity to go long! i dived in full speed ahead! set my take profit and went asleep to wake up the next morning with mounting losses! i decided i’d wait for it to reverse, went asleep the following night to wake up to be margin called by literally a few pips! my account had gone from 30k to 15k in two nights. i then decided i’d keep a cool head, avoid revenge trading and leave trading for the rest of the week which frustrated me even more as it then soared over 250 pips to my original take profit! :@

after months and months of hard work which was beggining to pay off with consistant success allowing me to live quite comfortably untill the other night where i was knocked back three spaces!

i know i should learn from this and steadily build my account back up to that size just as i’ve done in the past but im so tempted to throw in a couple big trades to recoup my losses!

i feel lost all over again…

I made $400 dollars today… I hope it was not from you.

Anyway, I am sorry for your losses… Best wish and better luck next time.

What indicators did you use?

Out of interest how much is the insurance on a 911 for a new driver these days ?

when I was 23 I was quoted almost as much as the cost of the car !

If it’s any consolation, going from 400-30K, then down but still being up at 15K in less than a years time is still pretty impressive. :eek:

Don’t knock yourself up about it too much except to learn what not to do, get over it and rebuild…lol. Realize Sh1t happens. :wink:

Almost forgot to say…HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
:slight_smile:

Happy birthday
Try to forget about your loss and focus on the money you have made the revenge trade will make it worse for sure!! Next time you feel lucky take a trip to a casino. You will get it back.

Do you take money out of your account or just compound up? maybe you should take a percentage of your profit out and reinvest it some other way to protect it. I think a forex account is not the safest place for your life savings for allot of reasons.

If it’s any consolation, going from 400-30K, then down but still being up at 15K in less than a years time is still pretty impressive.

TRUE!!

I bet you’ll never make that mistake again though will you? Now that you have gotten that one out of the way, you’ll have a long sucessful career.

It’s like painting a house, first thing you need to do is go ahead and slap some paint on yourself to begin with, just to go ahead and get that part done so you can move on with the rest of the job.

MC’s parables… :smiley:

That is amazing not the loss of control but your 19 years old:eek:Congratulations on your birthday, wow i feel old on this board.I went to a stock software user group and felt like a young buck everybody there had there AARP card tucked in there wallet.:smiley: Here i think the average age is college level but that might be a good thing, iam feeling younger already.;)Back on topic!

judging from your other posts i’ve been taking the cash out of your pocket all year so no worries lol

i dont use indicators, i prefer a very discretionary trading style using just price action

hehe i didnt even get around to getting a quote for it, although i was quoted £8000 at first for the BMW but thanks to confused.com i’ve found a quote for £3800 from QUINN, never heard of them to be honest though lol

thanks sweetpip :slight_smile:

i compound most of my profit although i do enjoy spending it at times!

If anyone says that they haven’t done something similiar they would most likelly be lying although one or two come to mind that never seem to have fallen at all.

To be Nineteen and having found forex and doing as well as you are. I would give anything to have found this even 10 years ago. I am 50 by the way. I have been trading now for almost 3 years and I still now and then do something totally breaking all the rules. So I have built those mistakes into my trading Money Mangement. So it doesn’t become a fatal mistake anymore…

Look at it for what it was another great gift on your birthday . The one with the most value a lesson learned. You didn’t get hurt, your family and freinds still love you and your still healthy. Get your mind right before sitting down agian and follow your winning strategy to the tee. Even if you have to use a checklist. So many people after that size loss do bad things .

I wish you well your doing outstanding and you should go far…

                And Happy Birthday Ken


£400 to £15,000 in a year is good no matter what happend at the end or what you could have had.

Next year you now have a starting capital of £15,000 and if you can just do that again you could turn that into a cool half million or more:eek:

thanks alot ken :slight_smile:

i owe alot of the success i have had this year to yourself, tymen, phil, cas, rhodytrader and many more of the babypips community that have provided invaluable information over the months.

i have adopted the idea of using MA’s as floating support and resistance thanks to you

although i havent actually used tymen1’s candlestick method it was he who encouraged me to delve alot deeper into candle formations and use them very frequently in my own trading

many thanks to phil for consistantly reminding me how pivotal pure price action is in analysing the market using horizontal’s, trendlines and fibo’s

cas has constantly provided his invaluable opinions on the fundamental aspects of trading

rhodytrader has provided invaluable information on the how and why of market movements and its concepts

and many many more have contributed so much to this community!

so i’d like to give the whole babypips community especially those mentioned above a very big thank you!

hehe thats the plan :slight_smile:

I think the wonderful thing here is that you were able to stop yourself from revenge trading. That shows that you have good self control.

We all make mistakes, just make sure you learn from it and move on to the next trade.

Happy birthday a bit late!

hehe i guess so although if i had taken that revenge trade i’d be back at 30k lol

thanks :slight_smile:

profitforextrader, congrats on the birthday, you can drink legally now!! lol just playing, i just turned 20 last month.

I started forex about 1 month ago, and aspire to be a price action trader myself.

Since you said you trade with price action what are your set ups? I assume candlesticks plays a big part in your trading style?

also what [B]time frames[/B] do you use, and the one i want to know the most is what[B] floating MAs [/B]do you use

kewl

Happy belated birthday and sorry for your loss though I am sure you will make it back quickly. Think of it as a tuition payment in the University of Hard Knocks.

Funny, my 19th birthday finished 30 mins ago, and i am looking to compound up a nice account @ 1% a day,

Whats your strategy? indicators? timeframe?

Well being barely older than you I’ve only gone up and mostly down with multiple micro accounts going from a net 5k to ~0.8k on and off over the past 12 months on cfds and forex after constant relapses of similar to what you experienced and only just managed to stay NOT negative for a solid month for the first time (technically, would be the 2nd had I not started trading 30-40k lots on a 1k account in the final 4 days of an earlier month) while trading sort of full time if that helps your self esteem at all lol.

it actually pays more to be consistent than an all in win all or lose all approach. Although 400 to 15k is not bad by itself.

I’m taking this forex trading slowly but surely. A 5% gain a month will do. But if the market will give me a much higher return then I would be much happy.