Hello Everyone, I am Richard.
This thread is really for myself, however hopefully others will benefit. Let me explain:
I have been live trading for about 4 months, I had a practice account for a couple of weeks but I found that with no consequence, there was little to learn. That is just me. I have an inability to stay disciplined as a trader. I have on many occasions taken trades on impulse or made trades with very poor risk management in mind, gambles that make an otherwise profitable approach not so profitable.
Well I’ve had enough of it, and my solution is to keep a detailed journal for all to see of ALL trades that I make WHEN I make them - not after they are closed. I welcome all and any feedback and collaboration. Don’t be afraid to tell me I made a bad trade!
I think what I am going through is something that most traders battle at some point, and many never overcome. But i am determine to overcome this issue, and invite all who are experiencing it to join in.
As a side note, one thing that is non-existent in my approach, is my exit strategy. so any help in that area would be most appreciated. I have broke even on many trades which were up by as much as 50 pips just because of my inability to exit the trade. I would have a set exit, but when? some trades make 10 pips, others make 30, 40, 50 +.
I will start posting as soon as I make my next trade.
This is just a test to make sure i can upload charts properly from my mac.
This is also a good example of a good trade that I ended up losing money from.
OK, this trade has started nicely, I think I got in at a good price. the longer term PA is definitely favoring the downside, and has plenty of room to fall. However there has been a series of higher lows throughout today, but hasn’t been able to break the 79.30 resistance.
Now i face the challenge of exiting the trade at a good place, I’m going to place my TP at 78.80, the first support after the weekend. but we’ll see how that goes.
I’ve exited this trade prematurely perhaps, but it went much better than I was expecting to be honest, it charged down to the most recent support at 78.93, seems like a nice place to quit while ahead, I don’t think it can sustain falling at that speed. Plus the fact that it is in the middle of the dead-period is also a good reason to cut this trade short.
End result +28.3 pips.
This sell order just got hit, as I’m typing it is moving towards my trailing stop which would get me out at a little more than break even. otherwise i have my stop set at the support at 1.573.
Unfortunately I was not around when this order was triggered, but this was a losing trade. I went short at the lower dotted line and got out at the dotted line above. - 13 pips.
As you can see I will try to reenter at the next resistance just under 1.2740.
What charting software are you using?
I’ve been looking for something decent for my I-mac.
I trade off my Dell laptop, but would love to put my 24" screen to better use.
Unfortunately not too much for macs, I use the charting package that came with my broker Oanda, it’s actually the only one I have found that is compatible and it’s very basic, as a result I don’t use too many indicators but the real problem is on smaller time frames you can only get historical data from a day or two ago.
If you have an intel-based mac you could get windows, but it tends to be a little slow.
Good luck
Well, I thought keeping a journal would stop me from doing stupid things. Went out today and left my orders unattended with trailing stops. lost on all 4 that were hit. Very frustrating since on more than one occasion I could have gotten out with at least a small profit. Lesson learnt: Don’t leave orders unattended.
As I was out I wasn’t able to post them live so I’ve put a blue line where I got into the trade and an orange line where I was stopped out.
Another mistake I should point out is: I could have avoided one of these losses because as I’m sure most people are aware, AUDJPY and EURJPY are highly correlated. Wasn’t a whole lot of point in taking a short trade on both. I’ll have to pay a bit more attention to that in the future.
This Just got hit a minute ago, I tried moving my order higher but it got hit before I could. either way there’s definitely solid resistance in the 87.45/55 area.
Today was the worst day I’ve had in quite a while, I’ve got one short order left for AUDUSD at .9295 but it probably won’t get reached in the next hour or so, so i’ll call it a day.
EURGBP order just got hit here. Looking for around 15-20 pips here as i think the trend is heading upwards, i’ll move my stop to break even very quickly.
Since it was unable to break through the .9020 point i cut this short for a small 7 pip profit. Well that’s it for me this week, next week is a new week so good luck to all.
