So a couple of positions closed out in very small loss as expected, 0.06% and 0.16% loss.
One position closed on a small gain, 0.1% gain.
There’s still a couple that are slightly moving agaist me, not triggered my exit indicators yet.
Equally there’s a few positions moving in my favour slowly, pretty much kept my PNL. both open and closed quite flat since yesterday, but had a good clear out of positions and lots of available exposure and equity.
One new position open today, 1% on GBP/SGD Long.
Starting to build a decent backlog of trades, I’ll be taking regular snapshots of the stats to see what happens to my Win ratio and Profit factor the more trades under my belt.
This is now the first time we’ve dropped below 50% win rate, my demo (3 months) was 55% so it’ll be interesting to see how close we settle to that by the time 3 months comes around.
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Nothing exciting to report in the account front today. 1 position closed by TSL with a loss of 0.02%.
5 new positions opened tonight.
All other open positions bar 1 slowly moving back in my favour, 1 is edging closer to an exit but still not enough to bring on my exit indicator.
On a personal note, I have just swapped from night shift to day shift on the rig.
i finished early last night, but only managed 2 hours sleep so I’m absolutely shattered at this point.
There was no way i was going to remain awake another 2 hours, so have done my trades at 19:00 instead of 21:00, so 3 hours from candle close rather than the last hour.
Hopefully nothing will change too much in that time, as it will make things harder to decide if I made the correct moves as per my strategy if things on the daily change before it closes.
Anyway, take it easy guys, I’m off to sleep.
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Which pair hit the SL? What 5 did you open?
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I’m long EUR/USD since this morning. But I ran out of time before I could do anything else.
That’s good you got your work done before going to sleep! Good hustle!
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Tsl was EUR/HKD short. As I open 2 positions for each, the first half had bagged a 0.35% win, so with this half losing 0.02% the overall trade was still a win.
New positions were;
AUD/NZD Long 2%
CAD/HKD Long 1%
CHF/ZAR Short 1%
EUR/JPY Long 1%
ZAR/JPY Long 1%
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Wow! You went digging deep to find some of these! CAD/HKD?!?!
I’ll be doing some digging of my own soon. I gotta look for some D1 action.
But USD/DKK stays at the top of my list!
Do you have a favorite?
Ever trade RUB crosses? Haha the RUB is all over the place. It looks like it’s on crack. Look at the shadows on those D1 candles! Madness!
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At a very quick glace I’ve noted something.
I only do a 1% risk when my volume indicator is low. What I found in back testing individual pairs was that generally when volume was low the trend didn’t last the same, but generally they were still profitable.
The problem is still taking the trades locks out exposure that can be used for other pairs etc
So in demo I still took low volume trades, and I was profitable. But again I did note overall they were slightly less profitable on the whole.
Since starting I’ve taken them, but at 1% risk, leaving exposure available for other trades.
Looking quickly at my log, it looks like the 2% trades from the start of week one are mainly the ones that survived days where there have been minor direction changes, and are still open pushing forward.
Most of the 1% risk ones from the same time period are closed.
It’ll be interesting later to work out exactly if I should exclude the low volume ones completely or maybe reduce them further to 0.5% risk.
All depends if the 2% risk ones are genuinely making more money, or are just taking longer to play out but returning similar figures for the time scale, and also if there are enough 2% trades to fill the space not taking 1% ones leaves open.
Capturing closed trades data once a month should hopefully start to reveal more and evolve the way I trade.
Back testing individual pairs doesn’t highlight the way the overlap plays out.
I could just say sod it and play every trade that comes up. I might run into margin limitations though, and although I believe the profits would be higher, the DD risk could be too.
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I’ll have to setup OBS on my PC when I get home and do a quick how to of how I manage and find the trades, but really I don’t have to dig much at all.
Finding the setups is just a real quick flick through the list spending less than 10 seconds per pair to see if ALL my indicators line up or not.
As such I don’t have a bias to any pair when it comes to trading them. Most of the time I couldn’t even say I’d be able to tell you the current price or it’s history.
I just see if the trend is up or down, and if my trend strength indicator says go.
If the price hasn’t gone too far from my baseline at this point, I look at the volume and atr to establish the size of my position.
The RUB had too wide a spread (due to that whipsaw volatility you mention) so I removed it from my lists.
Too little money to be made from it and too much chance of being stopped out.
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Hi, I have read your thread and find it interesting. We share some background. I graduated and worked as a Schlumberger field engineer (oil exploration offshore) then moved into management and nearly 30 years ago became self employed (I declared myself unemployable coz I couldn’t do the corporate ladder thing).
On and off, I have been involved in leveraged trading since 1988 (USD/GBP by phone call to Swiss bank from Middle East using BBC World service as the information source). Scary days. Made $8K in 3 days, missed a trade and felt lucky coz I didn’t lose $24K in the next 5 days. We stopped doing that. I started again around 2005, then again 2010/11, and again 2015/16 and now 2019 to now. So I have put on over 1,000 trades. Until the last year I had never been able to demonstrate an edge, but persevered. Strangely, I have found recent comfort in Crypto - no leverage to date - just a combination of a longer term investment plan supported by a shorter term (weekly time horizon) trading plan. We started with 1% of our assets, and it now consumes 3% of our assets, and will go to 5% mid year.
About targets, for the past 20 years I have made investment and trading plans with three targets. I define a “standard target” which I expect to be able to achieve, a minimum target which will not disappoint me, and a “stretch target” which is what I really want to achieve.
That approach may accommodate both your desire to achieve double digit monthly gains (stretch target) whilst being realistic and perhaps setting a minimum target of 10% to 20% per year. We set those targets only every five years, for the past 30 years, and have exceeded standard target in five out of six of the five year plan periods.
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Cheers for taking the time to read my ramblings, and to share your experience.
I work alongside the Schlum boys regularly when we have the cementers and Geo onboard.
I like your approach to targets, I think I’m going to remove targets for FX until the end of 2021 when I have an idea of expectations, then will start looking at establishing something to work for.
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So week two done, nothing dramatic this week.
Mid week we had a little turn on a few of the open trades as money went flooding back to the equities market, all in all not a big deal as for as many of the trades we had to close in a small loss, we had a few closed in profit to compensate.
This resulted in a fairly flat Realised PNL over the week, but still up overall.
Open PNL took a bit of a dip over the week, however as of close we’re now at a all time (2 week) high running PNL.
There’s 3 trades in particular are running away slowly, nice long trends. The rest is a mixed bag of small losses and small gains. Monday will most liklely be a little clear out of them.
One thing I need to do soon is update the TSL on most of the open pairs. The ATR has dropped a fair bit since opening the longer running ones, so the TSL being 1.5x ATR is alot wider than when they opened. I’ll tighten this up on Monday… I may be able to do this while the market is closed with Oanda, yet to try.
Overall I’ve stuck to my rules, that was 100% the main objective. So I see this as a MASSIVE win.
Have a great weekend everyone.
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David Paul - trade psychology
Brilliant video from David Paul above! Thanks to Ben. Takes all the fluff out of the psychology, form the habit from 5 -13 trades then you don’t need discipline anymore, it will be wired in! Can it really be that simple? Worth reviewing regularly
Happy to be of help. Keep asking the questions, and keep recording your journal
So nothing exciting to report at the moment.
Got a few trades that are running away and making a good bit.
Stopped a few trades early as they went south, so taken a little drawdown.
Nothing exciting and nothing really interesting to report.
I do have a little update to make regards volume, I will go into that a little more later.
All in all looking good, my process is really easy to stick to so far.
One thing I still need to get better at is looking periodically through the day to see if there are any changes in the % etc.
I will not be acting on anything unless my indicators tell me to in the last hour before NY close, so why do i need to look at all inbetween? I’ve moved the icons from my homescreen on my phone into folders so wandering hands are less likely to click the icon.
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So that’s me settled into my onshore life again ( been home a little over 24 hours) and just sat down to my second trading session.
So today saw a turn around on quite a few positions, a good few trades closed by TSL either in small loss, or in profit.
Tonight’s trading saw me close a host more of trades due to Exit Indicators signalling. Some of these trades were the opened in the first couple of days of the month, I’m hoping the next couple of days may bring a continuation of them.
At a guess there’s been a bit of a dump in the Equities markets again today, I’ve got plans tomorrow and over the weekend so I’ll take some time on Monday to examine what currencies saw the biggest swings, and what it correlates to.
Overall at nearly 8% in gains in just under 3 weeks closed profit things are looking ok.
I’ve opened a good few new trades tonight. A few positions of Major Currencies against the HUF and PLN mainly.
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Looks very good! Do you prefer to do your research/trading at home, or it doesn’t matter to you?
I prefer everything at home!
Not one thing I can honestly say I prefer there.
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So today took a little turn to the downside, with a fair amount of the new trades pulling back from the entry points.
The positive being 2 of the trades so the first half position hit TP, pushing out Realised PNL to over 8%
On checking tonight NONE of the open positions have an Exit indicator, which I’ll be honest was a surprise.
I believe some of the positions are starting to push back towards the entry so they may turn out alright after all.
Definitely some interesting figures, from a peak unrealised position of nearly 15% to about 6% in only a few days, certainly could be a rollercoaster if I don’t focus on the process.
There may be scope to improve the figures over time, maybe having more TP positions etc.
Time and Data will reveal all.
Still in a good place all said and done, and happy to continue the ride.
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So just getting into my new home routine.
Kids are now back in school now the lockdowns are lifting.
My plan was 09:00 to 10:30 would be exercise then 10:30 to 12:30 trading related activities.
Due to the car getting collected for a service this morning I’ve shifted it to trading first then exercise.
I had a little look at my trades, and I’ll be honest it’s brutal! Drawdown has pretty much swallowed all my gains.
I’ll have to take a really good look at the data and see what’s happened when there is enough to see.
With December, Jan and Feb in Demo being such high finishes, my gut says I’ve hit the DD period just as I’ve gone live, but I don’t have enough info to say for sure at this point.
Plan is to keep going and see where we end up.
So anyway, what are my plans for my mornings?
I’ve decided to work on my TradingView indicators and also to convert them into a Strategy to enable easy backtesting.
I go through my settings, and do paper trades for all my changes, it takes time.
If I am able to convert it to a strategy which takes the trades on paper and gives me results fast, I can save huge amounts of time going forward.
So spend the time learning TradingView pine coding now, to save time testing later.
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Haha. You’re doing the backbone of your strategy?
It’s funny to me because I was doing something very similar over the weekend.
I was working on the foundation of my strategy, as well. Looking for new set-ups is cool, but sometimes working on strategy is good.
Keep doing your thing!!! Keep up the good work!
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