My FX Journey... From Dream To Reality

[macilme]

Hello… Testing… Ahem
Alright…

I am Hassan, Nigerian, and a Forex enthusiast

I am not new to the Forex world, but I am new to live and consistently profitable trading…
This will be my own (out of many hundred others but mine nonetheless ) online journal where I’ll be updating on how my journey unfolds…

Hopefully it doesn’t stall along the way, hopefully it’ll get to the other part, the part where the present me becomes the future me, where I can scroll all the way back to the top here and smile in wonder at how far I have come.

Wish me luck.

Okay so a little background about me…

I am just starting out on my journey from demo to live (duh!! yeah I know like many others in here right)

I tried and failed at binary options a few years ago back when I knew virtually zero about trading and a lot about pseudo gambling…

Now i’m back though… to Forex and ready to learn…
hopefully it works out this time. and we can all celebrate the success story together.

Opening this up took a bit of guts on my end though… why? well… now I get to one way or another:

1. Fail at keeping this updated (that’s what journals are for right?),

2. Keep her updated, but with how I’m ‘Failing at achieving my Trading Goals’ or,

3. Keep her updated, but… with an ever increasing rate of improvement and positive motion towards my Trading Goals (this right here, is what we want to happen)

So, here I am… airing my linen in public (selectively so by the way, among a community with similar aspirations as mine)… I hope at the end of the day it’s as clean as snow

And that brings me to my Goals… why am I here?

In one sentence…

The Goal is to at the end of the line, be part of the few who manage to make a living from Forex trading, and to document everyday my progressions and retrogressions along the way.
Anything less is undesirable.

Will I achieve this?
Only time will tell.

Will I do all in my power to achieve this?
Hell yeah!!!
And the community will be here to tell me when I’m failing at doing just that.

Today is just about me rambling about myself and why I have this personal space eked out for myself on the Babypips Forum… In the coming days, I will have more structure and flow to the space, so feel free to smirk at the clutter and all .

If you do decide eventually, to follow my journey and hence serve as one of the many accountability partners I will hopefully be having on here, I will say thank you and don’t hesitate to reign me back in when I derail… (Remember: Spare the rod and spoil the Child).

And that’s it for today, my official first personal post on My FX Journey… From Dream To Reality, on Babypips Forum and among the people I feel safest sharing my uncommon dream with, The Babypips Community.

Catch you tomorrow guys…

Hassan from Nigeria

[macilme]

DAY 1 UPDATE (03-20-19)

Hey Journal, time for my first update.

So having gone through a bit of my learning curve distance and having a pretty good idea on how my trading will take form. I decided on a few things and have made some progress:

1.I will from now onward base my trading on pure price action on Daily and 4hour charts, there are enough reasons for me to make this my go to base for building my trading system around. It is slow enough for me to have enough time to analyse whatever number of pairs I’m looking at. It follows the natural order of the trading sessions, and it is less subjective than all other methods I have attempted to trade with.

2. I have opened a fresh demo account specifically for this purpose (I’ll be using FXChoice).

3. I have created my own proprietary Journal for my trades (I am using Trello Boards) and it looks pretty cool enough to at least encourage me to put in the daily work required. here’s a peek at the almost done set up of the journal:

It contain’s everything, well almost everything I’ll be doing all through each weekday I trade. I actually had this journal set up for another trading system I was trying out on the demo once. I will now convert it to suit the needs of my day trading system.

Tomorrow I will complete the Journal setup, and my charts. Then we do the talking about how exactly I’m gonna be doing my trading system. Have a good one till tomorrow.

[ria_rose]

OMG HELLO @macilme! I really hope you achieve your dreams and I wish you the best of luck in this journey! This will definitely be another trading journal I’d check every time I update my own too. Hahaha.

[macilme]

Haha… thanks Ria… looks like I got. meself my first accountability partner in that case lol… thanks for taking a peek in here… I hope you stick around and check in every once in a while. Looking forward to going through your journal as well… maybe I’d learn a thing or two

[TomCooper]

just one word for you , good luck

[macilme]

Thanks @TomCooper… I’ll be needing a lot of that.

[drkent]

I am really impressed and inspired with the amount of work you have put into this. I am a newbie to forex too and I have had little success thus far. However, I have considered Mastering profitable forex trading to be a ‘do or die affair’ lol.
So, it’s cool to be starting this journey with you @macilme. I hope to create my own journal too.
Best wishes.

[AUdvantages]

Good idea with this thread Hassan,

[macilme]

Hey @drkent, me and you both on the “do or die affair” hahaha…

Really though I think putting yourself out in the full glare of the community does something positive to one’s level of commitment and focus. I learnt that from the many good journals on this forum and getting positive feedback from people you never meant but who believe in you helps as well…

if you have the time please create a journal too… the more the merrier right?

Thanks @AUdvantages… hopefully it works out well…

Coming up with an update in the coming hours guys…
Was out for the better part of today on a part time job I took up recently. I now lecture for a professional training course for a small fee… just enough to cover my expenses for the day though, not much more:neutral_face:

[macilme]

DAY 3 UPDATE (03-22-19)

Hey Journal…

So I finally finished with my Journal set up… here’s how it looks like now:

You’ll notice it’s much cleaner than what I posted up the last time around. Well that’s mainly because I don’t have any trades active yet, also it’s going to be less cluttered since now I will be trading off of only the daily charts at the moment (the 4hour charts will come soon enough, but only after I’ve gotten a pretty good hang of things on the daily).

So if you observe on the extreme right on the board is where I have my morning routine. It is the first list on my journal board. There’s a checklist in there that must all be ticked before I can consider trading for that day. here’s a peek inside:

Once I can confirm these conditions by ticking off the checklists. Then I can resume trading for the day. I try to make the checklist as straightforward as possible. If you think I’m missing something important that should be there do let me know

Now all the way to left side is just a look at the pairs I will be trading … nothing spectacular… you’ll get a look at how I’ll be filling these once I have my first ever trade on this new journey haha…

on the extreme left on my journal, this is what you’ll see:

Yeah, you guessed right, my evening routine, just like in the morning I do this at the close of the trading day. Because I’m trading New York Close Charts which close at 10:00 pm my local time, my evening routine is completed after I am done looking at my charts and placing or adjusting trades as necessary. I will be competing my journal then around an hour after the daily close.

Here’s a peek at my evening routine checklist:

Again, if you have experience with keeping a journal do let me know if there’s something that helped that isn’t on my checklist…

So, that’s pretty muck a run down on how my journal looks and works… If you find it clicks with your needs shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to share my template… something for the community that’s given me so much eh?

YES WE SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING WITH YOUR JOURNAL, BUT EXACTLY HOW DO YOU PLAN TO TRADE?

Ah yes! That
If you took a pretty good look at my journal you might have figured that out already. I am going to be trading off of price action mainly. I will be trading three main candle patterns:

1. The Bullish/Bearish Engulfing Bar
2. The Pin Bar
3. The two Bar Reversal

On the other hand I will be trading also Breakouts. This will be the only PA I will be trading beyond Candlestick patterns. I will use both volume and SSI as supporting elements while I trade this strategy.

Maybe I’ll be talking more about this trading system in the coming days.

To round up these are the pairs I will be watching on the daily time-frame for my trade entries:

I have grouped them into two different profiles for a specific reason…

I will be trading the first group based solely on my three candlestick patterns while with the second group based off of both candlestick and breakout strategies. they are separated that way because I can only get volume and SSI (Speculative Sentiment Index) data for the second group and not the first. Remember I need those to support my breakout trades. I get these values from the FXCM Tradingstation platform.

Phew, today’s entry wasn’t intended to be this long, so appreciate if you manage to read it to the end.

Catch you guys tomorrow.

Hassan

[xfowokan]

Well Done and all the best…You have inspired me
Will be watching this space

[PipMeHappy]

Hello there , I thought you might want to see this:

My journey journal...from demo to live...and beyond

Hi everyone. I’m finally gonna get my own thread going. This thread is gonna track my progression in my business venture. So, this will be a personal outlet for me. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time now. I do feel it is important to have a place to journalize your thoughts, experiences, lessons etc…And what a great place to do it here in BabyPips, where we all come together. And also this is very important to me because I really just do not have any other outlet. I simply do not…

[macilme]

@PipMeHappy thanks man… an honorary member on my thread… yeah yeah😎.

In truth… @MikeWolski’s link you shared was the single best influence in my decision to not only keep a journal (I mentioned that in my introduction post thread)… but keep it both online and within the community itself… I follow mike and have read through a sizable portion of his thread… hopefully I’ll ship him a bottle of champagne if this turns out to be the sauce in my trading in future.

Really though… thanks for popping in here to see what I’m up to… appreciate

[PipMeHappy]

Great to hear, Macilme.

You will find that this trading and journalling will be exciting to begin with but it can get too much in terms of the frequency of reporting to the rest of Babypips readers and of having time to do that on top of doing all your trading, reading, trading analysis, etc.

You will also be less willing to be so generous with your time, especially as trading is not a paid job: if you were a paid trading analyst, you would spend a lot of time publishing daily articles/videos, but as your focus will be turning from someone with no trading experience to someone who can earn some kind of money from it, you will have to make hard choices along the way (time, after all, is our most valuable currency).

[macilme]

DAY 4 UPDATE (03-23-19)

Hey Journal…

So it’s the weekend, nothing much going on. I basically used the time to binge on my current favorite PA thread Forex Price Action. It’s an old thread but with such useful information… It’s got pretty much sufficient details on how to go about trading my candlestick patterns, I only wish the thread is still active today as it was years ago. Ah well, you can’t always get it all eh?

Nice nugget of wisdom there @PipMeHappy, that really resonated with me in a lot of ways. I remember when I was trading 30+ currency pairs on the 4hour charts on multipe strategies, I had to watch them all, update the charts, make my journal entries (with pictures by the way), and be ready to go through it all again within a four hour intervals, it was crazy.

That’s part of the reasons why i switched to the daily. you’re right, I probably in truth may not be able to keep up with the current frenzied pace of updating my journal in here, but it only takes 20 minutes daily, my trading takes roughly four time that length of time. The rest of the time is for reading and work. I think the daily charts provide me with enough time to do that.

Documenting my activities regularly in here is something I believe is gonna keep me on track. It’s pretty much like having accountability partners right?

Anyways, I’ve got some pairs I’m looking at for monday… that should help us hit the ground running if i find something tradeable… I’ll upload pictures tomorrow… until then, have a nice weekend guys…

[macilme]

DAY 6 UPDATE (03-25-19)

Hey Journal.

Morning Routine completed…

wish me a good trading Journey guys

END OF DAY UPDATE

So, first official end of day. No trades, a couple of close ones but none that met my entry criteria. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit different… Just on the side though… A good A+ trade every two or three days is sufficient enough for my trading plan.

these are the pairs that caught my attention today as Pin Bars:

I didn’t enter on both. US30 Pinbar didn’t look convincing enough for me and was coming on the heels of a big bear candle… I had a limit entry set on the break of the large red pinbar on the Silver but it didn’t get triggered. I have since deleted the order and observing the PA at this level.

I am pretty positive I’ll have at least a breakout trade tomorrow on the yen pairs at least. Guess we’ll see how that turns out. That’s it for today.

@Ambrianky Nice to hear bro… We from the same hood so I feel you on that. Hopefully you can have yours set up too and we can journey together lol.
hope you stick around sir.

[Ambrianky]

I’ve personally been trying to start one for myself but I’ve failed thus far. Hopefully this will inspire me to start… I wish you all the luck in the world…

[macilme]

DAY 8 UPDATE (03-27-19)

Hey Journal

Morning Routine completed…

So I finally took my first trade in the early hours of today…

TRADE 1:
EUR/USD Short…

Looking for price to at least reach the recent low as price has been in a slow downtrend on the daily.

Entry: 1.12570
TP 1: 1.12183
TP 2: 1.11132

I’ll be taking partial profit at first TP level and moving my stops to BE for the remainder of the trade.

So I mentioned I’d show how my trades get recorded in my journal, each trade get’s recorded on a card which goes in the list created for that pair, EURUSD for example goes here in the list I have already created for it:

This way I can monitor all the trades I’ve taken within any particular time-frame (last three months for example) on that particular pair. Hopefully it gets filled up with quality A+ trades.

Also you can see those multicolored labels below the chart image on the card, it’s how I sort, much like the same way you can use formulas to sort trade data in excel. Here’s how it looks in detail:

Here, you can see how the labels are used, in future i might want to see trades I took on breakouts only, so i filter with that label and everything else gets taken out temporarily and I can do whatever I need to do… I might show that when i got more trades on my board.

Hopefully this works out as my first profitable trade… I’m a bit worried about price going below the two recent lows before the breakdown so I have set my TP’s accordingly to cover those.

Fingers crossed and we’ll see how this pans out haha

professional inputs very much welcome.

[jairusmaloba]

Keeping a journal is a good idea, however, you could be getting over-complicated. Your journal looks like your trying to develop a very scientific setup. The more simple the better using just basic principals. Hopefully as you go along you will realize what is irrelevant and keep it out of your journal. Do not write what you do not understand and do not put indicators on your charts that you do not use. Also do not drown yourself in too much data that you will eventually be unable to analyse.

[macilme]

DAY 9 UPDATE (03-28-19)

Hey Journal

So another day in the bag, morning and evening routine completed.

No of trades today: Zero

Current Trade Update : EUR/USD short.

So price made it to my first TP, I’ve taken profit on half my position and moved my stop to BE on the other half position still open. So safe to say my first trade on this journey has been profitable… will it rake in more money? Guess time will tell.

it’s been just over a week and I only got one trade. Slow days but i’m okay with that… minimum of one trade per week is good enough for me as long as they’re A+ trade set ups.

During this time I have found some trade set ups that weren’t convincing enough for me to trade, most went in the expected direction and satisfyingly enough I feel comfortable in retrospect now watching them from the sidelines…

Hopefully the coming week will have more trades in stock for me.