Hello traders!
Reflecting on the past week’s price action, in today’s video I look forward to the Fed rate decision next
week, analysing Forex pairs and some equity indexes to see how risk trends are shaping up after the
ECB, RBNZ, and BoE rate decisions and with the commodities slide (US Crude Oil).
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Much appreciated.
Thanks and
Happy Trading!
Great video. Training video is idea of how to look at risk trends. Thanks for sharing. Just subscribed your channel.
Thank you, Adam, I really appreciate your feedback!
I just watched your video. Very interesting, thank you for the effort. You tell us that you already hold a short position in the FTSE 100 for 4 months. So you have been in red for such a long period. Do you make a living of trading in this way? More than 4 months no result of a trade? This is absolutely no offense, on the contrary, I hope you don’t understand me wrong. I just want to learn, that’s all. I think the fed will have no aggressive guidance. They are now already so scared of the market reaction of just a rate hike of 25bps. So in my opinion, but it’s like flipping a coin, things won’t break down on Wednesday but a few weeks or months later. Maybe crude will be the trigger. Or China. Or lack of liquidity in (junk) bonds. Or…
I once heard an old wise man telling on CNBC that a bear market never has started in history after the first rate hike. I know that history not always repeats but it’s the only thing we’ve got. We could get a few bad weeks after a rate hike though. By the way, last year Santa also came late if I remember well.
All the best,
Bart
Hi Bart.
If you read all of Pipmehappy’s comments on the GnpNzd thread or the first page of my own Balls Of Steel thread you’ll see how and why we both trade. Its basically about finding long term trends and riding the dips until you reach an acceptable profit (often several hundred pips).
Naturally theres some risk involved, but that’s true of any style of trading.
Hi Bart, your post is very good and it is true that my way of trading this year has changed, and my new long-term approach, as Eddie highlighted, has been something of a feature on his thread and on Zizzoforex’s one; when I realised that the reason I had been losing money was that I was overtrading, often exposing myself to conflicting positions through various pairs, I slowly looked at the way market trend move, and in certain assets and instruments you will see trends taking months to form but then the rewards can be long-lasting: just like with my FTSE100 short, I entered four months early but all I have done is booking myself into the second break of the 6,000 level, when I will already be in that trade… I have waited four months and ended the week with a 60-pip floating profit, with a target of about 500 pips… This would be a £50 gain, which on a current £110 equity would be a huge gain… So I look at longer term potential because it is less involved but it is about looking for which assets have the best directional staying power over the longer term… This still means that entry timing can be improved, of course, so had I entered at 6,500 for my FTSE short, then I would be settling now, but my condition was the break of the 6,000 level and allowing for a swing before continuation… Once I reach the 500-pip target, I will trail a stop from breakeven and up…
Yes, it is not a style that suits everyone and it may even pass off as bad trading, but I am certainly honest about what I do…and it is a style that requires a lot of patience, as Eddie says, or as I called it a few times ‘Buddha buttocks’ (a lot of waiting, and a lot of reading, but not much actual trading)…
What kind of trading are you doing?
Hi Bart.
Apologies to Pipmehappy for going off-topic, but there is a great thread here well worth following. Some great insights into the market and likely reactions, one of the best threads on BP. Will definitely help you understand forex and grow as a trader.
@eddieb, I will certainly read about your strategies. And secondly thank you for that link. It seems indeed a very interesting thread.
@ Pipmehappy, actually I like your trading style. I only got 1 problem with it and that is that I’m not sure that you can live from those trades. Secondly, before you were in the 60 pips profit that you have got now, you were (more than?) 500 in red, which is probably a huge unrealized loss. I don’t think that I would be able to see that unrealized loss going up and up every day. I would think “aah, damn, bad decision of me, I close this before it get worse”.
Then the hardest question you ask me is what kind of trading I do. I almost get tears in my eyes when I’m starting to write my answer. I actually after 7 years still do gambling and no trading. Worst of all is that now almost all my savings are in my trading account and I’m scared every day that I will wipe all my money away in just a few minutes. I can do that. I did it before with an account that went from 2k to 7k and then I drank too much in the evening because of all the stress trading gives me. I thought “I will make another 3k now with Japan at 2AM (tired as hell, doing exams of university at the same week), then I have 10k in a week”. And I just gambled. Lost. Increased. Lost. My account the next day? 7$.
Then I told myself: now you are going to trade a system and only the system. Don’t do revenge trading. I had a good system, with es mini futures. I executed it on a demo for several weeks. It worked, no losing days. After a few weeks I check the charts and see that my system wouldn’t have performed well at all. And then I throw it away. I have another system which is not really ready yet with EURUSD. It is almost perfect, but not perfect. I find it so hard to live with something that is not perfect while I know that a perfect trading system does not exist, I’m already searching for it for 7 years now. I have great daily systems, but then I say “profits come too slow and too little”.
I did a lot of reading yesterday and today on this forum about revenge trading and trading discipline and I hope that I can do it. The most important lesson is simple: don’t see a losing trade as a personal failure. It just happens. Don’t do revenge trading ever again you crazy dumbass. I funded my account just last week. I already gambled the first evening. I told myself I wouldn’t do it. But then I thought I’m very smart and just watch the chart and make some dollars. Started the week with a loss of 10% of my account in half an hour. And in two days I gambled it back and now I ended the week with a little profit of a little bit more than 2% of my initial deposit. And of course the feeling is mixed but it is not good that I got rewarded for taking risks which are just unacceptable and could cause me really my death. I think my account could have decreased with 50% or so if those two trading days went wrong. It is just crazy.
Ok I think you are very bored by now. So the thing is: discipline. Only trade a plan. Always plan the trade. Don’t care about a loss. When I get that really destructing urge to gamble I need to turn on a computer game as fast as possible or shut down the computer and jump on my bike or so.
I like trading. I’m already studying on it for 7 years (more than 40 hours a week). It’s really a passion (addiction) and I hope I can make a career of it. But honestly I think it will cause me death instead.
Now you will give me the advice to stop trading and do something else. Well that ain’t really possible. I suffer from serious concentration problems and tiredness which makes it almost impossible for me to do a “normal” job like a lawyer or tax consultant all day.
Now you probably think: what the heck, what kind of crazy dude is this. I would fully understand. And sorry for my bad English by the way.
Wish you all the best,
Bart
Hi Bart.
Great post, it must have been very difficult for you telling it. One thing for sure, you’re not alone. Most, if not all fx traders will have had similar experiences to lesser or greater degrees. Its good that you recognise this and are trying to rectify it.
I don’t know how much you have actually lost, or how that relates to your income, but it may help put things in perspective if you calculated how much you could have wasted smoking, gambling, drinking, etc, over that same period of time. If you’ve enjoyed the learning process of fx and the buzz of trading, then it may be a price worth paying.
I don’t think the style of trading Pipmehappy and myself use is right for you. I can recommend a system I found here called the 3 ducks system which you might be able to use. Its a trend following system, but doesn’t require you to hold trades for extreme periods like we use.
Good luck with your trading.
P.S. your English is better than a lot of native English speakers I know 
Dear God, Bart!
That sounds like many other traders’ experience of euphoria and despair…
Here is one of many, where one forum member was telling us about his
predicament:
You are not alone, as Eddie rightly says…
Indeed, he is also right to point out that using someone else’s strategy/approach
may sometimes be actually damaging: you would not have the patient to sustain
drawdowns of hundreds of pips over several weeks or months, so my/Eddie’s/Yohec’s
approach would not suit your style and temperament.
I am sorry for your losses, but if you have the trading bug you will want to continue…
Surround yourself with people whom you trust, and confessing to your trading habits
here to all of us was possibly the best thing you could have done… Hopefully, this will
be a moment to turn things around…
Good luck
@eddieb, thank you for your nice response. Your reply is really healing me a little bit (yours also Pipmehappy). In perspective, things are indeed still ok eddieb. You’re right. I will tell you because I don’t know you in my personal life. I’m a student and I’ve never really worked. I have total savings of about 35.000 euro. That account that I blew up gambling while I have been drinking too much in 2013 of 2000 euro was really very painful psychologically (suffered months from it) but not if you look at it in perspective of course. Since I don’t work I have no income. Now I funded my account with 25k. So almost everything. And I don’t want to lose this. I really need to accept a loss, because you cannot control the uncontrollable.
@Pipmehappy, I’m also thankful for your healing response. This really must be a turning point. About my losses: actually the strange thing is that today I think, but I’m not sure, that I’m still green with all the trading I did. I also traded some time in 2012 with uvxy (VIX related product) during the eurozone crisis with Greece back then using twitter (thank you zerohedge for telling me as one of the first that PANIKOS, mind the name, resigned as minister of finance causing a (little) vix spike, and I had a 30% gain because I was not so sure back then that Berlusconi would lose the elections as everyone else was). I only won back in that time but it was very exhausting.
In the next days and weeks I will read through the posts you 2 did because I think I can learn a lot from you guys. I hope we’ll speak again and I would really want to thank you for being a good human.
May your lives bring a lot of happiness and joy in the future,
Bart
ps: is trading a hobby or full time job for you?
Thanks Bart…
25,000 Euros is a lot of money… I hope you will make it work for you better…
I trade as investment, not as an income…
25k is a heck of a lot, I wouldn’t put all that in one account personally. It only takes one Black Swan event and you could lose it all in seconds.
If I had that much to invest, I would spread it over 10 accounts with different brokers and trade different pairs or strategies on each
I know it is a lot, and I it’s almost everything I got. Why do you guys think I’m so fearful to lose it all? But I had this “new” strategy of opening 12 trades, each risking less than 2% of my account, at 12 a clock, reopen the losers (stop loss hit) at 17 a clock with the same rules, and then add 50% to the “big” winners at 19.30, sell everything between 21.30-22.00. But I don’t dare to put it live yet because of the fear now that all those trades go wrong… Imagine… So it is for that strategy that I needed that amount of margin. But now I’m not implementing it. I’ll first demo it more days… It gave good return guys, but there was 1 losing day when the system lost 4.5k. Other days it returns between 1 and 4k. I’ll just demo it for now…
Its not the trades that would worry me so much as the possibility of a Black Swan event wiping out everything
What do you mean with a Black Swan event then?
The SNCB does not speak after 12 o clock I think? Or do they?
Do you mean the flash crash in the emini’s some time ago?
Do you mean a bankruptcy of my broker? They are quoted on the London stock exchange and have to separate clients money from their money.
A Black Swan event is one that is wholly unexpected, unpredictable, and has catastrophic results.
One of the most recent pertaining to Forex was back in mid-January when the Swiss severed the link between the CHF and the Euro. This caused the Euro to plummet thousands of pips in a few seconds, so quickly that many brokers were unable to complete trades. Many traders lost a lot of money and some brokers went out of business.
Some brokers now say they will honour trader accounts that slip into negative equity, but until we get another Black Swan we won’t know if this is practical.
That event was what I meant with my second sentence eddieb. It has really scared me a lot. That is true. But as I said, I don’t think the SNCB speaks after 12 o’clock. Of course, you’ll say, other black swans will occur in the future than this one. True. I have a broker that offers guaranteed stop losses. I should think of using them because I normally have a time horizon that is long enough to pay the extra spread. Problem with those guaranteed stop losses is that, I asked, “currently don’t offer it for the EURCHF”. Lol? AND you often have to place the stops away for let’s say 200 pips. And that is mostly too much for my strategy (risk reward you know). I asked if a combined one was possible: a guaranteed stop for the black swans and a normal for normal days. “Oh no that is not possible”…