Haven’t updated in a few days, but that is just because there were no open or closed trades… that is until yesterday, when the world came down crashing on me and two lost trades killed all my profit for the month,
with 3 trading days left in July, looks like I will be posting a negative month. The only good thing about this is that the loss for the month is not huge…
I still believe in it and I am still continuing to identify ways to cut on losing trades, next month will be a new month.
*** End of July Summary ***
Hello everyone, well July has ended and not in a good way. I closed the second month of live trading with a loss. -6.1% return. I currently still am at +6% return thanks to June which closed at +22% return.
I will not let this discourage me, I trust my strategy, I backtested 11 currencies on 2 years of data, with good returns. It was a bad month, I made a couple of mistakes, I am curious to see what will happen this month.
I am carrying 3 trades into the new month all positive so far, one of which short on AUDUSD with some good profit. Let’s hope it stays like this.
Good luck to you all in this new month, let it be a great one.
Hey Everyone, it’s been a while since I made the last update. I decided to just post once a week unless I find more time or something happens.
Last time we had closed July … with a loss…
New month, it did not start well, but I have caught up a bit.
Since I have moved to the daily charts, it is a little slower, but this helps me opening my range to pairs with higher spreads, so eventually, when some trends start reversing I can pick up more trades.
As far as opened trades:
During the middle of the week, I had twice as much profit, it took every bit of strength I had not to close everything and cash it in, it would have put me at 35% profit for the month, but my system gave me no indication on any of the trades to close them, so here we are.
During my backtesting, I noticed that the average length of an open trade was around 40/45 days, currently, I am well far from those numbers which make me hope that some of my open trades have the possibility to keep making a profit, time will tell.
See you at the next update
Happy Trading.
Glad to see you’re persevering Nic and that you’ve come over to D1 charts.
You said your system gave no indications to close any of your trades, though profits would have been higher if you had.
So, and this is the key question once you’ve got a profitable trading process running, what are your exit signals?
I shared mine a little while back on another thread. For long positions these are whichever comes first on the D1 charts -
I would also include obviously hitting the initial stop-loss and the failure of the entry set-up TA - 20EMA above the 50EMA and both sloping upwards. Both of these rarely happen before another exit signal.
HI, every trade I open now on the daily chart has only a SL, I use 2x ATR with a minimum of 90 pips, there have been times when 2xATR was below 80 and still I was hit by the SL.
The criteria I use is currently a MACD which in a sense is just another fancy way of saying a cross over, but I use a third candle, no more than that.
However I am currently back testing the SSL indicator, I was introduce to this as an entry indicator, so I gave it a test but quickly realized I was getting too many false signals, but than I noticed that in a couple of trades It would have got me out before the trend fully reversed letting me keep most of the profit. My strategy gets me out a little too late, still in profit but I do lost some of it. I need some more time to finish my back test.
Oof that’s a long time.
End of the week update
Open trades this week:1
AUD/NZD Long
Closed trades this week: 1
EUR/AUD Long +129 pips - 13 days trade
I had the feeling that I may end up with a trade open for every pair I trade given the time a trade stays open, but it really does not look like the case especially if I change my exit indicator to the SSL
Keep up the good work Nic.
I’ve reinstated an additional exit signal which I have used before but forgotten (or maybe my over-confidence made me forget it) -
We live and learn. Hey ho.
That is nice but with my capital even at 10% gain I cannot afford two days off :-).
I just entered a buy trade on GBP/NZD with a pretty large SL of over 300 pips.
I still have nothing closed since the 15th of August. So far except for the one I just opened they are still all in profit. I have the feeling that NZD/USD is getting ready to be closed, I am going to leave it for today and see what happens tomorrow.
It’s been 7 days since I closed a trade but finally we have one
NZD/JPY with 379 pips profit.
The trade I opened 2 days ago, GBP/NZD is at 170 pips profit, yesterday was 220… but I still think it will continue bullish.
And NZD/USD which I thought it was time to close, it still making few more pips, so I decided to keep it open.
One week to close the month, let’s hope I don’t screw thing up 
Closed Trades
Open Trades
Hey nic, just came upon your thread. Looking forward to your journal. I would be pretty interested in seeing how you see trades and your analyse.
I wanted to get into NZD/JPY and EUR/AUD trades but my plan didn’t offer an opportunity.
Hello All,
I closed USD/CAD Long with 53 pips loss. This trade had been driving me crazy, it was 2 weeks open and it was one day in profit and one day in loss, I decided to close it because I started to get a reversal signal.
The rest of the trades are still open mostly in profit.
Overall I am happy with the result, a bit more than 2 days left to trade before the end of the month,
let’s keep calm and hope for the best.
Closed Trades
Open Trades
Hello All,
August (trading) is done, the numbers are in and are really good, for my small account anyway.
I have had a total of 11 trades, the smallest I ever did, this was due to the change in strategy moving from the 4h to the daily chart.
Net Profit, 84.95, this is a record profit for me, compared to June of 55.70
Total Pips 1483, this is less than last month and yet last month I had a loss in Profit.
Gain for the month 19.4% bringing the overall so far to ~27%
Next month I will add some money to the account, this is money I finally managed to retrieve from a different account, not much, around 1200 euro, this means that I can take a few trades with 0.02 lots.
In my open trades, I have GBP/AUD that is acting very similar to the USD/CAD trade, goes up and down but is not going anywhere, I hope I don’t need to start a new month with a 300 pips loss
Closed Trades
Open Trades
Let September come and let’s make sure we do our best.
To next week.
Nic
So looks like I have been making few mistakes tracking my trades, I have been using an excel file and created the ROI formulas using info on the internet, but I guess I did not get it accurate enough. The error is not very big but it needs to be rectified.
I created a “myfxbook” account and linked my live account to it.
Now I will publish a screen shoot of it every week or when I close a trade.
Here under is an update of my 3 months live:
June 2019
July 2019
August 2019
Overall last 3 months
The gain for the overall 3 months looks a bit big, on my excel was 27% but at this point, I don’t know anymore.
I share your pain on the USD/CAD long. I got in long on this also, though later than your entry, but used a technical stop that was far too tight and made a small loss on a manual early exit (just under 1% of account). I am back in it long again now and feeling OK with the TA. This time the stop is at the same place, 3ATR20 from entry and the position is same size but I won’t be making such an early manual technical exit. Gonna give it more space this time and ride it…
Not a good start for the month, but as always… never give up.
I closed the trade 70 pips from the SL, lucky for me because it was going to hit.
September Summary
Closed Trades
Open trades
I closed AUD/USD for 125 pips profit. I got a signal for a reversal and decided to get out.
Overall for the month, I still negative but now it’s a little bit better.
I also deposited more money into the account, I was waiting for them from a different account, this way I should be able to trade a little higher.
September Summary
Closed trades
Open Trades
Hi Nic,
I’ve enjoyed following your journal and the hard work you’ve put into back testing and forward testing appears to be paying off nicely. When you analyze the currency pairs how do you determine when to enter a trade? Do you use price action or are you an indicator person or a combination of both?
Hi Kevin,
I use a simple EMA cross over as the entry indicator, I do check if we are close to support or resistance, but I am really not giving it too much importance and I do not draw any other trend lines or similar things.
My charts are pretty clean, I use a indicator that puts an arrow when the cross over happens, purely to identify the crossover faster when I go trough the charts, in fact I even removed the EMA lines.
Every morning first thing I do I go trough all the pairs and check for entry or exit signals, 5 minutes work and I am done for the day.
I know a lot of people don’t believe in MA cross over strategy, but I think that if you have patience and you are not greedy, there is profit to be made in the long run.
I am still continuously testing other ways to make my entry and exit point better.
