No Shoes Trading

Trading Discussion Trade Journals
41

Hey @Diabolo888,

That’s a fair question, and in my opinion some strategies are easier to reverse than others. According to that video Frandlost posted my pivot strategy is a target strategy, where I have a fixed price I am trading towards. I’m not sure what the reverse of that would be. And then, how would you know when to reverse your strategy? I’m not a mystic. Most strategies work in some context or another (spoiler alert), until they don’t. Price action: works, Your favorite Indicator: works, Trading the news: some one is probably making money off of it right now. In 2012 a cat beat a group of professional traders with a toy mouse.

Let that sink in…a cat…beat professional traders. What’s that say about professional traders. I’m a professional driver (so I’ve been told) and I’m not sitting here thinking " let’s let the dog drive for awhile"

I think working on properly managing risk (or money depending on how you look at things) is much more important than of trying to find a strategy that works all the time.

42

Yes I have tried the reverse strategy and it is not so easy to apply. I have difficulty justfying to myself that I should place a trade opposite to my trading rules.

The cat is an interesting one. Only about 20% of fund managers beat the S&P 500 or the FTSE 100 so why pay their fees just put your savings or pension fund into a tracker?

43

hey, thats nice, i just want to share, i’m using stoch 14,3,3 just for the scalping on m5, the rules is the same, and its working perfectly, but u need some basic into it, found setup everytime i open the chart :slight_smile:

44

Try Jamaican Rum Cream for your coffee!! It’s awesome!!

1 Like
45

@thekirk

Some friends of mine went to Jamaica for a wedding way back in the day and they brought back a whole suitcase of bona fide Jamaican Rums and they were awesome. So I am sure rum cream is too, but I don’t think I will be taking up cream Liquors anytime soon. I like it in cold brew, I just don’t make that regularly enough to justify buying more.

1 Like
46

So much has happened and, at the same time; not much has changed. I said I was going to do an update last Friday, but life really gets in the way sometimes. Thursday night our Furnace stopped working, and I spent all day Friday (and most of the weekend) in my basement getting intimately acquainted with every part of my furnace that had a panel I could remove. I am now a furnace repair expert, and it is back up and running again. I will come back to that point later.

I got absolutely slaughtered in my AUD and NZD trades. I am down almost $1400. So I have been licking my wounds and trying to sort out my weaknesses. I started with Risk Management, mine was just awful. So I dug into that for a few days and worked out some ideas that made sense to me. Now I am using a 2ATR stop on every trade. Soon I will be using ATR to determine trade sizes as well, but I am just running .01 lots right now while I am still searching out other holes in my system. Another hole was my approach to daily pivots. Now…I still believe daily pivots are still solid price targets. And I did a lot of backtesting to make a time based entry work, and even with ATR to kind of filter out the worst trades it was still about 50/50 whether it would come back to that point in a few days or make me wait a few weeks.I tried to filter it all kinds of ways but I couldn’t get it to work. But I knew they were good targets, I just needed something else for entry signals. Without boring you with the details I worked out a hybrid strategy of my past systems but with completely different indicators (does that make it a new strategy?) I will keep you guys up to date, but it is looking good in backtesting, and I just started getting live entry signals so we will see how it goes. I’m considering jumping up to daily charts, with my time constraints I just think Dailies might be better for me. I haven’t started back testing this yet, but its on the list.

Let’s get back to me being a furnace repair expert, which I am…obviously. Clearly my furnace is working, and I am the one you fixed it…but should I be an expert? I did fix my furnace, that was not a lie. But, I had some things going in my favor.

  1. I’m pretty mechanically inclined (we did all the renovations to our house, I do a lot of the work on my car, etc)

  2. My furnace is pretty old, and doesn’t have complicated electronics

  3. The actual problem turned out to be pretty simple.

    In forex there is no shortage of traders out there teaching their ideas. But unlike doctors or lawyers who need actual training and degrees to be considered experts. All you have to do is understand trading and have opinions to make yourself appear to be a forex expert. Now I’m not trying to throw rocks at anybody, or say not to listen to those opinions, I’ve learned a ton from listening to other peoples ideas. But there is one opinion I keep running into that I don’t really believe and its been irking me enough that I wanted to say something about it.
    I keep running into the Idea of banks control price movements. I am just not sold on this idea. I could be completely wrong on this, but there are some red flags that make me skeptical. Sometimes they say that x,y,z currencies are manipulated and you should trade this other pair that they are recommending. If they have control of the market why wouldn’t they manipulate ALL the pairs? You’re saying a bank, that will charge me a fee if I overdraw my account by a penny, is leaving huge chunks of money on the table because certain currencies aren’t worth their time? Also, these huge companies are coordinating with each other, and quickly enough to wash Gary out of his trade on the 15m chart and then take price the other way (whipsaw) to take out Steve who had the exact opposite trade as Gary.
    How much money would it take to whipsaw a price in a pair? Exactly how many pairs are they controlling? I don’t know those numbers, but it seems like a huge amount of money…how much money do banks actually have in forex? I’ve seen some people talk about them having access to information we don’t, I can buy that. They probably have certain advantages, but I haven’t seen hard proof they can manipulate prices. Another thing I hear is they let us win sometimes…to keep us in the game. 90% of traders lose their accounts in 3 months…Those to statements don’t match, and go back to my overdrawing example…they don’t just let that slide sometimes to you know…give me a win. The reason this irks me is that it makes ‘Big Banks’ the boogie man. And it gives people an excuse as to why they lost. How many times have you saw someone cite big banks for a losing trade? No Gary, you had a sh*t position (sorry if your name is really Gary, i pulled that out of a hat).

Just something to think about…

47

Added $16.84 in profits to the trading account last week. First trade with the new indicators was successful. Added a short on EUR/CAD shortly before end of day Friday and went long on USD/CHF around 9am. Those were both on the 4h chart. I also have the strategy worked out for a basket of pairs on the dailies. Keeping risk at around 1% per trade and per currency.

48

EUR/CAD stopped out, that made me nervous for USD/CHF because it was looking shaky so I closed it early. Both of these were mistakes. USD/CHF hit its target today and looking at EUR/CAD it had an earlier entry signal that I overlooked. It would have moved the entry price to a more favorable position and more importantly, moved the target to a point that I feel price would have hit before its turn around and eventual stop out.

Currently long both EUR/USD and USD/JPY. EUR/USD was taken from the daily and is in danger of stopping out. I’m not quite sure if I should have taken both trades, I am wanting to keep risk per currency down as well as risk per trade. Is this increased risk because they are both USD trades? Would it be considered a hedge since USD is on opposite sides of the pairs and both are long? I don’t know, so I left the trades alone since I was already in them before I realized they were both USD pairs. Current standing of the strategy is 1 win - 1 loss - 1 abandoned. (1-1-1) with a overall loss of 1.76. It would have been 2-1 with an overall gain if I hadn’t quite on USD/CHF, so far so good. More trades will have to finish before we can see whether the uncertainty and volatility in the market really hurting the strategy.

49

USD/JPY hit its target. The position was reduced 50% and the stop loss was moved to break even and will follow price if it continues up. $4.01 and a win for the strategy brings the score to 2-1-1 with a positive balance of $2.17. The loss and abandoned trade were both human error. So I plan on doing some back testing tomorrow, or at least trying to. The kids are off school because of the Coronavieus scare, and their mom is only working the days I’m off. So being the oldest I will be the defacto ring leader of that circus tomorrow. I will try to work on a worthwhile post, but, as I’m sure with a lot of other people; things have been a bit crazy around the house.

50

EUR/USD hit its stop loss for a loss of $15.55 today…not good. After studying that for awhile this morning I think I came up with an solution to filter out those trades.And by those trades I mean it was whipsawing and giving alternating buy and sell signals on the daily chart. It makes my trading a little more complicated, but the end result is hopefully less losers. I still have half a trade on USD/JPY with a stop loss just above break even so maybe that will bring in some more profit. I am sitting on a loss this week of $30.22, the system is sitting at 2-2-1 with an overall loss of $13.36. It is weird accepting losses, but I think properly traded this system has potential, at the very least it fits better into my trading style.

Anyway, some good things are happening this week. At the beginning of the year I sat down and figured up about how much money we were going to need for vacation and other family type events we were considering for the year and an increase in my emergency funds. All together with a little extra for unknowns I came up with a goal of having X amount of money in the bank before I could put extra money towards anything else. Come Friday I will have met that goal. So, before things get crazy I will be setting up a small second trading account for the purpose of experimenting with risk percentages. Right now I am keeping things around 1% per trade. But I want to stress test the system, can it handle 5%, 10%, 25%? What is that happy balance that gets the best possible returns?

P.S. Know that if you bought more than your usual amount of toilet paper in the last few week, I think you are an idiot and I hate you. I haven’t ranted much about the coronavirus (believe me if I had the time I would) but I still think most of the response so far is nonsense. I’m not saying its not serious, and older people (especially those with medical issues), should be very cautious and I agree with lot of the safe guards for them. My mom is in her 70s with diabetes and she went to WalMart to take back some yarn yesterday…WTF mom, go home. As far as the whole flattening the curve, you cant prove to me that closing everything is flattening the curve or just delaying it. I haven’t seen a dramatic increase in testing (at least in the United States) which would be pivotal in getting out in front of this. And finally according to an article (What’s the coronavirus risk for a healthy young person? - Los Angeles Times) out of the 12,000 cases reported in people under 40 only 26 have died which is a 0.2% chance of dying.

51

Reduced USD/JPY by another 50% which took $4.60 of profit off the table. Possible trade opportunities on EUR/CAD and NZD/CHF, waiting to see where they are at End of Day.

52

So far it has been a productive morning, NZD/CHF bounced off its daily pivot and hit its goal giving me $7.50 in profit. It looks like thats all i’m going to get out of it right now, but USD/CHF looked sketchy, I abandoned it, and it has taken off and not given a sell signal yet. With the win from NZD/CHF I am still down $18.11 this week and the system itself is down $1.25 with a score of 3-2-1. You could even technically say 4-2-1 because EUR/CAD was successful, it just didn’t pull back to its daily pivot where I had my trade sitting. I considered moving my entry down before I went to sleep as it was still in no man’s land between the goal and the missed daily pivot but I left it alone.

trade pic 7
trade pic 71011×581 40.7 KB

NZD/CHF is on the left and EUR/CAD the right and they both crossed the signal line (Ichimoku Base Line) and gave a signal at 1pm (at bar close) and they were confirmed with the Momentum Indicator (not shown) EUR/CAD still presented a trading opportunity with the distance between price and the goal (green line) even though it didnt pull back to the Daily Pivot (P Line). I didn’t change my order because I was worried it would trip an order by moving lower and then rebounding to the missed pivot, dragging me into another loss. I think if I hadn’t been so fixated on the Daily Pivots I would have taken it, but i’m not sure. I’ll be looking into this more

In other news, I might have some more time on my hands the next few weeks. My work is going to start rotating drivers in some capacity because things are very slow because of coronavirus is shutting down a lot of things. I’m not sure what that is going to look like, they will probably tell us something Sunday, but it probably means more time at home, which means more time to trade. They are also going to keep paying us an average 13 week rate (which is something they use to determine our vacation pay).I am losing my Saturday runs, but that was all extra money in my budget anyway (I don’t think they will count those in my 13 week average). Even though I am fine a lot of people in the restaurant industry are struggling, business is done and they are running skeleton crews. (We don’t service any place with a drive thru, but from what I hear those places are down too). Its a tough situation all around, and I hope everyone is supporting what businesses they can until things get back to normal.

One last thing, my mom is still crazy. She called me today on her way to take her aluminum cans in for recycling. At .34 cents a pound (according to her) and the fact that she drives a Fiat we will give her the benefit of doubt and say she brought in 20 lbs of aluminum cans. She’s gallivanting around town for less than $10…she’s impossible.

1 Like
53

How’s the system going? Still trading?

54

“I wasn’t a very good trader and stopped for awhile with a loss over $700”

My maximum loss was about $1500 (I remember it was the only beginning of my trading experience)

1 Like
55

Your risk to reward is poor. Please demo this strategy first before putting actual money on it.

56

What about the present? How’s trading going?

57

Listen here, random anonymous person on the internet, I am completely open to people’s advice and criticism…but not yours. I went through your posts here, and your odd Instagram and I can see what you’re doing. You are trying to build some sort of educational following, maybe your hoping to cash in on newbies and sell them products in the future (or maybe your selling things now, I didn’t dig that deep into it). Nothing I saw lead me to believe you were actually out here in the trenches with the rest of us, you know…actually trading. May you are a day trader…as you claim to be…I don’t know you personally. I’m not even upset that you are trying to carve out a niche as an educator, it is a viable way to make money in forex. I’m upset cause your advice is dogsh*t, how dare you come to my trade journal with dogma. that’s a little insulting.

You didn’t even explain why my risk to reward was poor, or what I should do to fix it. You sir (or ma’am) are a lousy educator. I’m going to assume, based on what you quoted that you believe my risk to reward was something like 2:1 because the one trade only won half of what the other loss. That’s not a measurement of risk to reward though, that’s the result of two trades.

Let’s talk about risk to reward and how it fits properly into a system, if you’re going to educate people I want you to at least do a good job. Risk to Reward (R/R from here) on a per-trade basis is a useless number if you do not know your win percentage. (You should write this down). An R/R of 4:1 sounds fantastic, but if you’re only winning 1 in 5 trades you’re not doing good. Naturally, the higher your win percentage the less R/R you need to be profitable. Anything above 5 out of 10 can have an R/R of 1:1 and make money in the long run. A better R/R would be helpful but it is no longer a requirement for the system to be effective. And really, if you’re winning less than 50% you’re probably better off flipping a coin than following that system. Trend following systems are an exception, but I haven’t found one I like that focuses solely on forex, those seem to work best when you trade across all markets.

Another thing, telling someone else what to do with their money is just in bad taste. The only time that’s really acceptable is if I had asked what to do with my money or if I was about to buy crack. That’s it. We aren’t all “day traders” like you claim to be (without any kind of proof) i’m not living or dying by this account. I have a job that is still going in these uncertain times, it pays my mortgage, it puts food on my family’s table, and it puts a little change in my pocket. How I choose to spend it is none of your business (unless I ask…or…crack). I lost $7 in your example, have you been to a Starbucks, go lecture those people.

To everyone else:

Sorry I haven’t been here, my schedule is a disaster right now, as I’m sure some of yours are too. I’m also sorry that my first post in a while was a rant against this hack account, but I don’t want half-assed attempts at advice from some wannabe influencer. I’m still trading here and there. Hopefully I’ll be back soon, I’m not sure when, but I will be back.

58

Lol wow you took that personally?! I was just talking about your trading and you’ve made so many assumptions. I’ve never tried to sell anything and nor do I advise anyone to buy any courses or pay for any trading material because you can learn for free.

This is a public thread so anyone can post their opinion on it. The way you reacted im guessing it’s probably true right. No need to take it personally or start attacking people. You dont need to throw your toys out the pram, it’s very childish. Part of the reason of telling you to demo is other traders read your thread and think it’s right to do what you’re doing. But it doesnt work for everyone especially your no stop loss method.

I’ve never said I’m In ‘the trenches’. In fact I openly say I’m not. I’m a fulltime trader, I’m not testing strategies, working on risk management or have another job. Sorry to burst that bubble.

59

You know what, you are right. I was a jerk. I’m sorry. I don’t want to judge you based on assumptions, so here is what I will do. You tell me how I can acquire the PDF/ ebooks you ask people to DM you about on Instagram (I believe), I don’t have any social media, but I have this post and email. I will refrain from any more ridicule or accusations until I read those.

60

I havent used Instagram for a few months but the pdfs aren’t pre written documents. They are pdfs/ebooks versions of books I have read and have downloaded. They’re free from google anyway, eg market wizards, trading In the zone etc. Are you looking for one in particular?