No worries. We’re living in a different world. Much more different for some, not so much for others.
Wait wait wait…your little info box says trading education/motivation, but you don’t have a personal body of work to educate/motivate with? You’re just referring people to other people’s educating/motivating material in something akin to education/motivational arbitrage. And to get the word out about your services you’re scrolling babypips sprinkling your advice into random threads like a modern-day Diogenes (shout out to the Podcast ‘Philosophize This’ for that reference). Wouldn’t your time be better spent building a website, or writing a blog, or even a Podcast? I can not find a decent Podcast running today about Forex. Your current strategy seems to have a very low ROI.
Hey Dudebro,
Awesome name. I fill like a little bit of an ass cause I skipped right over your comments and went right after Fakey McFaker over there. Anyway, thanks for reading, I really appreciate it.
My schedule had been continuously changing since my last real post so I tried to adjust my strategy from a 4H chart to Daily and something weird happen, the win percentage went down and the profit per trade down. I could adjust settings and get the win percentage up on one pair, but then that wouldn’t carry over to other pairs. It turned into something like trying to sort out an electrical problem in a Jaguar.
I didn’t really do much until last week when for some reason I decided I wanted to know how the robots would have handled coronavirus. I know the robots use Momentum and RSI and their settings (super important if you run robots to know how they work) and the creator even has a handy dandy custom indicator on Tradingview that is basically the signal for the robots. And just having that up I started seeing patterns in the “good trades” that weren’t in the “bad trades”. The bad news is on the dailies in a basket of 22 pairs I’m expecting somewhere around 25 trades…a year. But that’s 25 high-quality trades.
I currently have a position on EUR/CHF as kind of a test run. One of the issues is trade length, 200+ day trades are a possibility, that’s a lot of time for swap to eat into profits. The same setup seems like it works on stocks as well. I bought a single share of…i believe SXT (no idea what it is, it was in my Blue Chip basket). Honestly I stopped paying attention to its performance, it hasn’t hit its take profit yet.
And just for fun, I’ve been running the same setup on 15M charts in the mornings finding a trade or 2 and out of 10 so far I am 6 wins, 3 losses, and 1 open. the 3 losses all hit their stop-loss and then hit their take profit later in the afternoon. So I stop using stop-losses. (the robots don’t run stop-losses either). So that’s pretty much it.
Been doing a lot of thinking about trading, how it could fit into average peoples lives. We are different, we decided that we were going to invest time and effort, so we are no longer in the average group.
Lol you’re having a go at me for NOT selling material 
that’s a first! It’s true when people say you can’t keep everyone happy. Why would I need a to personally write an education when everything is out there for free. Im not sure I understand your point… if I said I educate on algebra would I need to come up new mathematical equations? Some materials say more, others say less but they’re all basically the same. I’d recommend the babypips course as a more comprehensive course for forex beginners.
You mean pointing beginners in the right direction, it’s free material that I wish I had when I was a beginner. You say it like it’s a bad thing. It’s free. I’m not sure how you can have a problem with this.
Are you one of these people who think if you pay for things they must be better? You seem to be hell bent in pushing for people to sell something. Sorry, you can learn for free.
Every few posts I’m doing something different, it looks like I’m just strategy jumping (and to an extent I am) and I realized I haven’t been putting the “Why” behind my actions. Part of that was due to the fact I only carved out 2 days a week to update this about something I was working on much more often. Another thing is I tend to go on tangents (I should really use notes) and I exhaust my time on one thing or another that doesn’t really matter (but I had a good time, so that’s good).
I am working on gathering a basket of strategies. My working theory is that if you think of a trading strategy like a piece of swiss cheese, with the holes being times when they are not working or losing money. Stack enough pieces of cheese up and you can’t see through the holes anymore. Now you have a basket of strategies and that kind of resembles a 401K portfolio. I hypothesize that trading like this I’ll be able to run very simple systems, I don’t need something that’s a rock star all the time.
This whole Coronavirus fiasco slowed me down, right before things went sideways I got a new account set up and I was going to start running concurrent systems. I made a few changes to the original system that was pre coronavirus, and I feel like it’s ready to go. I was going to run it on one account, the robots were going to have their own account (which is the system i’m trading today just manually) and I have a third account with no money in it and I haven’t really decided what’s going in there…yet. But, things aren’t just a little uncertain right now, they are way uncertain. So I haven’t added any funds to my accounts. I don’t know if I’m going to need that money in the coming weeks/months. I’m going to continue playing with what I have. I think I’d like to have 5 strategies in my basket, I have 2 locked in for sure, the others i’m just meh about.
Scooby Snack Time: I pulled 4 more trades off the 15m charts this morning 3 were winners, 1 is still open. So I’m at something like 9 wins - 3 losses - 2 open. I am wondering what is going to happen with the 2 opens. They aren’t exactly going against me to the point that I think I should close them, but they aren’t hitting their targets either. They are just bleeding off negative swap. Hmm, I’d really like this set up to be ‘set and forget’. I’m going to wait a couple more days and look at them again. The robot actually does a supporting trade after certain conditions are met, but that would mean I’d have to watch the trade to find those conditions, I’m not sure I want to do that.
You sound younger than me, so i’m going to adopt you, from this day forward I shall call you…Brent. You seem like a Brent (plus I don’t currently have a Brent in my real life that I could confuse you with).
Now Bryan, I think I should be honest with you. I’m very skeptical that you are who you say you are. A 12 year old girl from New Jersey could read a few trading books and come online anonymously and pose as a day trader and start handing out advice to people with whatever information she got out of those books. I’m not saying your a 12 year old girl, I’m just saying its very hard to take people at just their word on the internet.
Another thing Brant, is that I scrolled through your activity and I didn’t see any first hand accounts " I did this when I started" " I lost on x" there is nothing personal about your advice that implies you have experience in what you are talking about. That doesn’t mean you don’t have experience but its another red flag.
You’re also dishing out more criticism than actual advice, I didn’t see a single post in your activity where you actually called attention to an issue before it was known. “Hey you might want to look at x it could turn into a problem” For Exampe: I drive semis (I think you call them lorries(?)) and make deliveries to places that aren’t designed for such large vehicles. so when I’m with a newer driver i’m on google maps before he gets to the next stop telling him the best way to get in and out so he doesn’t run into problems (or hit anything, cause i’m not filling out that paperwork).
That’s about it Brian, hopefully while your out there being a Stranger Danger with your white van and free candy, (Does that stereotype carry over?) discerning people look at your activity and see you spending a lot of time on this thread and come check it out. Thanks for helping spread my thread around.
1 Like
A 12 yr old girl who’s read one book, who gives right advice, is right. Dont care if you’ve read 1 book or 100. I dont care if a complete beginner gives advice, he or she may have read something I havent. It doesnt matter who they are.
So you have to prove who you are before you can give advice?! Or maybe it’s because I didnt agree lol. I get the feeling you wouldnt have a problem if I was very positive about your trading.
The advice is in the criticism, your risk to reward is poor and especially as you’re chopping and changing your strategy I believe anyone who’s reads your posts and is doing the same should use a demo. But you dont have to do what I say. It’s just an opinion. You’ve taken it so personally. Not sure why you’re butthurt.
I’d prefer more people read your thread. Maybe theyll learn something new from you and the way you trade. Only time will tell.
AUD/CHF closed out sometime today bringing things to 10-3-1. EUR/CHF is being very noncommittal. I took this trade 5 days ago off the 15M. I’m only asking for 20 pips, which seems reasonable for a 15M chart. I think if we all get together and sing ‘Imagine’ we can get this pair to close out…or I can sleep on it.
I timed myself this morning, I got up around 9:30 am. I know, early bird. I’m on a quasi- second shift type schedule right now, plus that when the kids usually get up and demand I make eggs. Made coffee (sorry kids), fried some eggs, and sat down at my desk around 9:45. Pulled up Tradingview, it already has my chart setup and watchlists saved and I went through my 15M Forex charts first. Flagged 2 trades that were about to give signals and switched to Daily charts and flipped back through Forex and then my Blue Chip watchlist which is stocks. Went back to the 2 trades I flagged and double checked their indicators to make sure everything was in agreement. I dubbed them high-probability trades (there was a short ceremony, their families came, they got plaques, it was lovely). All that was done before 10:00, i think it was 9:55.
I then forgot I was trading, I was looking through indicators on Tradingview (user submitted ones will keep you entertained for hours) went back at 10:10 to see both pairs had posted their signals but they hadn’t really moved so I took both trades.(20 pips is pretty conservative so I don’t have to Ride or Die on a signal. Its more like the Pirates Code from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: “they’re more like guidelines”) EUR/JPY closed out at 10:55 CHF/JPY closed out at 10:57. 12-3-1
The one is still EUR/CHF…I just don’t think enough of you got together to sing “Imagine”
I was thinking last night before I went to bed about how many people are going to be mummies for Halloween with all this extra toilet paper people bought…And then I thought what I should do just put a small amount of money into the trading accounts and run micro accounts. Then I could run a concurrent system, on a small scale. I need to decide what starting capital I’m considering $200 per account, and the total number of systems to run. Maybe 2 to start and I can always peel off money to start more.
If your making $8/hr bringing home $250-$300 a week, the $1000- $5000+ people recommend to start trading is a ridiculous sum of money to come up with. $400 is more reasonable, and you could technically start with $200 but then you can run into EUR/CHF problems. And tying up capital would probably be a bad idea for anyone that can’t afford starting with more capital.
Anyway, they are sending me out to Minneapolis tonight…yay. Six stops, which is suspiciously low, But i am interested in knowing how other cities are handling everything. Based on the traffic in Chicago last week a lot of people are not too worried about stay-at-home orders. But this means I’m probably done trading for the week, I’ll check the daily charts but I’m even going to try my morning routine. Tradingview doesn’t let you flag on the mobile app, which is annoying, and I’m not dragging the laptop with me because I’m not quite sure if I’ll be driving or not tomorrow morning.
By publishing what you’re interested in, it’s your theme, I think that if you focus only on the questions of others, you will not have enough time for what is important to you, I think you also want to improve your results.
1 Like
Did I mention I closed EUR/CHF? I’m not sure I did. I just didn’t feel like it was behaving the way it should. So I’m going to look into that pair more before I add it back into the basket of stocks. I did close it with a profit so I’m going to count it as a win. 13-3 now. with a EUR/USD trade this morning.
Note: EUR/CHF did jump to its target after I closed it, lol.
Anyway, I know I haven’t given a full recap of exactly how this strategy is going and that’s mainly because I have not gotten back to updating the spreadsheet I use to track everything. I’ll try to work on it this week. I ballpark it at around $15 bucks, which doesn’t sound impressive (its running 1% risk), but I’ll break it down after I have 20 trades and look at different possibilities for the system. In the meantime, I switched it over to my $200 account and bumped the risk to 5% (EUR/USD closed before I finished this bringing the system to 14-3). Now the main account is open for something else.I’m looking at the original MACD/Stochastics system, as well as a system with moving averages I think its called a fan or a spread system. With my current schedule, I want something I can look for big trades on the daily AND pick up a trade or two in the mornings between 9:30 and 10:00 on the 15M charts. I’ll let you guys know what I come up with.
1 Like
Today is a meh, day. You ever look at your charts for setups and everything just looks bland. I wasn’t super pumped to trade today, nothing was jumping off the screen, but I went through everything and settled on just one trade and the only real reason I took it was it had signals on two different setups in the same direction. So I take it. I realized I was not in the small account so I had to switch accounts and take the trade again. After 15 or 20 minutes of fiddling on the computer I realized the chart I had been looking at was USD/CAD (I keep them open on tabs on the computer) but the trades I took were USD/CHF…At that point I just called it, today is not a trading day. I closed them out (they happen to be up a pip or 2) and I’m done. There is no point in me sitting here trying to force trades when I don’t feel like it. I have the day off, I have all the time in the world to trade today, and I just don’t feel like it. That’s the way it works out sometimes
And I was wondering - judging by the fact that you work with currency pairs, you should definitely have some observations in this regard - did you notice any special regularities concerning currency pairs, how they react to news or correlate especially among themselves?
Hey Snowredeemer,
I was stuck on the fact that you started the conversation with “And”. I had to Google it and it seems like its legit, although most people admit to being taught that it was improper at one point or another. I think I was taught that somewhere around 3rd grade. I remember even then it didn’t make much sense, but a lot of rules out there don’t make much sense.
Let’s start with I don’t work with currency pairs, I consider our arrangement more of a Field of Dreams scenario, I’m Kevin Costner and the currency pairs are the 1919 Chicago White Sox. (I looked that up on IMDb). Even that implies some cooperation and I feel its more akin to beating pips out of them with a stick, preferable while they are asleep.
How they react to the news, I assume they are concerned about COVID-19 like everyone else. But since states are starting to open up ( sorry I stopped following international and only watch the states that affect my company directly) and the fact that forex continued through this whole I would guess they aren’t worried about that either.
Honestly though, fundamentals and news are just too much noise for my style of trading. I don’t pay too much attention to other traders, but I also haven’t found a really successful (Warren Buffet style) pure fundamentals style trader in forex. If you know one, and they have an audiobook, I’d love to listen to it while I’m at work. But I just don’t think fundamentals work the same way in stocks as they do in forex, and I’m not even a fan of them in stocks. And News…US unemployment is through the roof right now, its been all over the news. but if you look at USD pairs some are up from the beginning of the year some are down. I know there are traders that trade on the news, but I’m not one of them.
Correlation is just as problematic (the problem with problematic is something is either a problem or its not. Shoutout Scott Hambrick). For simplicity I just put pairs into groups, USD and CAD, AUD and NZD, EUR and CHF, GBP, and JPY. EUR and CHF are the only ones that I actually treat as correlated for my trading, meaning I’m not going to trade say AUD/CHF and EUR/AUD at the same time. The other two it’s more of a guideline, if I have a strong trade signal I’ll probably trade USD and CAD or AUD and NZD at the same time even though they are also correlated. GBP is in its own group just because my trade sizing is different because of margin costs same for JPY.
But really I only separate them because I trade without a stop loss and I want to limit my exposure. So really, you could get along just fine without ever worrying about news or correlation. I guess that’s my observation, some people use news and correlation, some people also the Awesome Indicator, but I don’t think any of it is required to be successful. It just depends on what fits you.
I won 2 more trades at the end of last week, I was running to Cleveland Thursday and Friday so I didn’t trade or have time to update you guys. I think I am up to 16-3 (Wins/Losses) I have 2 open trades on the 15M AUD/NZD and EUR/USD. I also have 2 open off the 1H EUR/GBP and NZD/CHF. I did open a 3rd one on the hour GBP/CHF, but I closed at after I realized I had both EUR/GBP and GBP/CHF. I don’t want those in the same account. I’m on call…I’m not sure what that means besides maybe i’ll work, maybe I won’t. I haven’t been an on-call driver before. But that works out cause I bought ducks (because apparently chickens are considered agriculture and you can’t have them inside city limits, but ducks are pets) and turns out they grow RIDICULOUSLY FAST. so we have been working on our fence which has been a disaster since we bought this house, but super low on our to-do list. Soon these gals (hopefully they are all gals) will be outside in the backyard and they need a nice fenced in area…and a duck house.
Oops, didn’t get my update from yesterday posted. I wrote one, but I must have not hit reply before I closed everything down yesterday, I need to get my offline trade journal back up and running so I have backups cause I’m not 100 on what I said yesterday. I thought I made a mistake on one of my trades EUR/USD on the 15M cause I checked on it after a day and it no longer had a trade signal in the 930 - 1000 range where I would have made my trade. I thought I just jumped the gun and didn’t wait for a bar close, which I am guilty of, but the same thing happened to a few of yesterday’s trades too, so I may have did it twice…or the indicator is a little loose. I’ve been feeling like I need to invest some time and make my own indicator or at the very least look into getting one made.
But that is future plans, lets get back to right now, of those 4 trades 3 closed just EUR/USD on the 15M was the hold over. bringing things up to 19-3 (Wins/Losses) I took a EUR/USD trade on the 1H chart yesterday and it closed. Some of those profits were used to reduce the 15M EUR/USD by half. And that was the only thing to close yesterday, add the trades today and I have 5 open trades on the 15M and 3 on the 1H and 20-3 for the system. And lets not forget those 3 losses were an early attempt to run with stop-losses and those did rebound to hit their take profits.
So, not much happens over the weekend. One trade on the 15M closed sometime between open Sunday and this morning bringing things to 21-3. I added another 15M trade and another 1H trades so I have 9 open trades. I still haven’t updated my spreadsheets, like I should, but according to Oanda’s Performance stats I ended April with a profit of $19, and so far in May I am up $15. The win rate for April was 88% May so far is 100%. That’s odd that May is 100% because I did reduce EUR/USD by 50%, so I’m not exactly sure how they calculate everything, but that’s what it says. The stats look okay, obviously, I’m only going back 2 months because February and March is when I took a hit.
I know $34 in a month and a half isn’t amazing. But, looking at my margin usage, and total risk I feel like I could increase position sizes, which would increase profits, without increasing risk to the point that I would be concerned. I’m not going to start messing with it yet, I’m still waiting for things to get back to normal, because the change in schedule will have unknown effects on my trading, I’m not sure if I will adapt to trading mobile or simply trade on my days off.
Appreciate the details and thoughts!
1 Like
Okay, this is getting hard to remember, 21-3, I think that’s where I was. Monday night I had a trade close in the middle of the night and the other trades were good, heading towards their take-profits. I ended up closing all the 1H trades early, just cause I needed my alarm to go off in a few hours but I didn’t want my notifications waking me up before then and that was the fastest thing for me to do to fix it. I netted somewhere around $10 on all 4 trades and that brings us up to 25-3. Now that brings us to the 15M trades and what I did with them. 2 of the trades closed at their take profit. That put that account at a net positive, even though it had three open trades with slight draw downs. EUR/USD was still hanging on, i never fully washed it, and EUR/CHF which I had such a bad time with last time I traded it I’m not sure why I felt it okay to trade again…I even had it Red Flagged in TraderView.
Anyway, the point is I only had confidence in one of the three trades so I invoked a strategy I know as honeymooning. The strategy I am trading right now is a manual strategy of a robotic strategy and one way to manage the robots way called honeymoon style. The robot tended to do really well when you first turn it on (not always) and then over time it got bogged down in trades and eventually started losing money (it works until it doesn’t). Honeymooning is just clearing your trades when you have a net profit in your account to reset the robots and keep them in that sweet spot of doing fairly well in the beginning and before they start to bog down and lose money. So you end up managing your account balance, not your trading.
Based on that principle, I closed those 2 trades and left 1 (USD/CAD? I don’t have it pulled up at the moment) which later closed at its take profit. That puts us at 28-3-2 (Wins/Losses/Washes).
Today I had an attack of greed, and I set things up really badly because I started thinking about the dollar amounts instead of the performance. It started with the simple idea that I wanted to switch away from the 15M chart and instead run the 1H and 4H. I am not failing to find trades on the 1H when I look for them, so I feel like there is enough there to support the move. I even found 2 4H trades this morning. But As I was setting up trades I didn’t like the dollar amounts the 1H trades gave me in the small account, so I took them on the large account and took the 4H trades on the small account.
I set this up and walked away to feed the ducks (which are tiny dinosaurs at this point) and went to make eggs for the kids. Before I even cracked an egg I realized I was an Idiot. The whole point of running the small account is not profits, Its allowing me to run 2.5x the risk of the large account while while keeping overall risk low. The large account takes less risk and generates more profit to support the small account. Profit comes from account growth and/or risk adjustment.
I have 2 trades on the 1H and 2 trade on the 4H, the setup is still the same. I though about closing them, but I’m just going to leave it alone and put future trades in the right accounts.
EUR/NZD closed off the 1H trades so I am up to 29-3-2. The remaining trade in the 1H (GBP/CHG) has been languishing around for awhile and has finally popped up on the 4H charts so I entered it, a bit late, but it still has potential. Any profits will go to washing the smaller time frame trade.
Other than that its been pretty slow, which isn’t bad. but it does mean I don’t have a lot to talk about as far as forex. I’ve been putting much of my time into stock options. Needless to say, I am not an expert in options, I am not saying that. I’m looking at it as a supplement to my stock buying. I made $4 on credit spread last week so it has peaked my interest. Again, not suggesting you pick it up, but its what I’ve been spending most of my trading time on lately. I am set on running the system I have now in forex, I am not trying to make anymore adjustments, I just want the system to play out for a awhile and get more data and more trades.
I’m still going to update you guys every time I’m at the computer making trades. And go on more tangents.