Not Another Trading Journal!

Happy New Year everyone!

Here are the details for my journal.

[B]Pairs:[/B] Trading the all the major pairs.

[B]Timeframe:[/B] 4Hour and Daily

[B]Method:[/B] Trading Pin Bars and Inside Bars from Phil’s Basic Chart Analysis Method by phil838.
Thank you Phil!

All trades are on a Live Account. Well, actually a tiny, Live account. But it’s not the size of the account it’s what you do with it. :slight_smile:

All comments welcome (except for nasty ones)!
Ahh, what the hell, nasty comments are okay too! :rolleyes:

Pair: EURGBP
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 28/ 2010
Went Long at: 0.85431
Closed at: 0.85527
Reason For Trade: Pin Bar at Support on an Uptrend.
Reason For Exit: Price starting to stall.
In retrospect: Successful.
Profit: 9 pips

Pair: USDCAD
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 27/ 2010
Went Short at: 1.00609 (First blue square)
Closed at: 1.00452 (Second blue square)
Reason For Trade: Pin Bar at Resistance on a Downtrend.
Reason For Exit: Hitting Support.
In retrospect: Should have held on to it longer.
Profit: 16 pips

Amazing !!!

Hey there smile1,
I’m looking forward to this journal, hopefully you’ll make it last! Another Calgarian! :stuck_out_tongue:

Clark.

Greetings Clark and brandnew2fx!

Pair: AUDUSD
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 28/2010
Went Long at: 1.00749 (First blue square)
Closed at: 1.01490 (Second blue square)
Reason For Trade: Pin bar on uptrend at support.
Reason For Exit: Hitting resistance.
Profit: 74 pips
Comments: This one I’m happy with. I closed at a November resistance level with a decent profit.

Pair: AUDCAD
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 27/2010
Went Long at: 1.0126 (First blue area)
Closed at: 1.0106 (Second blue area)
Reason For Trade: Pin bar at support area.
Reason For Exit: Price stalling.
Profit: -20 pips
Comments: Okay, this trade kind of went nowhere for a couple of days after I got in, so I got out after losing 20 pips. Right after I got out there was a perfect Pin bar setup, but I wasn’t at a computer so I wasn’t able to trade it.

Pair: USDJPY
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 29/2010
Went Short at: 82.300 (First blue area)
Closed at: 81.980 (Second blue area)
Profit: 29 pips
Comments: Nice pin bar at resistance on a downtrend. And yet another trade where I should have stayed in longer.
Maybe I should do trailing stops instead… I don’t know.
I hate it when my feelings of cowardice takes over my feelings of greed. :rolleyes:

Try taking partial profits if you’re not sure it’s going to continue the trend. For example taking 80% of position out at whatever levels you’re using right now and leaving 20% at break even. See how that works out for you.

Agree with mozdef. Ideally, feelings shouldn’t play any part in your trade. :slight_smile:

Having a trailing stop or partially liquidating is a good way to lock in profits. Just be sure that you follow a system to take in profits. This will eliminate the need to base decisions on greed or cowardice. :slight_smile:

That’s my 2 cents. Also, it would be helpful if you can also share what the R:R was or what the R:R you expect is when you take the trades.

Just curious since you mentioned Pin Bar and Inside Bars. Have you looked up Nial Fuller’s site? I think he also trades similarly.

  1. Mozdef and Vonner, thanks for the advice. Partial profits are something I’ve never done but should probably look into.

  2. I don’t really keep track of the Risk/Reward. As long as it’s above 1:1, I’ll make the trade.

  3. I have looked at Nial Fuller’s site over the last few weeks. There are some really good things on there. I’m going through the (free) videos right now.

Pair: GBPUSD
Timeframe: 4Hour
Date: Dec 29/2010
Went Long at: 1.54073 (First blue area)
Closed at: 1.54608 (Second blue area)
Profit: 54 pips
Comments: A pin bar on a very small uptrend near a decent support level. And I got out at another decent support/resistance level. And the same formation happened about 24 hours later, but I wasn’t able to take advantage of it.

Week #2

Pair: USDJPY
Timeframe: 4H
Date: Jan 5/2011
Went Long at: 82.184 (First blue area)
Closed at: 83.209 (Second blue area)
Profit: + 103
Comments: So far it’s been a quiet (but profitable) week. Here’s a long pinbar off an uptrend at support that paid off quite nicely. It moved up through a couple of resistance areas. I manually move my stop loss up for this one. The price stalled for about 17 hours so I got out with a decent profit. This one went in the red about 25 pips for the first 4 hours before it turned itself around.

Week #2, Trade 8
Pair: AUDCAN
Timeframe: 4H
Date: Jan 5/2011
Went Short at: 1.00180 (First blue area)
Closed at: .99296 (Second blue area)
Profit: + 88 pips
Comments: I entered and exited this trade at roughly the same time as Trade 7. I’m not sure if these pairs are negatively correlated. Anyone know? I should perhaps avoid trading pairs that are correlated in the future.
This one also went in the red about 20 pips for the first 4 hours before it turned around.
Once again, I manually moved my stop loss as the trade moved in my favor. The price went nowhere for the last 16 hours so I got out. I probably could have gotten in the trade at the earlier pin bar but I wasn’t home at that time.

Nice trading

Thanks, Viper5.
Although you may want to take that compliment back when you see what happened on my next couple of trades. :slight_smile:

I put in six pending orders on Thursday night and when I woke up Friday morning, they were all filled.
I was a little wary putting in that many orders as I’m sure some were positively/negatively correlated.

Week 2, Trade 9
Pair: USDCHF
Timeframe: 4H
Date: Jan 7/2011
Went Long at: 0.96572 (First blue area)
Closed at: 0.96201 (Second blue area)
Profit: - 37 pips
Comments: Another trade that went into the red 20 pips about 15 minutes after I entered, practically begging me to get out. Seems a lot of my trades are doing this. Even the winning ones.

I almost didn’t enter this trade because the trendline was so steep. But it was a pinbar at nice support.

It ended up hitting my stop loss (0.96201 ) about nine hours after I got in. It looked like a good trade. I can’t see anything wrong with it. Can you? :slight_smile:

Well, as I scroll back in time after the fact, it looks like there was a little bit of resistance in the area I placed the trade. That’s never a good thing.

Week 2, Trade 10
Pair: AUDUSD
Timeframe: 4HR
Date: Jan 7/2011
Went at: (First blue area) 0.99107
Closed at: (Second blue area) 0.9944
Profit: - 33 pips
Comments: Another one that looked like a solid trade when I placed it. But as I now scroll back now, I see there was a fair bit of resistance right around where I opened the trade (0.99130).
I got out when it clearly broke my trendline.

Week 2, Trade 11
Pair: EURUSD
Timeframe: 4H
Date: Jan 7/2011
Went Long at: 1.30074 (First blue area)
Closed at: 1.29498 (Second blue area)
Profit: - 57 pips
Comments: And this is what happens when you trade while you’re drunk. Well, actually I wasn’t drunk when I placed this trade. Maybe that was the problem.

I took this trade with a pending order. I went Long on this trade, against the trend because it was at strong support line from early December and the price looked to have stopped falling.
This trade was over in a merciful 12 minutes.
And the next time I feel like trading against the main trend, I’m going to take a long hard look at this trade again. :slight_smile: