After having had 2 good weeks with reasonable outcome between good and bad this day have been awful. The funny thing is that the steadiest moves ever seen is changing direction within fractions of a second time after time after time. When my stop loss is hit it reverses within half a second of faster. It was so ridiculous that I explained what was going to happen to a friend beside me and entered a few trades. He said that if I was so helplessly dumb that I thought that I was trading for real against live rates he felt sorry for me. He said, that is a fraud. Can’t you see that? You are caught in a game.
He’s wrong of course but his spontanous reaction was/is understandable in that sense that one shouldn’t be able to control the rates up and down more precise than a light switch control a lamp like 30 times in a row.
I’m new to this myself and it may just be paranoia. It seems like you are making very short trades, if you are using a retail broker try not using stop loss ordes. I usually stay in trades any where from 6hrs to 5 days and i have noticed an improvement when I dont use stops or limits and just watch the charts until price hits a certain level. Again it may just be paranoia, but I dont trust them.
Everything is up and I made myself +128 pips today. I think that days like that one shows up from time to time. It felt strange at the time, like ending up with 50 ones throwing a dice in a row. Highly unlikely to say the very least.
Anyway, this is how I do. I read the news, forecasts and comments from the pros trying to form an opinon. Then I go through the pairs looking at daily charts. If there is a clear trend that doesn’t appear to weaken to judge from the last two days I try to see how this match what the pros are saying.
Once there seem to be a clear trend I trade in that direction.
15 min charts.
I always use Entry orders at strategic levels, mostly once the big numbers have been passed. A very tight stop loss that I move to a ±0 as soon as possible. That way I shouldn’t lose much. Most trades are cancelled by my stop loss right away. No profit but no loss either. A couple of times a day with some luck it moves a bit further so I can start surfing along. I will then move my stop losses along manually beeing more and more generous since I already have a profit.
This seem to work but requires much attention at the screen.
I could do that but I do it manually. You see, I only want the trailing until I have a tiny profit or no loss so to say. Then I don’t want it no more because the price pulse much more then 30 pips back and fourth all the time and I don’t want to start off with larger stop losses than that.
I used to do the same thing, and I finally gave up trying because it was a very bad strategy. The reality is that you WILL lose money, and you just have to deal with it. Having a SL that is so tight that you exit out of the market immediately is a bad situation. If I were you, I would set a comfortable SL, such as 30-50 pips, and then modify your SL only once you hit about 30 pips or more over your entry. You have to allow some room for the market to move above your break-even point, otherwise, you’ll just hit the SL every time. That’s just a waste of time and you’re paying the brokerage for nothing.
I’m new to this babypips site, just joined-in. Just to sad hello to you…Nice to be here… well I been in the market for a while now as a mini trader.
So far I’m not doing well in my account, may be due to small capital. … but I believed in FX market that I will do better when time comes. … just have to learns and wait…
cheers…cj:)
Well, I used to do that and found it to be a bad strategy. What happened was that the market went my way, say 4-7 pips and then reversed back to my SL. So I went from a 7 pip win to a 30 pip loss instead. Now you can’t do that many times in a row. I much more preffer to lose nothing 15 times in a row. But the most important thing is the entry.
When a candle is moving, it will retract and pulse back and forward for a while and then all of a sudden move away to almost the price it had. What is important is to identify this movement, hit it when retracted as its most and almost always will it shoot past my break even line by a couple of pips. Then I move my SL to my break even line.
When you were successful two weeks ago, was that strategy the same as what you are doing now? If not, there’s your problem. You may of had a successful strategy, and now that you’re making more money you’ve changed the strategy, but it’s a loser.
I had that problem when I first started. I would do a trailing stop of 30 pips. Then I changed it to 50 and couldn’t understand why I lost so much money. The problem was that it was simply a bad strategy. I’ve changed it since then.
I don’t have a problem. This thread is quite old and I had a very strange day back then. I understand that once in a while even the best trader have a lousy day when everything seem to go wrong time after time. I think that a good strategy allow for days like that to happen.
Now and then I take bad trades but I can almost always track them to beeing me not doing what I’m supposed to. One thing that I have a problem with is sitting flat when the currency pairs just are GBP:ying like EURUSD have been doing today. After a while I tend to look harder and harder trying to see a trade coming and that’s a mistake. Other times It’s so easy and then I think that I need to be cooler when things are just GBP:ying.
Actually, a good trader should be able to sit and stare at the charts for days without taking one single trade. I hope that I can achive that discipline.