Post Graduate

I DID widen my stops.
I DID widen my stops.
I DID widen my stops.
I DID widen my stops.
I DID widen my stops.

… and I lost £120.00 of my £500.00 capital.

Hello,

Wow, Great site!

I have been trading on the demo accounts for 2 years (Alpari the most recent which went bust in January) and have recently opened a live account in July which didn’t get off to a good start. I was in 3 trades that were highly correlated and they went in the wrong direction. Since I didn’t want to get off to a bad start, I moved my stops out twice, in the belief that this was just a slightly bigger correction, which it wasn’t, and paid the ultimate price.

It took me about 2 months to recover my account to its original balance and I am now back to square one. My account is under-capitalized depending on conversion rate in some cases, especially EUR/GBP which is double my 2% risk, and my average risk is around 150 pips, so my first challenge is to get capital of £1000. My aim is 10% profit per month. I am a swing trader on the daily charts foremost since I work 4-on 4-off but I want to try a couple of other time frames when I am off in the week and the breakout trading idea covered in a previous lesson.

Anyway, I am looking forward to checking out the rest of the site and seeing other peoples ideas and getting some more knowledge from the experts.

The Manchester Derby is on soon so I must go.

Phil.

Greetings Phil and welcome to BabyPips.com! Congrats on taking your first steps into live trading because that’s where the real learning happens, but we hope you built a solid base of fundamental knowledge and experience during your two years on demo. Good luck and we hope to see more from ya on here, and if you haven’t started one yet, the forums are a great place to start your trade journal. :slight_smile:

Hi Pipcrawler,

Just thought I should respond. I have mainly traded technically thus far and I have found I have got emotionally attached to the trade when I have traded the news. I am currently reading the news and trying to figure out which is most likely but there are many different opinions on the trade direction. A lot of the news doesn’t guarantee anything in my opinion, figures may do though, but I would prefer these before the event (I am currently reading the COT blog and have started an excel workbook with 5 years data). My first analysis is technical - structure, confluence with the stoch and/or fib, and then most importantly at this point in my trading career, risk. I then move on to the news for hopefully additional confluence, but I am still at an early stage with fundamentals. I will be starting my Trade Journal soon, this will be mainly based on statistics which
is covered in the Journal section of the “School” (once I have figured the calculations out with excel).

Thank you for the response and hope to see you on here too!