Ok guys…just thought i’d throw this one up…gonna start another thread soon…something like a trading log
at any rate… Long eur/gbp at 0.8708,stop 0.8680, target 0.8740
disclaimer: don’t take this trade. trading is risky, and you can lose all your money doing it.
Jay
P.S. trade filled 8706
long Eur/Usd @ 1.3955
stop 1.3915
target 1.405
disclaimer: don’t take this trade. trading is risky, and you can lose all your money doing it.
short gbp/usd @6067
stop 30 pips
target 50
Jay
P.S. trade triggered as i typed this
ok all…stopped out on eur/gbp for 0.33%. taking one more stab at it here for 0.50%
long 0.8680
stop 8660
target 8720
risking 0.5%
already in trade
went short GBP/USD at 1.6110
risking 0.75%
stop 6160
target 6055 for 0.5%
5930 for for 0.25%
other gbp/usd short stopped out at 0.5% loss.
we’ll see!
Jay
last entry on gbp/usd.
short 6150
stop 30
target 90
risking 0.25%
last trade of the day
gbp/usd looks like it found liquidity. selling off now, short at 6147…risking 0.5%.
stop 6190
target 6060
closing up shop soon… now just left to mange these two trades (eur/usd, gbp/usd)…and see what happens.
Jay
P.S. will summarize all results tomorrow for ya
well guys… I’m thinking this might actually be teh high of GBP/USD for at least the next 200 pips…if not more so…
guess we’ll find out there… so far have a decent short position…may adjust targets down…dependin on how today finishes out.
check back later.
Jay
Hey guys… Just wanted to update these trades.
Ended up down a total of 0.38%. Let gbp/usd run a bit further than i posted here, but other than that…everything traded basically as I posted.
as of this update, GBP/USD traded down about 190 pips. I for one think it has much further to before it makes a new high… and will be looking for opportunities to short it as such.
Will post more as i see more high quality trades that I will take…
Jay
EUR/JPY - Long at 107.26
Stop 85 pips
target 85 pips
risking 0.5%
EUR/JPY 2nd position taken at 107.31 for 0.25%
stop 106.80
target 107.95
Over the weekend I identified two EUR/USD intermediate demand levels:
1.38638-1.38808
1.37980-1.38383
Price showed scant respect for either one. Did I mis-identify these levels? Did anyone else pick them out, too?
Pajo, the problem right now with eur/usd demand levels is that the DX (dollar index) is just coming off a record oversold condition, according to the COT report (commitment of traders report). The dollar index is most heavily weighted against the euro…
As a rule, i’ve never found anything more powerful a predictor of an impending 500 pip - 1500 pip one directional tsunami of a move as an extreme COT reading. It’s not very good at telling you WHEN this will begin…only that you can expect it, and once it begins…it doens’t stop for quite a while.
babypips has more info on COT stuff…maybe i’ll do something on it soon too. just google “larry williams” and “COT”.
check youtube as well. for longer term moves…nothing better out there to trade with, and nothing better to know about, to stay out of it’s way.
Jay
long eur/usd at 3665
30 pip stop
90 pip target
risking 0.75%
correction - 35 pip stop.
Nice marks! didn’t trade but could see them pretty clear
Jay,
I am trying to make a close reading of what you say here, in order to get a clear and solid grasp of this subject.
When you say that the COT is a problem, what exactly do you mean? Are you saying that the approach described in your seven videos is invalid when the COT reports the dollar index as extremely oversold, or when it comes off an extreme oversold condition? I can’t tell which.
I know the dollar index is basically the anti-Euro, so when the index is oversold the Euro is presumably overbought. So, does this mean that it is only demand levels that are invalidated, but not supply levels? And how would one decide the relative weighting of such an effect? In other words, when do you say it argues against taking a long position on the EUR/USD, and when do you not?
I’ve watched the COT for the Pound for several weeks, and see that the commercial traders currently have a strong net long bias. This, I thought, meant that they were banking on the Pound rising some way towards a hypothetical ‘fair’ value, at which point their net position would swing back to neutral. This currently reads as a ‘buy’ indicator for GBP/USD therefore and, since the Pound and Euro are so highly correlated, I am surprised that you foresee a massive fall for the Euro.
I am new to forex trading, but I am reading extensively. What I keep running into is a proliferation of factors that weigh either for or against taking a trade, each more experienced trader cites yet more factors, yet rarely gives precise rules for their application. Having all factors arguing in unison hardly ever happens. The effect is that, though I now look at many more aspects of a trade, my performance simply continues to bob along at roughly breakeven. I am doing no better than I did in my very first month of trading. I take this as a worst case, since, if I was instead consistently losing money I would happily reverse all my decisions and start making it instead. The few other new traders I’ve spoken to seem to have the same problem. Meanwhile, I am dubious of those who publish an apparently unbroken run of winning trades; I wonder whether this is an attempt on their part to convince themselves that they are learning, ‘getting it’ and doing well, or whether they are truly making good progress.
So, this seems to be the crux of the problem with forex trading: there is no shortage of teachers, no shortage of things to consider, a general concensus that support and resistance and trends are important, but hardly any concrete and reliable system to follow, and very few opportunities to try out suggestions, since if one really exercises the filtering being proposed, one would spend most of each trading week watching and watching, and hardly ever taking the plunge to accumulate real performance data on which to base a trading career.
I’m not picking on you in particular here, I hasten to emphasise. Quite the opposite. I am just saying that this appears to be the forex learner’s predicament. The reason I am telling you all this is that in my judgement you seem one of the few who might be able to respond constructively to it.
Pajo, I appreciate your questions, and your faith you have in my ability to answer some of your questions. I will say this… your predicament is very common in the world of trading, and one of many factors that makes trading successfully so difficult for so many.
To start with…here’s a short parable I’ve come across that I think accurately describes what learning to trade is really all about:
In summary, much of this is more artistry than raw, quantifiable analysis. And mastering the technique and developing the abilities of an artist simply take time and experience.
I’ve heard that the average amount of time it takes for those who are successful to develop the insights and abilities needed for success in trading is about 5 years. That’s right… 5 years. If simply finding the “right formula” were the case, it should be a matter of a few months at most, once that “right formula” is found.
The problem with that right formula is that it is dynamic… it CHANGES due to current circumstance. Only through experience can one gain the proper insight into what factors should be ignored, and what factors should be strongly considered. The factor today that is most impacting the market will NOT be the factor tomorrow. And then one must develop the ability to not let emotions influence the correct actions that need to be taken (but thats a whole other story)
Learning to trade successfully, in many ways, is like learning to be a 16th century art expert. You simply cannot learn what makes a masterpiece a masterpiece without seeing it compared to many others like it, and learning the subtle differences between it and others. Furthermore, the next"masterpiece" you see from that era will likley contain VERY LITTLE of the same components that made the first so great…yet, it too is great, and you develop an eye to immediately recognize that.
How could a person possibly recognize two pieces of art to both be “great” when they are completely different from one another? when few if any components that went into their creation are the same from one piece to another? Critical thinking and experience. Simple as that.
ANd what about forged art to mimic this time period? each forgery will likely be constructed in a manner different from others… yet a great art expert can very frequently tell when something is fake, even though every single fake has DIFFERENT clues as to what may be “off” with it. Again…critical thinking and experience
Or, imagine being a vet who treats animals, but yet for some reason, you never see the same type of animal twice in your practice. Each anatomy a bit different, each problem a bit unique. Yet, I’d venture to guess after seeing a few hundered animals, you could likley treat future patients with a greater degree of success than 50%. I hope your starting to see a pattern here in how difficult this would be, and how being 100% correct would likely never be possible, but how gaining enough knowledge, experience, and insight to be more right than wrong would be possible, over time.
This is STILL an oversimplification of the various components that make successful trading hard, but I think it is the closest thing i can give you for you to really comprehend the complexity of trading from the paradigm you are currently struggling with.
For you personally, it sounds like you need something you can trust based on quantified results. I would recommend you gain a great deal of familiarity with some approach to “backtesting”. Develop hard rules from which to govern your trades (as much as possible), and then get some charting package which provides a few years of good data that you could go back, and manually or via a backtesting program run your rules through the many situations that have occurred in the past few years in the markets you are looking at.
see if those rules provide you with a method that is profitable. If so… you have something. If not (which will very very often be the case), it’s back to the drawing board.
Even computer based trading, using algo’s, neural networks, and the like often (if not always) requires constant refinement, and a human supervisor, to know how to fix what no longer works well, or when to simply turn it off as something is happening in the market that is “not normal” and that their program will not be able to account for.
For the most part, successful trading is an organic, holistic process. It is not strictly quantifiable by any sense of the word.
With that being said, I have decided to start a new thread here on babypips. One which will attempt (literally…no idea if I will be able to succeed) to boil down my trading to a few setups and a few trades each day…complete with journaling of thoughts and my analysis of market conditions.
Something like “a view into the mind of a full time trader”. It may end up being a completely fruitless project…but I believe it is worth attempting as the insights I and others may gain from it could well justify the work involved, failure or not.
Anyway, I hope this helps put the proper perspective on what trading is all about, and why success is seemingly so elusive to nearly all who try.
I will post a link to my “new thread” once I have the first entry completed…sometime today.
If this does not properly address your question, please feel free to further explain it to me.
Jay
Here’s a guy that i’ve known about for a long time. If i’m not mistaken, he has had a good deal of experience trading forex on both the institutional side, and from the private retail sector. He knows his stuff, and is one of the few who I feel provides highly informed information to the masses for free. Here’s his thoughts on the eur/usd moves recently…and his last paragraph ends with how easy this type of move up we saw last week would be to kill…
In short, this guy seems to be able to isolate the factors affecting the market RIGHT NOW, and is able to do this with consistency. He’s a good 16th century art expert. I advise to everyone to find a few of these types, and learn to see what they see, how they see it. It can’t do anything but help your trading in the long run.
link:
Jay
Jay, that was a good response, and I do appreciate it.
What you are proposing for the new thread is exactly what I think is required. To extend your analogy concerning works of art, the only way to develop the expertise is to mingle with those who already have it and discuss specifics, not generalities. The generalities are available in books already anyway, for both art history and forex. I hope that you have the powers of frank introspection to be able to say which factors you took into consideration, which you ignored, which of them you feel sure or nervous about, how you weighed them against each other, and so on, without falling prey to post facto rationalisation. This is a real skill, too!
Cheers, Pajo.
I’ve been having the same issues that Pajo is having; over the last few months it’s been so challenging that I’ve resorted to scalping and have left swing trading for a sort of mental exercise.
Oddly… this week, having seen the Yen intervention and having heard of the Euro turmoil having to do with Greece, it sort of ‘spooked’ me enough to not attempt any ‘normal’ swing trade analysis yesterday. I suspect this is ‘herd mentality’ on my part; that being said, my new swing trade analysis demo account, started at 1000.00, remains at 1000.00. On the one hand: well, that’s measurably good, probably. On the other… I’m no smarter, and still firmly in the middle of the herd mentality.
Also of note, the MF Global issue ~ here’s a broker that accidentally mislaid 600 (was it 700?) billion dollars of its customer money… these sorts of things may add to investor fear at institutional scales perhaps… yet another cause for a ‘stampede’ in some random direction, by the market herd.
While history does tend to repeat itself, and rarely is anything new under the sun… I cannot help but wonder, might these truly be interesting times? Perhaps even difficult for the seasoned art experts? Eremarket I too have faith in your abilities, it’s more a matter of what the market is handing us these days. I’d hate to be learning the stock market during the year 1929, for instance… or perhaps worse yet in 1927/28… what would a skilled trader with a decade’s experience in the Roaring Twenties, make of the next two decades? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.
I’ll risk one slight divergence to your thread, with regard to the jade parable… as fate would have it, I’m a bit of a jade hunter. Here in California, we have a fair bit of jade, but not of the easily found variety like say, in British Columbia or asia. Along the coast, in the Big Sur area, and also in the southern deserts we have a fair bit of it. I’ve spent some years acquiring that exact skill: finding jade stones amongst entire beaches full of other rocks and pebbles on our remote sea coasts. Sand Dollar beach has a little if you are very sharp eyed, Jade Cove nowadays has very little (for perhaps obvious reasons).
It was, to say the least, not an easy thing to learn. Jade is a cousin of serpentine, a rock that for all intents and purposes looks just like jade, and quite often, especially here, overwhelm a jade site with its presence. Even worse, many long~respected jade objets d’art from antiquity actually are serpentine, or agate, or some other such thing… it’s not like you can just grab a massive, thousand year old statue from a temple and start scratching at it or weighing it with a crane.
I’ve brought others along on my jade hunts now and again, and tried to explain how to spot jade. Invariably they come back with a fairly hardened, solid, well rounded, beautiful piece of serpentine. The usual real explanations don’t work very well… jade is harder than steel and will laugh at your attempt to scratch it; jade has a sort of ‘coldness’ when pressed to your cheek that other rocks do not have; it has a weight to it, a strange silkiness when polished that other stones do not have, and has a special sort of ringing tone to it when struck.
None of these explanations, as accurate as they are, seem to work at all.
What does work? Two odd questions, mainly. One, did you practically get yourself killed coming down the cliff to this particular beach? A good prerequisite. Two… forget about jade, look out at the rocks and imagine deep time. Imagine a decade of the sea moving these stones. Now a hundred years of it… now a thousand, now a million. See how the rocks have been strewn about as the seas rose and fell, again and again. Most rocks turn to powder and dust against the power of the sea… a rare few are harder than all that, and over millions of years, simply pick up a high polish under a salty, ancient surface patina. Look for these ancient, ancient rocks, the stones that have survived here longer than mountains. At that point, anyone who can do that has a far better chance of actually finding California jade. I’ve seen people pick up black jade out of a pile of other ordinary sea~polished black stones, after ‘getting it’ ~ I’m holding a piece now, from one of the excursions. In extremely intense sunlight, nothing less, this piece betrays itself as a deep, dark, benthic green with hints of intense color deep within.
Away from its natural environment like that… I’ve got only modest skill at spotting true jade from fakes, especially if the pieces are waxed up. Which obfuscates the true nature of the stone a fair bit. Only the ‘cheek’ test works for me at that point ~ jade has a cold, cold soul to it somehow. But at the seacoast, after years of hunting it, I know what I’m doing. It’s a very narrow skill, and I still have much to learn.
Alright, no more divergences… I suppose the whole point of the jade thing is that yes, I do believe this skill is attainable. Perhaps some things are as difficult to ‘verbally’ teach, as learning to ride a bicycle. One can… and it can be explained, but explanations somehow fail to engage what really must be done.
Once market conditions seem to calm down a bit, I’ll be hunting some setups myself.