If you’re interested in indices, watch https://www.youtube.com/@TraderTom/streams
He’s live most days at 8am and 14:30 UK time trading the session opens. Really good stuff and free
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Market was odd today, very sideways and I got the impression volumes are low, perhaps today is a holiday in some parts of the World.
Anyway, I was very patient today as I could see PA was very sluggish and that stood me in good stead, first trade was just before 8:30 so in effect today is like a late entry strategy day.
Two wins from 4, one loss and one break even (a small profit actually) so overall a profitable day, even though I did close the two winning trades slightly early, here’s the details;
EURUSD first, fairly easy trade you can see what I mean about sideways action, this was the first pair to clearly break out of the range - now I did take this slightly early as it hadn’t quite hit TP, the chart shows it did but it was like a couple of dollars short and due to the very sluggish PA I just took it, of course it would have hit a minute or two later.
GBPUSD next, this was looking great but then reverse just before hitting TP and I left it, knowing it would probably interract with the SMAs and it did pretty much exactly what I thought it would, again I closed this fractionally early for a slightly smaller profit as it looked like the market structure showed a reversal into an uptrend but again if I’d left it then it does hit TP a minute or two later.
EURUSD was the loss, this one did reverse on me, it actually reversed back again but after hitting my SL.
I took USDCAD after 9am but I know that the breakout usually works a few minutes after 9am, but I closed this quite quickly as it was around the same time as the EURUSD had hit my SL so I got a bit spooked, but it did end up showing a small profit.
So overall it’s about a 0.5% profit on the day, I will put up the weekly totals later on.
I will post the trades I didn’t take as well as maybe useful to look back on.
AUDUSD, as you can see, sideways! I didn’t take the early move as even then I felt there wasn’t much volume and it turned out to be a wise move, I drew that line as I was going to take it if it could sustain a break out above that level but it never did.
Similar for USDJPY but this did eventually break to the downside around 9:40am but too late for this strategy.
Someone posted on a forum about the GBPJPY being a good reliable pair to trade using this trategy so I will be dummy trading this for a week or two to see what it’s like, but you can see below it behaved very well today and would have been a nice easy win and did seem to have more volume than most pairs. I want to try to get away from trading so many USD based pairs so it will be a nice addition to what I currently trade;
Weekly update;
A pretty nothing week really but potentially this is a small breakthrough.
I’ve been going through a run of two winning weeks , usually around 1% a week and then two losing weeks - this should have been a losing week and instead I’ve made a tiny profit. So overall I am quite happy with this.
Especially with that win rate, poor, must work on improving that! Also need to stop this losing day, winning day alternating thing.
Learnings from this week;
Entry is pretty good, just try to be patient and look at the overall price action and don’t jump into trades too early.
Stop Losses are getting better too, continue this but look at price action and where the SMAs are as they may mean it’s worth setting a bigger SL, using the middle/far side of the range is working quite well I feel.
Take Profit/Risk to Reward Ratio - I think I’m going to push this to 1/1.1 as pretty much always the price hits that level when I make a profit and it would mean wins are matching losses when you factor in the spread and commissions/charges.
BUT DON’T CLOSE THE WINNING TRADES EARLY!
I need to leave things to run, overall I’ve probably cost myself 0.5% profit this week as practically every trade I closed early would have hit TP, maybe I can still close losing trades early if they look like they definitely will lose.
I won’t trade on Monday (not sure if market is open) due to the bank holiday and also I can’t trade Tuesday as I am in the office, but I think that might be a day to leave alone anyway due to the BH, we will see.
NFP day. Always slow. Be careful trading European morning, it usually ranges until the news. I don’t like ranges, the risk isn’t worth the reward
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Thanks, didn’t know that, so will it go crazy after that news or just back to normal?
I will add this to my notes!
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13:30 it usually moves a lot on the announcement. Sometimes it triggers a big trend, sometimes it retraces quickly and then does whatever it wants to do. But NFP is one of the biggest market movers, so always be careful especially holding trades before it is announced.
Consensus is very low today, so it could trigger a big move up in the unlikely event it is much higher than expected. All the news this week has been suggesting things aren’t hitting the fan just yet. But I think the move back down will be on soon unless tariffs go away
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Completely agree with all of this.
(I won’t be trading today, myself, until after about 2.45 UK time - and even then maybe not because Friday afternoons/evenings aren’t exactly my best times of the week.)
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Friday’s are statistically my worst day of the week but not bad enough not to trade, around 48% WR and my sample size is too small to make a judgement call yet.
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Lots of people say Friday’s are bad for trading, I’ve not noticed this.
But I do appear to be wrong about NFP today. The DAX has slowly chugged up all morning. But the US indices are holding in a very tight range now. FTSE is in a range, but that is pretty normal for it.
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I’m a big fan of MACD to help me with this.
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Yea, looked at 1600 trades worth of data. Winning % for me is all about the same for any day of the week.
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I have tried that, will have another look.