A bad day but oh well. Took 2 trades in the same zone. 1st one as barely stopped out so i took a 2nd one on 4h PA. there was a doji and then a bear candle which thought would be confirmation but stopped out again.
Eur/GBP short
price: .87063 SL .87234 TP: .86284 Closed: .87234
here you can see my level in green and the orange arrow is my original entry. then the blue arrow after the doji since i was just barely stopped out before.
both trades net: -34.04
Took some short term scalps today. Got slipped into a bad SL by news in UJ when i was protecting my profits. So that sucked since i had a large position on that. This was when spread spiked to 10 pips. OUCH!! I was up about 3 pips but with that slip i am even. But since my lot size was large on that trade I am quite negative for the day. YOWZAA. well still up $ for the week so no complaining i guess.
Alright so i was done for the day pretty much because i was frustrated with earlier. So i decided to play some Deux Ex: Human revolution. Yeah its a pretty cool game I’ll admit, but i suck at it and keep dying. Anyway. I get a message on my phone from my alerts. I though wait a second I am pretty sure I am flat, then i check it it says TP reached. WHAAAA!! so i decide to check the action. So as you know all the central banks got together and reached an agreement on USD loans/liquidity something or other. Basically volatility wonderland. First I will post trades that were resting orders that were triggered Then news scalps.
USD/JPY
Price:77.783 Sl:77.391 TP:76.951 Closed at TP
I took a 1H level, that was inside the wicks of a 4H level. I got short on a down trend. news just was the catalyst that triggered this short but i pretty much got the 60% of the move in 9 seconds. This is my biggest win in UJ and because levels are so small in UJ my lot sizes are larger. So it was a great capital booster. I took my profit right above the level ranging at the 1H timeframe. We got right about 3:1 on this trade. Yes I wish i could have gotten more but its not too bad.
Net + 33.2
EUR/USD
Price:1.38883 SL:1.39382 TP:1.37382 Closed at SL
Seriously I was closed out here on this trade by the spread of the news. If you look closely the candle does not actually touch my stop loss. This is very unfortunate but it is what you have to deal with in spot Forex. Anyway this is technically a 4H level I have zoomed in here to 1H for clarity. Blue TP red SL Green entry. all in 1 candle
Net -49.9 pips.
Also I did some news scalping. I use a bollinger band method for the initial upswing. But since i was playing a video game by the time i got in my first scalp lost me plenty. Then i realized the momentum had shifted so i played shorts. 3 wins 1 big loss. Up only 8 pips. But overall profitable.
Total: -8.7 but my capital is up. I don’t know what to say about that but maybe i should change accounting methods.
Beautiful long on the eur/usd daily demand zone…thats been my big money maker this whole week. love the usd/jpy trade…i missed the short…but i was in for the rocket up long, and got out well before that supply level was hit.
Derek, you are on your way man. Wish I could stick around more these days…but I’ve been busy help a few aspiring traders, and this has taken most of my free posting time.
Anyway, will do another webinar sometime in the next week or 2, hopefully you can drop by… Keep up your trade log, and trade analysis. I don’t say this often, but you are actually on a road that will drop you off at the destination you seek. Enjoy the journey, keep a clear head, and send me a christmas card from that private island you’ll have.
BTW…todays eur/usd short you got stopped on? yea… it was my best trade of the day…in futures
build your account up, and come over to the dark side…where spreads are rare, brokers arn’t bookies, comissions are comparatively cheap, and an artificial market won’t stop you out during a news event.
was a great trade though, good eye. maybe next one we ride together eh?
Here are 2 trades that just closed. I hope that writing about them will make me feel better but i am not sure. Either way I thought I was going to have a glorious day with winners. Well I was ****y and tried to emulate something from someone who is much more skilled than I. Mistake 1) taking 2 correlated pairs at the same time at basically their equivilant levels, yes it would have worked out awesome if both won, but when they both lose its like having 2 lots on the same currency. 2)LETTING WINNERS BECOME LOSERS. I have been in the habit of moving my stops to BE after 30 pips, but i have been debating the cost of doing that vs letting it just stop me out. I think the system has to be more refined then that. If price is just ranging right above my trade I should just close it or move to BE. Even if it doesnt move 30+ pips away. This may cost me profit in the long run, but also cuts loses to 0. What to do?
EUR/JPY
Price: 105.789 SL:105.550 TP:106.335
Here i was up about 25 pips. I thought it was a good level. But i get the tail to stop me out. Now i see here that I did not include the tail of one of the wicks in my level. This may have been a critical mistake in trying to increase my lotsize. But as current price action looks it doesnt matter because I think i would be SL’d anyway. The level has been penetrated to deeply and now will fail.
Net:-23.9 Pips
EUR/USD
Price 1.37951 SL:1.37662 TP: 1.39252 closed at SL
Here i actually broke my 30 pip mark by 1.2 pips but since i wasnt at my computer at the time I only had my cellphone. I couldnt accurately gauge the graph. So i did not move my SL. Now I take a loss because of it. Also since these are both very correlated with EUR as the basis pair it was like putting 2 positions on the same pair. I would have won or lost double. The amount of variance in the markets was little. Next time I have 2 orders trigger like that simultaniously I will cancel the one taht takes the longest to become a winner.
Net:-28.9
//Scalps: -8 pips. Ugh some revenge trading maybe. I dont know I felt pretty bad.But since i realized it was stupid i just closed my trade.
Still have an open position Short on EG. Its doing reasonably well. at the time of this writing 36 pips up. enough to negate 1 loss.
This was my major win of the day. Although after all the loses i ended up cutting my winner short i think. I didnt get the entry perfectly on the daily level. I actually had to play catch up and did a market order about 10 pips away from where i should have gotten in. But with these kinds of things I think if price starts moving away with out me getting filled i can take a market as long as its within 10 pips or less of my price. Basically I am targeting for my profit right above the large congestion on the down side. There was some psychology as that speed bump you see is causing ranging and i had a lot of losses earlier. I did scale out 25% of my position @ 48.2 pips then i ended up closing the trade @ 36.8 as price continued upward. I dont even know if price would have made it the entire way down its another 95 pips or so.
Red is SL. BLue is TP target. light blue is scale out and orange is close.
Average net: 39.22 pips
Here is an image of one of my bad scalps. from Cable
I lost 11.5 pips
Here is my good scalp. When i was more focused and not as ‘revenge’ trady or emotional. This one obviously had more thought into it. And luckily made up for a large chunk of my stupid scalp loses
Here was a much better setup. Played very aggressively with my stoploss to protect profits on such short term trades. Also my TP did not get filled because of spread i presume. so imoved my SL down to the top of the candle hoping that it would shoot down and trigger again. But it didnt. 21.1 pip scale out 28% 19.3 closed.
average net: 19.82 pips
the other really bad scalp i took on EJ was for certain revenge trading. But i closed quickly.
net:-5.4
Weeks summary:
account capital overall: -4.695%
pips gained/lossed: 76.175
Wow what a roller coster ride. Today really cost me a lot of profit if i hand not made those mistakes I would have had over 1/3 more profits. Really teaches you to move your BE aggresively and stay out of emotional trades. SO for next week I will work on that. Also since I may consider my goal to be % capital I have no idea but i will contemplate it. Because pips are great and all but since each lot size is different it not comparing apples to apples.
eitherway a profitable week I cant complain. looking good going into next week and since I had a winning week I am allowed to increase my risk per trade. see you guys around!! Cheers and good pippin!!!
Alright Its the weekend again, and Its time for the weekly analysis for the next trading week. If you guys haven’t noticed I have added an INDICATOR. OH GOD!!! its a 200 EMA I use it to purely remind me of which direction the trend is in, I do not trade off of it in anyway. But since I will be trading 8 currencies now its just a quick visual reminder of what direction the action is moving.
EUR USD
Daily
Same level as last week. So boring. Basically that level worked out I picked and I was picking up longs all week. Got ****y on friday and let 60% of my profits fall away like a idiot but we will correct that this week. YOU MAY LOSE MONEY BUT DON’T LOSE THE LESSON I always say.
4H
A new supply level has formed on the way down. It is smack in between the larger time frame supply and demand zones. I will short here no problem. Really looks good. The way its climbing up a demand level may form and that would negate my trade but if the approach is good. Then we have a bun in the oven.
GBP/USD
Daily
Here you can see price has pierced the lower portion of the demand level but has returned back into it. The 4 H will show why this has not shot up as fiber did and why I did not continue to take longs here.
4H:
I always talk about how entry into the level is important and why this is a serious consideration. You see as highlighted in the orange block. You have a supply level 1H/4H forming here that creates a problem. This is why price bounced back and forth creating ranging and therefore builds up resistance very close to the level.
Here is the 1H level to show you the level that formed before entering the larger TF demand and then another one was formed closer to the line. SO you can see that each of these levels created moves closer and closer to the level. So its like in the battle of Supply and Demand the Supply army keeps making more base camps and moving them closer to the Demand homeland.
This is why I have not traded much cable at all this week.
USD/JPY
Daily:
We have a lot of supply levels stacked on each other. I do not know how much more Japanese intervention we will have. But I think every time it spikes up it will be smacked right back down. There is a candle that touched the lowest and smallest level and just smashed back down to create a hammer formation.
4H
So you can see this daily level get very close to it but every time price gets there it just races down. Although price has never actually penetrated it. So I would continue to short when the yen gets there again.
USD/CHF
Daily:
Obviously the intervention created a level. So we have that. Now we are possibly currently making a new supply level. But we have a Supply level on the left as well. Although with all this intervention I am a bit nervous playing the swissy. But its good to keep an eye on.
This graph shows exactly why I don’t really want to trade the swissy anymore. just look at that massive amount of ranging. Also not following the general rules of a free market any more so I am probably going to stay away, usually like with BoJ the intervention is large and of short duration. the Swiss are doing constant intervention which really is shown here and knocks this off my trade list unless something really pretty pops up.
AUD/USD
Daily
We have a lot of good supply levels. You can see how price moved away with out touching the only demand level at the bottom. Which indicates strength. But it looks like price might rally up and create a new demand level. BUt we have 2 really supply levels. 1 stack of supply on top of supply and 1 daily level inside a weekly level.
4H
just a close up of the daily’s. Nothing of note really stands out. I have highlighted the possible level creation. But only the PA will confirm.
EUR/GBP:
Daily
New demand level.Also I have shown here a trade I took from that daily level. Now I had a order set at the orange line for a conservative entry. However once i saw price move away from the larger level canceled and took a market. This was my best trade from Friday.
Alright now for something tasty. I am adding 2 more currencies to my little corral here. USD/CAD and EUR/JPY. You may be asking why are you doing that isnt 6 enough. Well here is the deal. I want to have some currencies that are less correlated so another comdoll and a yen cross helps do that. I had problems with many trades that are correlated. So I will not be taking the trades that are at similar levels on correlated currencies. I have to decide how to systematize it this weekend as I evaluate my own system after this weeks performance. But having these currencies allows me to take only the BEST set ups and not try to take trades that are not there. I have
USD/CAD
weekly:
We have an overall downtrend, and 3 supply levels. The 1 and 2 are great levels but really far away. the 3rd one is really sloppy and large. Yes it has been penetrated once before but the % of penetration is really low compared to its overall size. 1 Demand level this one has been hit before and has caused price to race away in the fashion i like. So this level may be deleted in the future depending on the price action.
Daily:
Sloppy levels all over the place. I wouldn’t consider the yellow box a level even though it meets the drop base rally criteria. It may provide a speed bump. Also both of the larger time frame levels have been touched twice. This is really going to be a confirmation entry trade if I take anything here in the next coming days.
4H:
So i was convinced by looking at the daily level that the yellow box level will fail but because of this ranging that’s occurring right above that level. gives more credence to its future failure. Exactly the same story that’s happening with the cable.
EUR JPY
Weekly:
Wow I haven’t seen this before. only supply levels. every demand level has been broken. Very interesting. We will be entering a type of market that I would consider clean air if we continue down.
Daily:
2 daily levels here. the lower one that’s very tall. is not very optimal but is going with the trend. I could see using a confirmation here but because we have no demand level to measure a profit target. It could be legit but i have no idea really. The higher up one i think is more high probability but again. With no demand level we have no idea if it will reach there or not.
4H:
nothing really at all interesting.
Well that wraps up my weekly analysis. This is taking longer than usual because of the 2 new currencies. But doing your homework is important, so cheers and good pippin.
Due to several wins and breaking my weekly goal fairly consistently, I am reevaluating my systems and goals.
My risk % of capital is going to be .5% on all trades. I have done a calculation on the possibility I could lose 100 trades in a row. If i did do that i would only have lost about 38% of my capital. Plenty to keep going and the probability of losing 100 consecutive trades is quite low. With my more constant wins and smaller losers I feel more confidant in the time to up my risk and try to create some more capital.
Goals:
Having a pip goal is great. But its meaningless, because each one of my trades is a different lotsize since position size for each trade is unique. Therefore I will change my weekly goal to a % of capital gained from the previous week. I had just been keeping track of the overall capital change, but since my capital is smaller then what it used to be I will have to use a more recent point in order to properly gauge myself. 1.5% sounds like a fairly easy to get goal so I will use that. also having a position size of .5% and a usual target of 3:1 (not that i hit it that often) but 1 single trade could in essence put me over my goal.
Also I have added a lot of new techniques and refinements to my game that I hope will bring me more pips.
Using more correlations in trade decisions, evaluating liquidity, and more effective means of judging order flow. Hopefully these 3 new tools will increase my wins. Although simulating them has been quite difficult because of a lot of factors that need to be run at the same time. So I will just have to put them into practice live. I tried to simulate but it was utter hell and nothing worked well and was very cumbersome.
[I][B]
REVISED SYSTEM:
Weekly goal: 1.5% of capital from starting of the week.
Risk Management: .5% on all trades[/B][/I]
Well 1st trade out of the gate was bad. I think I may be miss using correlations but its ok. Its a learning process. But I really feel that its going to be beneficial in the future. I am also conentrating on using the higer time frames. Really fucosing on the four hour and the dailytime frames. I also tried to use price action to confirm the trade before i took it. Even though it failed this time I will keep trying. Over the long haul i am sure it will be more effective.
AUS/USD
Price:1.02517 SL:1.01849 TP:1.03717 Closed at SL
here is the daily level i was looking at just straight up and down to create the level.
here is the 4 hour TF. the yellow arrow is the PA candle I used to confirm. Great bounce up and doji. I watched to see if the 4h kept with momentum and entered on the blue candle. It looked quite promising but then just turned around and destroyed me
Seriously How does anyone use this? I have lost every trade waiting for my 4H confirmation of a daily level. Or it increases my Risk and decreases my reward to a point where the trade is untakable. Really all this does is put me in the middle of the supply demand curve and turn me into a more ‘novice trader’ as sam seiden would say. Seriously WTF is this all about. Either I am doing it wrong or this is just some kinda BS. UGH at least I can rant in my own thread and not bother anyone. Jesus. Usually people say oh yeah PA confirmation wait for that and then you are more certain. Well after back testing daily levels with confirmation I only increased my win rate by about 1% over 60 months. Which is just garbage. Something must be wrong with me.
So here are a set of trades. I was focusing only on Daily 4H levels with candle confirmation. Hoping staying at these very high time frames would help me. Which has so far been an utter failure.
Blue arrow is pinbar confirmation of reversal. Entered on the yellow arrow candle. looked like it was going brilliant then BAM right in the kisser.
net -66.8 pips
Eur/GBP
Price:.86965 SL:.87215 TP:.26265 Closed at SL
Here i was using a technique that I have been working on to get back into trades. So we have been in a down trend. SO i used the opposing 4H level i knew would cause a retracement. I thought after hitting that ‘speed bump’ since we were in between 2 daily levels it would continue down after the weekend. Well I was way wrong. Anyway i entered after seen in the big bear candled turned out i sold at the bottom then we rallied.
Net: - 25 pips
Capital: -1% (.5% risked on each trade as lot sizes differ)
U need to read D TF first. Without knowing where price will end for the day will make buying or selling on a lower time frame a guess work.
Which will of cause make the entire activity of trading a thing of luck.
We read where price is going to end up, then mark any support or resistance areas close by like how you are doing. Then we go into H4 to mark the same and finally look at H1. Any lower then that and you are going to get many false entries.
Drawing a single horizontal line at the price opening / closing area presents a much more clearer picture of support and resistance instead of drawing a rectangle area.
Finally, the rectangle area that you draw. If we are to take it as the support and resistance area where prices range on H1 or lower TF before going in one direction. then its best we buy at the bottom of the rectangle, not when it breaks out at the top or in the middle of the box.
This is important because the difference in SL will really affect your profitability.
This is where experienced traders have a very distinctive edge over newbies.
They enter at the bottom because they already know where price is going to end up for the day. Their SL is usually about 5 to 20 pips at most.
I often wait for a candle after a classic pullback is done. This most often goes back up the wick before falling. We get to catch real good price entries this way. And finally, an entry like this, when moved to BE when we are holding say 20 pips, very rarely gets stopped out.
I think Nikita is basically right on here Derek. You are also choosing some entries that don’t have nearly the velocity of price move away from the point of origin to verify a real supply/demand imbalance.
3 most important aspects of supply/demand trading:
Quality of the level (how far, how fast, and how crystal clear the stallling point)
How price re-entered the level (how fast, how smooth)
Where you are on the larger term supply demand curve (moving from daily demand to supply? or visa versa? etc)
Your eur/gbp trade is taking a relatively insignificant level as price was rocketing up from daily demand…but had not yet hit daily supply. If your going to get in front of a moving train before it reaches its stop…you’d better be a mountain. otherwise…
your aud/usd level was so weak price could barely move up with any velocity. it also didn’t move up 3:1 RR from what i can tell…
You need to really pick the fastest moves, the most perfect looking patterns that indicate a real supply and demand imbalance.
Yeah your right guys, Eremarket and Nikita. I will really work on it. I should take the PA entries that just pierce the bottom edge of the rectangle/ line then bounce away in a strong fashion. I have moved a trade to BE yesterday on a PA confirmation it was going swimmingly until lots of volatility about the news and then dropped 55 pips into my BE as i can tell. Still going over a lot of the re quotes from OANDA. I am just frustrated with the PA because i don’t know what to consider a PA confirmation, does it have to leave the zone quickly, any PA inside the zone. I think its a valuable tool but since i have always used limit orders my head never had to be in the game at that moment. I always could just set and forget. Either i was right or i was wrong without having to be ‘in the moment’. Well we will work on some entries today an see what happens. I am comforted by the fact that I can lose 100 consecutive times with my .5% and still have over 60% of my total capital. Really making 100 back to back mistakes and still having over half of your capital gives some sincere confidence that i can pretty much fumble my way through the dark and still once i figure out what the hell went wrong stage some kind of comeback. As always I really appreciate your quality feedback guys. I really feel that you both have an interest in seeing me improve which motivates me endlessly. I will keep my nose to the grindstone until either my face falls off or i am sharp enough to understand the game. Charts are maps to treasure, and i am on a treasure hunt. The problem is all the Indiana Jones type booby traps along the way. Maybe at the moment I am more like short round than indy.
So basically this morning I had 4 re quotes. and Today when i tried to scale out i got an error on my limit order and it did not execute, and then i had to take a market 10 pips below my target value. So all in all OANDA really FUC-KED me. Oh and my Stop losses got slipped. Anyway it was a winning day so who cares!
Took a 4H level here long. It was doing quite well. Then I moved my SL to BE while i slept and i got stopped out. No big deal here. I covered my spread and made like a penny oh well move on. Oh yeah well since i have to scale out using a limit order. I had a resting order there so if my price got there it would sell 1/3 of my lot size. But guess what since i was stopped out i sold an lost 6 pips but really that just teaches me not to leave scale out orders laying around.
GBP/USD
Price:1.56944 SL: 1.56744 TP: 1.56724 Close @ 1.56717
So here i am trying to take a 15 min level. there is a lot of ranging over head but i figure i can take a small scalp. Anyway I guess there is some sort of news or something and then i get slipped on my SL by 3 pips. YAY!!.
Net -22.7 pips
SO now we get to some news trades of Cable.
After getting stopped out I had a scalp for 3.1 pips.
GBP/USD
Price: 1.56282 TP:1.56678 SL: 1.560583 Closed trailing stop @ 1.56581
This is a straight news fade. I knew I had a higher time frame demand level below me so i felt very confidant. Actually I am quite good at playing the news, I usually profit. These are all the dotted lines. Also note that as soon as i reached 15 pips i move my SL to BE.
Net+29.9 pips
GBP/USD
Price:1.56212 SL:1.55113 TP: 1.57614 Closed at : 1.56716
This was a legitimate swing trade from a long term demand level below. But considering the conjestion above and the nasty trend building i decided to be aggresive with it since it was also triggered during the volatile news time.
NEt+50.4 pips
Still currently in a profitable trade long AU. will get back to that as soon as it closes.
So Lets start with the profitable trade from yesterday.
AUS/USD
Price:1.02049 SL:1.01780 TP:1.02650 TF: 15 min level
Scale out 1: 1.02259-33% Scale out 2: 1.02167 Close:1.02068
I had a scale out higher up 10 pips above my #1. But the order was canceled due to an error by OANDA. Jesus these errors are just racking up. Really making me worry about putting in larger sums here. Definately going to move to Futures at some point when i cut my teeth. Anyway I just kept scaling out as price turned against me and didnt trigger my TP zone. Although It was very very close.
Net average 11.6 pips (well its something)
Now here i was sleeping and woke up to a long list of stop outs.
EUR/USD short
Price: 1.37057 TP:1.36656 SL:1.37276 Closed at SL TF: 1H
Here you can see the small cluster of 1H candles. Giving me 3:1 so i took it but as you can see here price just blasted through.
Net:-21.9 pips
EUR/USD long
Price:1.36177 TP: 1.36928 SL:1.35908 TF:1H
So i took a long here it has 4H significance but its really a 1H level.
Net:-26.9
USD/CHF short
Price:.89883 TP:.88582 SL:.90192 Closed @ .90105 TF: Daily with 4hour inside
Just mangled this level. I closed it early because of TP.
level and post continued in next post due to image limits
