That bums me out MeiHua, it seems to me like you were really on the right track. My observation is that there is no way your trading method would net you a 10% loss so quickly, it must have been something going on in your head. All I can say is stick with the system you have, maybe tweak it a little but mainly [B][I]work on that psychology[/I][/B].
By the way if you’re looking for a less newbie environment to chat feel free to hit me up on skype 
Hi MeiHua,
Really sorry to hear about your loss, not surprised that it has dented your confidence. As others have said, I would look hard at your approach to money management - personally I never have more than 4% of my account exposed to the market at any one time, and then only in Pairs that are not correlated. Even on a bad day when everything goes wrong, it should not be possible to lose 10% in one day. I just think that the psychological impact of losing that much at once is too damaging to risk it.
Also, I would seriously urge you not to trade news announcements. I know that opinion is divided on this subject, but for me it is just too unpredictable over the long haul. Firstly, we do not always know what the content of an announcement will be, and secondly the market does not always act as we would expect. I was Long Cable yesterday, saw the GBP news coming up, and I just closed the trade. It made me 0.5% on my account or so, so not a great trade - but had I left it on the table I would have been stopped out. Even if I see afterwards that a news announcement would have pushed my trade comfortably through my TP, I still don’t regret closing it early - it’s gambling, to me, not professional trading. Particularly while you are just learning your craft, I would just stay away from the news and stick to a simple strategy with fewer variables.
I am very sorry about the outcome of your trading week, and understand that you will be feeling low about it - but don’t give up. Just move forwards with a small risk per trade, rebuild your confidence, and try to only trade in calm waters with steady PA while you get your confidence back. The highs of trading the news well occasionally are just not, for me, worth the lows of being caught out by it while you are a beginner.
And get some solid money management in place!! I risk 1% per trade, fixed, and never expose more than 4% at any one time. There are many effective models - but a system that lets you lose 10% in a day is not a good model for the long haul. Sunday is a good day to design a new system, or review the one you have. I do this weekly.
Hope this helps, have a good weekend, and come back refreshed and reinvented!!
ST
I really appreciate everyone’s comments here. definitely going to pull my self up. Actually I only risk[U] .5% on a trade[/U]. I guess I was not clear but [U]10.27% is total negative over my entire trading career.[/U] Which is actually 8 weeks on the dot today. Actually from [I]Monday - Friday i only lost 2.67% total[/I]. I am going to take a hard look at psychology and my mistakes. Here in the forum for certain i find great support and advice. I think staying out of the chat is probably going to be for the best. I have noticed it does catch me out of trades and i spend way to much time explaining something or getting into some kind of argument for no reason. When i should just focus on my trades. I am sorry for the confusion I think it made the point the same though. If it was 10% or 3% makes no difference, i [B]KNOW[/B] there is something wrong with my trading now. I need to get that mended before I can take a step forward again.
These past 8 weeks have been a hell of a ride that i have completely enjoyed. From going to the baby pips school, to finding a path in trading that i truly click with, to being able to put together 100+ pip trades not to mention 200+ pip weeks, to the utter lows that I have just experienced. I truly admire and appreciate everyone who has looked on and commented in my thread, Nikita, Simon, shroom, goldy, eremarket, and the rest. Have really contributed to my development. I am still a infant now falling on my face whilst trying to crawl. But watching people walk and run in front of my eyes and reaching for it. I am definitely in this for the long haul (that’s why we call it going long isn’t it 
)
So after some keen reflection and some tweaking my system and most importantly. MY OWN PSYCHOLOGY. Lets see what the next few weeks bring. As always cheers and good pippin.
Good luck in forex temple. I’ll still be bothering you on skype
After some serious thinking and discussions with various traders over the weekend, I am not going back to demo. But that does not mean there is has been no change. I am renovating my strategy quite a lot, as you have seen I traded for all intents and purposes straight supply and demand. What I saw I took. But now I will be trying to add in some things to help me filter my trades. Every trader I have seen has a system that involves confluence. Mine does not, basically if it looks like a level and meets my definition of one then you take a trade. Well it’s time to put a filter on these and try to target the levels that will give me the largest price reactions. I know the core of my trading system s/d can be profitable no doubt. I also know that I am taking levels that only react a small amount say giving me less than 1:1. So I hope that I will be able to add some new criteria in order to add confluence to my system. These are all secondary and can no trigger or even initiate investigation into a potential area without a legitimate supply demand zone already existing. The tools I am investigating are as follows: fibs, fractals, psych numbers, trend lines, volume, pivots, and of course candlesticks and their formations. I hope that by only taking solid levels that also have atleast 2 additional factors of confluence will increase my win rate as well as pip profits while keeping me out of the lower probability trades. There is absolutely nothing complex about it all of these tools are in every traders toolbox. Also I will maintain my .5% risk capital and not increase it due to the losing week. However if this week does poorly I will reduce it by half or if I take 3 consecutive losing trades Which ever comes first. Thanks for all of your continued support and let’s see if this frankenstein can do something!!!
Hi MeiHua,
I am happy to hear that you are coming back. I have been reading over your threads over the past week or so and have enjoyed hearing about your journey. I am a new trader as well and am still in the experimental phase of trying to refine my trading plan. I have been trading a demo account for a few months using supply and demand as well as my main basis for my trade setups. Anyways glad to see that you are not giving up and continuing your journey to consistent profits. I look forward to more posts!
Happy trading!
All right guys. Here are some pics of my new charts. To be perfectly honest there is a lot going on here. But I will clean them up and remove things that are not very significant as the week progresses. I really liked my clean charts. Its not too bad if i play 15 min and 1H charts but if you zoom out its pretty nuts. but a lot of the lines i drew are from weekly or monthly fractals or pivots. So they will only appear during the day very rarely. I really have no idea if i am doing the fibs right i just throw them up on fractals basically. if they look important or are related to the area we are currently in. I guess they are very subjective.
Fiber
Cable
Eur/Gbp
USD/JPY
EUR/JPY
GBP/JPY
USD/CHF
EUR/CHF
AUD/USD
EUR/AUD
USD/CAD
EUR/CAD
NZD/USD
AUD/NZD
Alright so as you can see these charts look like someone took me to the disco. Anyway I am going going to trade inside the demand and supply zones as before with .5% risk on each trade. I am hoping that this will help me kind of make a turning point. I know people are going to say, oh thats to complicated, you dont need all that nonsense.
Changes I have made:
i have added volume indicator with 20period EMA
Weekly monthly and daily pivots
Fibs
and a No Trade zone
The supply demand zones are still created as they were previously all the above are just add ons. Hopefully going to filter out worse trades and make the trades i do take more profitable.
Also I am banning myself from the chat room. So if anyone is interested in contact me. Hit me up here or through PMs. Not that anyone really cares to contact me anyway. But I am truly beginning to think that the Chat room is -EV for me, so time to cut that out of my trading life.
As mentioned to me by someone who has contributed a lot to my trading development, I forgot the most important point: focusing on VIRGIN DAILY LEVELS.
Alright so I took my first trade using the new system which worked brilliantly. But on the same pair I went against my original bias at a pretty good looking level. But guess what, it didnt mean jack because I was coming from a daily level. What I realized is that even though Price may break through my "no trade zone’ and become ‘over sold’ doesnt mean that smaller time frame levels are going to work. I hope the following charts will explain my thought process. Not that its very good.
USD/CHF #1 short
Price:.92965 SL:.93225 TP:.92185
Scaled out 50%: .92379
Closed at: .92301
Here is the daily chart, I see the pinbar rejection as we were inside a daily level way to the left, but have been drifting in it but havent see a push down. So i saw the small bear candle and it was above my No trade zone meaning i should go short. SO previous day was short and today was above no trade zone.
We had a previous weekly and daily high in this level. Also we had a daily R1 right at the top of the zone. No fibs made it there but that along with a normal S/D level made it an area of intrest. So i watched the PA for some confirmation to enter. My TP was at the weekly pivot. Really only shot for 1:1 here but now i see that was a mistake. But hindsight is BS. My SL was right above daily R1. Basically once we got about 6 pips away from my TP i moved my SL 6 pips away to lock in profits. got stopped out.
Net average: 35.5 pips
USD/CHF #2
Price:.91755 SL:.91486 TP:.92055 Closed @ .91488
You can see this level is a pinbar and then a large move up through the no trade zone on the higher timeframes. But I am zoomed into the 15 min as that is what i was working with. Here we see a really good level in my opinion. We had a fib, and a previous daily low, I did enter 5.5 pips into my No trade zone but i was right under daily S1, which i read was pretty significant. Anyway, this was a bad trade. Because my bias of the day was short, just because i crossed my ‘no trade zone’ and things are ‘over sold’ doesnt really mean that its going to stop at a 1H/15min zone. We are coming from daily areas here. I guess its like trying to stop a freight train with a cinderblock wall, just not going to happen.
Net: -26.7
Take away lesson: stick with the bias from the daily levels, crossing the no trade zone does not mean immediately go long!
Took a usdcad long earlier today. Got stopped out turned out that I was not doing my analysis correctly atleast I was able to reduce my risk by about half before I got stopped out. I am turning off my computer because I don’t want to do anything stupid. Anyway hope to get some good ones later this week missed out on a good swissy trade cause I am not at my computer all the time and I discounted it because of the slow move out but now I know better. Anyway cheers and good pippin
Here is the chart for the ucad mentioned earlier
USD/CAD
Price:1.03257 SL:1.02783 TP:1.04757 Closed at New SL@ 1.02986
This was inside a daily pin bar. Although as was pointed out to me after the fact, it was not qualified as a daily level. But at the time i saw a lot of confluence. We had, a 50% fib, a 62% fib, it was the previous weeks low as well as the monthly pivot were all in contained within my green box. So i was very certain this would be a high probability trade.
Now your probably asking yourself why did you enter so high. Well it is the start of the level on the left in the 1H but i was actually in a 5 min chart. In a feeble attempt to enter using VSA.
As time went on i was able to reduce my risk and came out better even though i lost so thats ok. Hopefully better trade management helped me preserve capital.
Net -27.1
EUR/JPY
Price:105.902 SL:107.050 TP:105.35 Closed at SL
This one was a fresh daily level by my reckoning. We had weekly R2 and monthly pivot just below the level. Inside the level we had 50% fib 62% fib, daily r2 and it was also a previous days high. well i was wrong. I put a limit order at the bottom of the level because thats where i thought the origin of the move was.
Daily
4H
Net -55.2
I like your live charts. They are not “after posted charts”, like a lot in these forums.
I wish you best success in your trades.
AUD/USD
Price: 1.01856 SL:1.03355 TP: .9987 Closed at new SL @1.01612
Scale Out 33%:1.01691
Scale In 16%: Entered 1.01445 Closed SL 1.01612
I know the image is messy but it just takes to long for me to replicate everything on a clean chart. So this is a virgin daily level, we have weekly R2 right below. When i entered we were well above yesterdays R3 but the previous days R2 was inside the box. We also had several fibs overlapping as you can see, 0% 38% 24%. This was also the start of the major drop off from last week.
You cant see the original stop loss because its too far away. But this makes it much clearer what i was doing. I got stopped out on a spike right before the news of US trade balance and unemployment claims. I also had another attempt to scale in but that one was BE.
Average weighted net +21.76
Alright I am reducing my risk back down to[U] .25% [/U]now after a losing week. I will no longer be posting my weekly analysis considering it takes a really long time and i think pretty much everyone who has read this understands what I am doing. Also no one really acts or talks about it so its just a waste of time. I will continue to post my trade results though.
[B]for last week capital total: -3.66%
TOtal capital: -10.27%[/B]
I forgot to mention. I am purely a technical trader to this point. But i truly believe that understanding the underlying market sentiment especially in these turbulent times will have a positive effect on my understanding of market structures as well as developing a bias in the direction of the overall market. I have been slowly incorporating more COT data as well into my trading outlook regimen that I do over the weekend. But I am going to start a notebook at home and for the 30 days, I am going to record my take on the overall sentiment of a specific currency. Now this was a tough choice, either the Euro, JPY,or GBP. then i thought about it, wait a second aren’t all majors consisting of the dollar? Oh yeah so I am now going to start journal my sentiment of the dollar every day. This is only because of the fact it is represented in so many of the pairs. Euro is going through a tough time but the analysis would be interesting, GBP was my original choice until i realized i could pick the dollar. JPY is under intervention which well makes it pretty much useless for my purposes.
I am posting my weekly analysis anyway. I was bored and figured I should probably keep up this routine so i can also track my own progress. Also I removed the NZD based pairs because they are not liquid enough for my system, they do provide profitable oppertunites. But after watching it move I didn’t like it, very jumpy. If I want to play a more illiquid market then i know where to go. But for know i want to stay with more liquid markets.
EUR/USD
GBP/USD
EUR/GBP
USD/JPY
EUR/JPY
GBP/JPY
USD/CHF
EUR/CHF
AUD/USD
EUR/AUD
USD/CAD
Yesterday was quite interesting a bit if psychological losses but I know the reasons as I will explain. But the true golden nugget was a very interesting trade that I took and used so many tools in my toolbox. I am currently replying away from home ATM but I will post some charts to explain more detail. Basically we had Eur/Aud coming into a fresh daily demand level very low on the relative weekly supply demand curve. And I was originally long here. But of course I was watching the fiber take a major dive at the time. Now obviously due to the correlations here my long trade which was in profit by a small bit is going to get dragged down too. Now as I checked the USDX and we had the dollar dropping into a 1h demand level at the same time. Now obviously long Eur/Aud I am bearish on the aussie. So I took my 6 pips that had been bouncing I consolidation and went short the Aud/USD which had entered a daily supply on Friday but had not broken down out of the level. It had just created a small bear candle and was heading to the start of the level. Giving me ample distance to a reasonable target. This change if currency with the same trade idea was due to the dive in fiber which showed that the dollar strength, combined with USDX demand level showing a pin bar. All in conjunction with Eur/Aud in a fresh daily level. It was a phenomenal alignment of factors. Now I didn’t prosper as much as all this work made out but I can’t shake my fist at 40ish pips.
Now let’s explore the losses. So I was demoing a new trade idea that exploits a different area of orderflow. I tried explaining my theory in the chat room people told me I should just be a professor not a trader since overall I am a loser. Well in the first hour of LO I bagged 85 pips in demo. So I tried my hand at replicating my results in live. Now I did have winning trades but I tried to scale in to try to magnify my wins turning these trades into losers as the market retraced. So all in all I lost a lot of pips trying to force more pips out of the market or replicating my wins from demo. Either way I had mental expectations that should not have and that directly effected my trade decisions. I did end up taking a full TP on one but it didn’t negate the 3 loses. So all in all a bad play. I lost a lot of pips yesterday and I might ban myself from scaling in because I don’t think I do it properly.
So far today using that same system I was discussing earlier I have 2 wins 1 loss and 24.5 pips to show for it. Not bad considering this could be my first positive day in a long time.