Hi everyone!
Long time lurker, first time poster here.
I’ve decided to finally ‘get serious’. I think that keeping a public journal will force me to to analyse my decisions, self-critique and ultimately help me become the best trader I can! Here’s to hoping that works!
So, a little background about me. Opened a Demo account about 8 years ago, worked out well and I thought “wow, this is easy money”. Progressed onto Live and promptly blew the account, wiping about £2k in the process.
I had just graduated university at the time & £2k was a seriously big deal to me. Despite the poor outcome I was determined that this Forex game was something I could teach myself - I was profitable on Demo so what’s the difference? Spoiler alert - the difference is (mainly) psychology.
How to learn? How to improve? There’s SO much rubbish on the internet from so many ‘proven’ traders. I decided the only way to really get in on the action was to see how the professionals do it first hand. Of those intervening 8 years I have worked more than 6 in the financial services sector in the UK, the last 4 of which have been spent at a Tier 1 international investment bank. I’ve tried to learn everything I can to be consistently profitable.
I now have a strategy manually back-tested from 2016 which provides for a consistent annual profit with a Risk of Ruin of just 2%, which decreases as the account grows. Note that I say Annual Profit, not Weekly, not Monthly - Annual - There will be bad days, there will be bad weeks there will even be bad months (on average 1 - 2 per year). The point is at the end of the year, overall, it will be in the positive (ranging from +80% to +380% in the years tested).
Here’s a small sample of the back-testing monthly totals (hopefully it loads properly, if not I’ll try to fix it later).
Now, sorry everyone, I wont be sharing my actual strategy here; I’ve done the hard work to learn and make it work - you can too. I once spent a looooong time scouring for profitable trading journals with the aim of copying. It never worked. You need to find something that works for you. This journal is for me - I’m selfish like that. It’s to make sure I am justifiably following my system.
That said, I will be posting illustrations of my trades, my equity curve etc etc and if you can work out how it works then kudos to you. It’s not complicated. From my time at the bank I’ve found that the best systems are boring simply, what’s difficult is to have the discipline to be consistent in your analysis and execution.
Anyway, I digress. I will aim to post at least once a week highlighting the equity curve and any trades taken that past week. Based on interest and my own schedule I may increase the frequency and we can see how it goes.
I will be trading purely on the daily time-frame, account starting size will be circa £10k,1:30 leverage. Trades will be placed upon NY close and reviewed in the hour prior to the next NY close. They may be closed then, or kept open depending on certain conditions.
I think that’s enough of a text wall so far! In my next post I will try to post some trades which occurred over January / Feb this year and where the account is at currently.
