I pushed thru and finished. I’m going to bed. I didn’t do much. I closed and reversed one of my positions.
We’ll see how that goes.
I realized that I still have some fear and doubt about some trades. ¨What if it breaks this support and keeps going?¨
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Me too, some trades I’m very confident, some I’m not, one of the reason make me worry too much for the trade is previous experience of the same currency pair and the same situation. I know I should treat each trade separately but somehow I am still affected by previous trade.
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I practiced a chart and I was supposed to wait for a bullish signal to catch the major trend.
But, I saw a bearish signal and took it. But when I took it, I got so focused on the mini bearish trend that I stopped looking for my bullish signal.
When price turned bullish and hit my SL, I’m wondering why. Because I went against my strategy. I got really annoyed.
I forced myself to do it again, even though I didn’t want to. It’s ok to get angry, but there has to be a next step. The process can’t be that get upset, then just do the same thing again. That’s a vicious cycle and it’s not productive.
I hate that I got it wrong. But I HAVE to think of it as a stepping stone to an improvement.
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I’m trying to follow my strategy, but some signals are difficult to see until after.
A clue, then confirmation. But I gotta pay attention. It’s tough.
Sometimes, noticing signals is tough because I make it tough. I just focus on the wrong thing and miss the important details.
Each failure is a stepping block.
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I just finished trading a long chart. I traded it about a week and a half ago, and again today.
I did much better this time. I cheated 6 times, though. I went back and changed my position. But I had a lot less losses.
I marked those particular trades in red so I can see where I felt compelled to cheat. That means that trade was giving me trouble and is worth investigating.
First try:
26 losses
6 big profits
Second try:
14 losses
10 big profits
I have to examine the trades where I felt compelled to cheat and go back to change my position. That means those areas were really confusing for me.
Onward and upward!
I saw another tough trade. Bounced support, great entry. It shoots up over three days and reached about 3/4 of the way to resistance. The next day there’s a big pullback. It’s not a signal that fits my strategy at all.
My strategy says to hold until it hits resistance or shows some reversal signal. This bull trend was doing neither. Hold or close???
Well, after that retracement candle, price returned to support, and actually pushed support slightly.
So, I would have had a nice profit, then watched it turn to nothing.
Another option is to understand that price suddenly turned bullish really quickly and might not be able to sustain that kind of momentum. I could see the big retracement candle as a sign to just get out while the getting is good and say ¨good enough¨.
I suppose my strategy is not worth following 100%. Choosing when not to follow my strategy is a slippery slope. I have to be careful about that.
Sometimes, I come to babypips forum to procrastinate. I always have the forum tab open.
For a little while I would close it, and it helped me to keep working. But I started using it to procrastinate again. Just because it’s forex related, it doesn’t mean it’s not procrastinating.
I should close it when I don’t have anything to post.
I just practiced a chart. I didn’t do very well. I went against my strategy, and started chasing a trend. Instead of losing twice and catching the trend, I lost three times and missed the trend.
I also didn’t pay attention to a small important detail and missed a super profitable move.
I’m gonna trade it again.
Well, that was a first. I actually sat a trade out during a practice chart. In my strategy I there are signals/candles that I call ¨untradeable¨.
One of them is a signal candle that is way too big to trade. The SL would be so wide that it’s just impractical. It often means that the trend is retracing.
Long story short, it didn’t retrace–it started reversing, then reversed again. The signs were all over the place. So, instead of trading it, I decided to sit on the sidelines and wait.
That was the first time, I sat out a trade during a practice trade. At that moment, I can’t say if what I’m doing is the most profitable or the smartest thing to do. I just know that my strategy said the candle was untradeable and none of the signals matched.
It turned out that it was a good idea.
By the way, I’m closing the babypips page in between posts, so that I don’t get tempted to procrastinate and start browsing.
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I just finished practicing a chart. I had fewer losses and slightly more wins. It’s progress. I’m gonna move on to the next chart.
I’m digging this song right now.
I still find myself having trouble between hold vs close. I get a signal, but there is a possibility that price is not reversing, it’s just retracing. Of course, the problem is telling the difference.
Sometimes it’s really difficult. Naturally, after the trade, I’ll say ¨oh look at that, it’s so obvious. why didn’t I see that??¨
There are losing trades. For sure. But there are clues before the move happens. A clue, then confirmation.
Practice really helps to point out my errors. I can’t believe I still have trouble following my strategy. But, it’s part of the process. I just have to keep being conscious of what is happening in my brain while trading.
I’m preparing a practice chart with USD/CZK. I see another example in which the strategy works, but it’s so easy to drop the ball and chase the trend.
If I have patience, I’ll get stopped out a few times, but the true signal will appear and the trend will run.
I really do get caught up in worrying about contradictory signals that I panic, take the wrong contradictory signal, and price just continues in its original direction.
When I look at charts, the signals are so obvious, but in live trading the signals don’t seem so obvious.
But wait, what’s the difference between the charts I practice with and the live charts? Technically, when I practice, I am trading live. I can’t see the next candles.
That means the only difference is emotional. I worry, and I panic.
Patience, young padawan.
I was looking up Bernie Madoff and for some odd reason, I found this:
If this is true, Kevin Bacon is hardcore. This is a great attitude to have.
I’m repeating this because it keeps bouncing around in my coconut.
When I look for new charts to practice/study, I look for very difficult charts. If I have trouble with particular charts when trading live, then I should try finding similar old charts and practice that kind of situation.
The problem is that I can’t find any. I realized that no such charts exist. Only in the moment do I see the chart as difficult. No chart is as difficult as I make it seem. It’s just me. I’m the one who makes the chart difficult.
I have to think about that some more, but that’s pretty strange to me. All the charts in my roster are equally simple. They only become complicated when I make them so.
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One thing that still bothers me is when your strategy is wrong. If my strategy says to keep shorting a setup, I have to keep shorting unless there is a clue + confirmation that price is still bullish.
But if there’s no genuine signal, just a questionable signal that price is still bullish and it shoots up bullish the next day…I’d wish I had broken my rules and caught that trade.
The problem there is that just because I missed a big move, it doesn’t mean that my strategy is now invalid, or that I did something wrong. I don’t have to take EVERY loss as a lesson. That will just lead me to constantly changing my strategy and creating a chaotic system. No bueno.
I missed a retracement trade. It’s the end of the retracement that catches me off-guard. They’re just so tricky because often there’s no signal. I just have to be wrong until I get it. It’s in my strategy.
I was trading a pair. I was wrong twice, then I decided to wait for a signal. But this time there was no signal. And now the trend is in my favor, and I missed out.
I see an additional trade that I want to take, but I have no margin left. I have margin, but I don’t want to use any more. My trades need room to breathe, so even though I like to cut it close, I’ve reached my limit.
So it begs the question: why follow so many pairs if there’s not enough margin to trade them?
I have over 10 trades running, and I’m risking 0.83% in each trade. In a few trades I added positions. I normally prefer 0.5% risk per trade, but my account had shrunk from so many losses, I eventually stopped reducing my risk in respect to my margin size.
Perhaps I will further reduce my roster. I’ll tell you this, though. If I reduce it, EUR/HUF and CAD/NOK get the boot. EUR/HUF will get dropped first because the spread is so wide, it’s impractical sometimes. Not always, but often. And CAD/NOK because the margin is so wide. For some reason the leverage is low on that one. Not sure why.
I really like the way the kroners move. All of them. But, I could use that same money to trade two or three other pairs. What’s the point? To have fun? This is not about fun; this is not a game. If I wanna have fun, I can trade it in demo.
Actually, I just remembered that I have a few orders pending, so that takes up margin as well. So, I might be ok after all. But still, those pending orders shouldn’t get in the way of new trades. I’d prefer not to delete some of them…
I’m looking at my EUR/AUD trade, and I’m trying to understand what the trend is doing.
It makes me think about my strategy and why it’s so easy when practicing charts, yet so difficult live.
Patience. That’s the problem. I have a trade that I jumped into too eagerly. So, in my mind, I actually WANT it to go in my direction. My brain has trouble understanding that I could be wrong. My brain doesn’t want to be wrong, so it just focuses on information that supports being right, while trying to ignore contradictory information.
Interpreting a chart with all this conflict is difficult. So, that means I need to step back, refer to my strategy, and wait for the signal to come to me.
My previous diagram happened to be open, and to be honest, it’s actually a little confusing now. Maybe it’s just the moment, but there’s so much data in that chart it really starts to become sensory overload and rather impractical.
I built a new strategy from scratch to simplify everything. Draw S/R, then wait for price to hit either one of them. If price is in between S/R, and I’m not sure which way it’s going, don’t just jump in and start hoping. Tommor said hope is not a strategy, and that really stuck with me.
And that’s what I did with this EUR/CAD trade. I saw SOMETHING and jumped in. There’s always SOMETHING. Oh, what does this candle mean? Oh, what’s that candle?
You can do that 100 times and be wrong 99. Patience is what separates an insignificant candle from a significant one.
Patience, young padawan.
Jeez. I closed that EUR/CAD trade. It was halfway to my stop. It may not hit it; it may go in my favor. But at this point it’s just a guess. That’s not the way I want to trade.
When I closed it, I looked at my strategy and saw a sample chart of marking S/R and waiting for signs. It looks so so simple. It looks so simple that when you look at it, it makes you think ¨Trading is easy!¨
And it’s kind of a slap to the face because it looks so easy, then I feel so lost looking at that EUR/CAD chart.
The reality is that I feel lost because I’m forcing myself to find a sign that isn’t there. I’m bound to feel confused if I’m looking for something that’s not there.
I get so jumpy and force some trades. I’m doing it less now, but I still need more patience. Any candle can be interpreted as a sign, but the conditions have to be right. This trade was like that. There really were no favorable conditions. If it’s near S/R, then ok, let’s go. But this was just a forced trade. Just a bad move. This is all part of the process.
Just got stopped out of a trade. I was short, but looked at my older strategy and then switched to long.
Now price is super bearish and hit my SL. I’m feeling frustrated and foolish.
I’m gonna keep practicing. I guess the good news is that I saw something, and I was right. It was a real signal. I wish I held on, of course, but I’ll take it as a lesson learned. Hold and hold, unless a VALID contradictory signal appears.
I deleted my prior strategy. I made sure to back it up, first. Actually, I’ve been doing well with backing up my data.
I have my micro SD card in my laptop, and all my data is there, and NOT on my laptop’s internal drive. I learned that lesson already.
If anything happens with my laptop, all my data is on an external source. If my laptop crashes like before, I can just pop it out, and put it into my next laptop.
I think deleting my previous strategy from my laptop will help eliminate any extra confusion.
When I go to sleep, I keep thinking about some trades. Some trades have contradictory signals, and I seriously don’t know what to do. If price is hitting resistance, but the SAME resistance for the third time, is this time a fakeout?
I took a walk this morning, and yeah, I think it was a fakeout as I think about the surrounding clues. But, it’s too late now, That was last Friday.
Those tricker trades are the ones I wanna get better at. I don’t want to feel like I’m guessing. In my backtests, everything looks so obvious. There are some very rare occasions when direction seems random. But that’s super rare. So rare that it’s not worth including in my strategy. It’s really like a 1:100. In my mind, though, I never know when that 1:100 will occur. Is this it? Is that one it?
Then it becomes a 50/50 chance that it either is or isn’t a fakeout signal. And that’s where the panic starts to set it. No bueno.
No more guessing. It’s gotta be strategic. Use the strategy, pay attention, be patient.