I’ve been trading on the FXGame provided by Oanda for the past 2 weeks. I purposely lowered my account to $3,000 to mimic a live account more accurately. By doing this, I feel that if I could do well in the game then I’d perform similarly on a live account.
Anyway, starting with $3,000 I was able to earn about $1,700 in profits over the last few days, hitting $4,700 balance trading USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY and even a little EUR/USD (basically, any pair with a low spread) during the tokyo/london session. However, this week I tried trading during the NY session and have lost $1,500 using the same strategy. Perhaps I just got lucky at first.
My typical positions are for 35 to 50K units per trade, and my strategy is loosely based on GMMA (using 8 EMA lines, 3,6,9,…29,41) and watching multiple timeframes for market trends. I do set “take profit” points somewhere between the support and resistance points I can see on the most recent portion of the chart. I also experimented using various “stop loss” points, and sometimes none.
Overall, my strategy seems to work fine during the tokyo and london market sessions, but during the new york trading session I can’t seem to nail a trade. All the pointers show a steady downtrend or uptrend, but when I enter a position, it almost always goes the other way!!!
Of course, I can leave the trade open and hope that it bounces back - it usually does - and I end up making money. But that style of trading doesn’t appeal to me, because it leaves too much to chance. I recently took a lost for $550 by leaving a trade open for AUD/USD.
One thing I noticed is that despite what I see on longer time frame charts (1D, 3H, 1H, 30M), the 10 and 5 second charts contradict the larger time frames. Even so, I do not want to base trades on 10 or 5 seconds because I realize that the market can fluctuate +/- 20 pips or more during a busy trade session.
I was hoping that someone with a bit more experience could help me figure out a better way to read trends so I can avoid jumping in on the wrong side of the trade.
Ideally, what I would like to accomplish, is to be able to jump in and make 10-15 pips per trade reliably. I don’t need to go for 100+ pip rides and I don’t want my trades to stay open much more than 20-30 mins.