Review of the weeks trading

Well, in a nutshell, there has been none... or so it seems!

The time frame is such that I do not expect trades everyday, and having those expectations means that I am not wanting to trade every day. If the indicators line up - then I will take a trade, if not, I will not!

One of the key reasons people fail at Forex is going in on substandard signals, and trading too much. By trading less, you improve your chances of success. On top of that, you should also be able to adapt to market conditions, and use all the availale tools to help you succeed. What this means, is that this method relies on a long time frame, and all indicators lining up. In the current market conditions, we have had massive trends with no retracements, which means that this strategy has not produced any trades. However, at the same time, you could have taken a trade on one of these heavily trending markets and still been very profitable. I do trade away from this method, but what I want is a method that is low impact in terms of time, is very proiftable and is stress free. The signals are for the most part automated - there is only a discretionary piece of the jigsaw to decide on the trend - is it strong enough to sustain itself for another 3-4 days where we know that this system will be successful? If the answer is no, then a trade is not taken - depsite all the indicators effectively lining up.

Some of the best guitarists know that it is not what you fill the song with, but the spaces in between which make their tunes great - the same applies with trading. It is not the trades that you are profitable with that makes you a success, it is all the other trades that you did not take that makes you successful.

Trading does not start and end at the charts either. To be a full rounded, confident trader, you need to be reading around the subject (which I have been doing a lot of in the abscence of any trades) and understanding the market drivers. This can only help you make the correct decision in the future to make the trade or not.

Quite frankly, anyone can come onto this blog and look at the open trades, take them, and then come back and close them when I do. They (hopefully) should make a profit... but why settle for that? This is only one strategy I am running, there are plenty of other opportunities out there on shorter time frames - and longer time frames. Reading through this blog will actually help you understand my thinking which could help you to make better calls.

The major things I have been looking at this week include Price action - trying to get a deeper understanding of why things happen, what are the market drivers, and from a couple of simple changes in thought could have netter in man many more pips than is seen on here - and this is a scalable model on time frames too. Bringing the stop loss figures closer to the entry point (which means more profits).

The strategy I use here is very conservative - 3% at risk per trade with a stop loss of 150. This means that the lot sizes are very low for a small account - at the most 0.01, looking at gaining $0.10 per pip. Granted when you hit the 200 pip moves, it is some very stress free ways to make $20, but let's face it, you are hardly going to be able to live on this. But what happens when you have a s/l of 75 pips... suddenly you are onto 0.2 lots... but then again, what happens when you have a stop loss of 50, 25, 10 or even 5 pips... your lot size goes up dramatically, and suddenly those small proifts turn into some very big profits risking the same amount - 3% of your account. Using price action is one way to do this, and catch it right, and you can make lots more cash (which is why we are in this game). This is doable, but takes lots of practice, but that is the position I want to get too.

We shall see!

Here's to next weeks trading, and may it be successful!

Nothing on the horizon as of yet

Well, Wednedsday is here, and we still have no trades worthy of taking - in actual fact, there is very little going on that I would be happy to get into at the moment. The markets seem to be going a little bit crazy, but my eye is firmly on the CHF at the moment.

Both the USD and GBP pairs with the CHF show some promise, but little else at the moment. It is certainly not a certainty of which way the trade woudl go if we got in right now. The CHF had a big dip and I am expecting it to rise again - how much and if it meets the criteria to trigger a trade - I am not sure. The best thing traders can do is to enter into trades without emotion.

If you have fear going into a trade, a couple of things will happen:

a) You will close the trade because it goes negative, and your initial thoughts were proved true - except that it goes to massive profitability... the fear meant that you got out of the trade against what the trading plan tells you!

b)The trade goes into profit straight away, has a little retreat and you close the trade with a small profit. Although this is not the worst scenario, again it goes against the trading plan which is bad for traders. I always say that you shoudl never begrudge the profits you make, but the whole point of being a trader is to follow your trading plan. This is your trading bible, and it is imperative that it is followed (otherwise you may as we try your hand at gambling).

Your trading plan is the one thing that puts you ahead of all the other traders out there, and the ones who follow the trading plan will be the ones who succeed in the long run. This can not be stated strongly enough.

Money management is the next level. If you have a trading plan, money management should be part of this in any case. I am going to look at putting something on my blog that can be downloaded for everyone which details what a trading plan should look like.

This is the most boring part of trading... but it is also the most important and vital thing. Ultimately, trading should not be exciting. If it is, you are opening up yourself to emotion - and most scarily greed. If this is the case, you will lose money. There is very few ifs and buts about this. As I mentioned in an earlier post - check out market wizards - this is a real eye opener in terms of mindset of traders (proftiable ones, and very successful ones at that!!!).

Anyway, here's to picking the RIGHT trades, and getting in (and out) at the right times!

Happy trading, and look out for the trading plan manual in the coming weeks or so.