So all bullish bias has quickly been erased this morning. I had just started to get used to the dollar falling like a rock everytime Big Ben opens his mouth. Anyway, I would love to stagger some shorts every 100 pips up and make a killing right about now but since I swore off wild trades we will just have to see what the prog gives us. I will take both long and short signals but might try to add size to promising short positions. Here is today's blotter but it only has the the sell execution since I restarted my comp during the trade.
Sorry for the delay in posting this afternoon I had a lot of work to do. Yesterday I had one buy signal which wasnt executed due to a disconnected internet. However, I traded the signal when i came back home on my own. Today we had one sell signal which i just closed out manually since it the price reached pivot support levels. DISCRETIONARY LONG @ 1.5441 @ 2:14 AM SOLD @ 1.5464 @ 7:07 AM (+23) PROG TRADE SHORT @ 1.5433 @ 4 PM manually covered @ 1.5398 @ 9:40 PM (+35) Net Pips: +58 Acct bal: 3765
Question: How do you take a +93 pip trade that goes your way and turn it into a -110 pip loser? Answer: Put in a stop to protect yourself, a limit to take profit and go to work. Then let the market give it to you all day long while you watch unable to do anything. After one stop out last night I placed a buy order at 1.5407 with a stop at .5385 and a limit at .5500. Can you guess what happened? Thats right -20 pip stop out. Got short at .5500 and still short at -93 pips. LOL. More late breaking bulltetins after a nap. Oh and i guess i forgot i mentioned that i sized up to 30K.
Alright so spent the better part of the day trying to figure out the best plan of action after the disaster this morning. I can quite easily close my short EUR position and take the -80 pip loss and be flat for the week, however, since I am bearish on the EUR I can just keep it using size managment so that I can capitalize on further drops. (This is basically the strategy of sizing in small size every 100 pips up like i mentioned before). I chose not to do it last time since the whole reason i started this journal was to avoid trading like a maniac. But now I have been given this position by the market and I sortof want to make some lemonade out of this lemon. The problem is I see at least 200 potential pips of losses before a turn around and this can be extremely problamatic. I am not in a good place and the trend is not really my friend right now. However, I thought about it all day, did some research, took my emotion out and given the risk to reward I am currently at I think it is worth a try. This may or may not be a disaster and I am making this decision knowing full well that I am going against some of my rules. I have done a couple of trades similar to this before with some success so its not like I dont know what to expect. At the very least it will spice up this journal. I will be both adding size and covering parts of my EUR short, but I should keep the original short from .5500, I will also hedge myself at certain times using either JPY or GBP. I have already taken an additional 30K short from .55915 to .5577 for 15 pip profit, as well as a 25K USDJPY short as a hedge. Most likely tomorrow is gonna be painful but I am ready for it. Wish me luck.
I just wanted to summarize my positions and trades really quickly from the last post. LONG stop out -30 pips LONG stop out -22 pips SHORT for +15 pips total closed pips: -37 pips on 30K open positions: short eur (30K)= -80 pips short usdjpy (25k) = -24 pips
Predictably the EURUSD shot up another 100 pips in my face, and as for the JPY hedge, lets just say it leaves much to be desired, although it turn in my direction for about 50 pips after NFP news. However, after further research I am more convinced that in a longer term perspective my positions will be profitable, I just need to survive the EUR rally(at least another 100 pips to go). I will most likely look for doubling up my short pos some time Sunday to capture some retracement profits.
Actually I made mistake on my last post. When you have two positions with one making money while the other is losing and you expect that to continue its best to add to the winning position and not the losing one. So I will most likely add to my USDJPY short and ride the dollar's fall rather than trying to pick tops in EUR. Hopefully I can make some profits on JPY which I can roll over when EUR approaches 1.58 and start carefully adding to the short.
1) You already mention that you broke your rule. 2) You then decided to remove stops and ride out your bad trade. 3) Is it any wonder why only 5% of us actually make money trading? 4) A trend following system is supposed to have larger winning trades than losing trades. You already messed this up by having a large losing trade that could end up blowing up your account. 5) Your goal is not reasonable. For example, trying to make 20% per month. Instead you should work to keep your account from blowing up while you learn to trade.
OOHH some reponses I thought I was alone lol. Since I started posting I have closed out +160 pips in 3 weeks on EURUSD. Currently I have two open positions: +95 pips on USDJPY. -260 pips on EURUSD. As for 20% monthly, sure it can happen, if you look at the blotters I was up about 15% before that trade(which was NOT a prog trade). The prog gave a buy signal obviously generating 130 pips. No one hates breaking the rules here more than me, I did not intend for this to happen and I tried every type of login to get out of the situation while at work, but what has happened is in the past, no going back and I will work with what I have been given. My hedge helps a lot but its a smaller size than the EUR position. I fully expect more rally's in EUR although not as intense as these and I am ready for them. Thank you for the good advice but I am well aware of the risks I am taking. On a side note I am glad that my journal suddenly got exciting, from the looks of it it should continue as I use every bit of skill to squirm out of this. Happy trading to all