Discretionary trades for the past five weeks. 7/28-8/28 Strategy: interpret/monitor price action. Hold trades for several hours or a couple of days. 3:1 RR Target 120pips flexible Loss 40 pips flexible 3-5% In week 3 started trading EUR only, prior to that I would trade CHF and JPY as well. What do you think.
Experiment with smaller time frames to improve entry accuracy. FX is technical enough to allow tight stops = highly accurate entries. Targets that big @ 140 pips are swing/daily trades. Use same strategy to determine long term direction, let direction be confirmed by price, then key in on shorter time frames for entry in longer term direction. Better to wait until the market has turned before jumping in. Bigger moves allow more room to jump in after direction is confirmed. So no need to catch the falling knife or call market tops. Also experiment will pyramiding. 3-5% at once is too much. Try 2%. But then, add additional positions once initial position in confirmed. Those are good results. However, most of the profits come from a few big trades. Whats needed is consistency = smaller losers and more, medium sized wins. If the strategy is left unchanged, the account will get blown out when the market chops in tight range for a month or two. Its a good start, but more work is needed. Concentrate on entry strategies on smaller time frames. This should cut your stop loss by at least half. Try for 15 pip stop loss. Further, pyramiding will also cut original risk size. Instead 4% initial risk, now its only 2% initial risk. That should cut losses by 50% (in theory), and keep the winners more or less the same. Remember, price patterns happen on all time frames. Figure out whats working on the larger time frame, than apply to the smaller time frame for entries/pyramiding.
Thanks. I rarely get stopped out because i'm usually going in and out with small losses at or near my entry. I've been going in with half my position just recently, then adding on the way up this has provided mixed results. I think the reason for this is because i go 50% then 50%, I should do 50% then 25% and so on, pyramiding like you suggested. Question, are you constantly adjusting the RR for trade? ex) lets say you're up 80 pips on a long position, near major resistance on hourly chart, with a 120 target. do you risk 20/40 pips of profit for the last 40, which gives you a rr1:1, or 2:1 from current price or do you just take your 80 pip profit wait for a pull back which may not come, but most certainly will and get in at better price, 10-25 pips lower? I had trouble when eurusd tried to break through 1.48, first @ 14780 as expected, than @1.48 I'm just rambling.thanks for the feedback.
Looks like you were playing the head and shoulders echo for the resistance at 4800. This will probably sound cliche....to be a good swing trader, you need a good short term game. If I played that move (i was sleeping, incidentally), trade in the direction of the resistance but keep stops super tight and losses small. One key is knowing which trend you're in. When an intermediate short is coming up, wait for the short term up trend to fail before adding trades, then short trend goes down, then add positions. Know what I mean? You might have been shorting an intermediate down, while the short-term trend was going up for a re-test. At the least, wait until the short-term trend (30 sec/1 mins/5mins) goes in the expected direction. This will give you more breathing room. And if comes back, you can get out at break even or for a small loss. Otherwise, shorting a short term up trend is gonna hurt.