Bear in mind that USDCHF is in a region where it rejected climbing higher in November and December of last year as well as in May, June, and July of this year. Moreover, EURUSD rejected crawling lower than this general area two months ago in August. I’m therefore going to pass on EURUSD, which looks more-or-less neutral overall from a bird’s-eye view, and perhaps wait to go long when the pair's day-to-day trend eventually begins hooking back north toward 1.1638. I also ultimately decided that I wanted to be a bit more conservative with NZDUSD, setting my nonnegotiable take-profit target at 0.6483 rather than 0.6468. The data told me to set my stop loss at 15 pips, but since this is only half of the 30 pips I believe to be the minimum necessary to avoid falling victim to the shenanigans of the market makers, I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed that I don’t get stopped out at that level before the asset eventually zeroes in on a lower destination.
If the rate falls below 1.1380, all of the data will be bearish, in which case, I might have to go ahead and enter a short position after all.
USDCHF has thankfully hit my nonnegotiable take-profit target in less than 24 hours. As you can see from the above record/image, I pocketed some of my gains twice before it did so. Unfortunately, NZDUSD burned me twice before finally deciding to make at least a temporary genuine commitment to pushing south. I locked in a bit of profit there as well, which fortunately put me in positive territory. The charts suggests to me that NZDUSD is still full-on bearish with absolutely no indication that it is, at least for the time being, inclined to reverse sentiment. Hence, I still have reason to hope that it will ultimately make its way downward and eventually hit my nonnegotiable take-profit target at 0.6483 to provide me with a nice bit of icing on top.
What I'm calling the "grand sentiment" is still bearish, but what I view as the day-to-day trend just turned bullish (stopping me out in the process) so I will not be shorting NZDUSD again, at least not for the time being.
The are no good setups right now, from my perspective, so I just entered two rather “iffy” trades, both involving a Loonie pair. I entered a CADJPY short position based on price currently being on the “wrong side” of a down-sloping day-to-day trend. This was an aggressive trade, in that it was made prior to receiving confirmation/permission from what I call my secondary trigger line. Moreover, though the day-to-day tend line is headed south, my primary/core trigger line is still evidencing an upward slope, so that the two of them are not presently in harmony, which would have been a more ideal situation. I also entered a USDCAD long position, but this is a low probability trade because the wave I am trying to catch is not originating from an extreme degree of deviation. But on the plus side, both my primary trigger line and the day-to-day trend line are sloping upward. Moreover, the rate has just crossed above my secondary trigger line so that I have a number of factors leaning in my favor.
I see from a lot of your trades that your R/R is approx. 1. Does your target move, based on new price action?
On second glance, the day-to-day trend line is technically still sloping downward, even though the most recent candlestick formed above it, so the jury is still out as to whether a short position from 0.6547 might reap a profit. However, it would have to be for a target of no more than 20 or so pips, at least until a bearish bias is once again firmly established.
Structurally, NZDUSD should be coming down from 0.6545 due to regression toward the mean. Of course, according to my data, a climb all the way up into the region of 0.6613 is within the realm of possibility. But this should not be likely due to the fact that, technically speaking, the overall bias is still bearish. However, this is still an aggressive (risky) trade given that it has not yet been validated by my secondary trigger line, and in fact, the rate just pulled up to 0.6550.
This is not the way I normally trade due to the fact that I will be busy working on other projects through the first quarter of next year. Consequently, the purpose of this journal is to begin to try making trades with firm take-profit targets that do not move. Consequently, the reward-to-risk ratio will more likely be like 2:1 or 3:1. However, because I do not see any good setups at the moment, but would nonetheless like to try recuperating some of what I lost when NZDUSD stopped me out (and do so relatively quickly) I'm going for the two (less than ideal) 1:1 CAD-pair trades. However, when I'm trading as normal (i.e. fulltime) take-profit targets are almost irrelevant to me because exits are indeed determined by price action, and I don't really care about the reward-to-risk ratios because my daily success rates are typically above 90%.
At 0.6568, my NZDUSD day-to-day trend line HAS now verifiably just turned bullish. Consequently, my only goal at this point is to simply get out of the trade at breakeven, or worst-case scenario, to at least minimize what might otherwise be another inevitable loss (given that I am already in the red). (Had I been trading full-time [i.e., monitoring my positions] I could have exited this trade with a small profit!) I woke up to discover that USDCAD had thankfully hit my take-profit target, but that CADJPY had gone in the opposite direction, and was only just then crawling back into profit territory. Given that I would not be able to monitor the position and that I would prefer to have the funds available for a better setup anyway, I exited that trade at what turned out to be breakeven.