It looks like I missed out on all the action during my dinnertime once again today. Glancing at the NZDJPY and NZDUSD daily charts, it appears the two New Zealand pairs might be unwilling to continue the southward trek they began at the end of April and may very well be attempting a full-fledged reversal to the north. Oh well, that's the way it goes. So much for my hopes of raking in the big bucks by shorting the pair (NZDUSD). The Aussie and Cable pairs are being stubborn about providing me with a pullback from which to enter long positions (from a justifiable entry point) so about the only halfway decent opportunity I have open to me at this point is to buy USDJPY @ 113.26. The pair is still where it was on Friday, but it IS technically bullish, and having already visited the 113.80 neighborhood perhaps it will do so again.
Just when I was complaining about a lack of pullbacks, a few of the currency pairs were kind enough to oblige me. But ironically, USDJPY is currently in negative territory. At any rate, I think I'm now more than halfway to getting out of the hole I spent two or three days digging last week.
Based on yesterday’s results I’m going to begin trying to incorporate a slightly enhanced five-minute chart setup in the decision-making process when employing one-minute charts to pinpoint precise position entry levels. Based on that information however, there are NO ideal trades for me after waking up this morning, so I’m choosing the next best thing. USDCAD has pretty much gone nowhere during the months of July, August, September, and October. It also appears to have spent about the last eight days in consolidation and established a data-based resistance level in the neighborhood of 1.3173. The day-to-day trendlines are neutral at best (as is global bias) but the slope of the confirmation trend line is bearish, which is my primary justification for making this trade. However, price just climbed above the confirmation trend line, which is not a good sign, given that rates have a tendency to continue climbing when positioned above this moving average, and to continue falling when positioned below it, so perhaps I just made a foolish mistake. On the other hand, @ 1.3114, the candlesticks find themselves within the upper regions of the typical intraday price range, which ordinarily would suggest the existence of pressure that might coax the candlesticks to regress toward the mean. So perhaps I will be able to get out of the trade with a few pips profit after all, maybe three or four hours from now as the New York session draws to a close, possibly somewhere around the 1.3093 level. (Another thing in my favor is the amount on "noise" the pair generates in this region, the evidence of which one can observe by glancing to the left.)
If I had opened my charts back up about twenty-five minutes ago, I could've exited this position with about 20-pips worth of profit. However, price is headed north at the moment, so I decided to go ahead and close the trade with a pocket full of change. (It's not really worth my time. I'll come back and look for a better setup later on.)
Looking at CADJPY from the perspective of a daily chart, the global bias has been undeniably bullish for at least three months now, and possibly up to seven. The pair looks like it initiated a new leg up about eight days ago, which is now confirmed by the day-to-day trendlines. The stats suggest that if the pair pushes past 86.80, it’s likely to go much higher, with plenty of room up above before reaching the most recent local high at 89.21. The 30-minute chart setup recommends a stop loss of 86.12 and a take-profit target of 86.81. The five-minute chart setup is totally bullish, and the pair need only climb another five pips to be 100% bullish on the 1-minute chart as well (which means that technically, the 1-minute chart has yet to grant its permission to enter the trade, but perhaps this is close enough).
If EURUSD is going to continue the ascent it began four or five days ago, this pullback to 1.1428 should be a great level from which to enter a long position. I just hope I can remember to come back every 30 minutes to check whether the stats have given their permission to make the trade yet.
EURJPY just registered a buy signal @ 129.87 with statistics-based stop loss and take-profit targets plotted at 129.52 and 130.21 respectively.
I just got an AUDUSD buy signal, and right after I executed the trade, the pair experienced a sudden "pop," so I went ahead and locked in the gain before buying the pair a second time. My feeling at this point is that there is really little reason to continue doing this other than to bask in being right, which would totally be an ego thing, and therefore something truly worthy of avoidance. The whole point of this exercise was to develop the discipline to strive for longer-term (and more substantial) targets, which has essentially been accomplished via the adoption and use of statistically generated data-based stop losses and take-profit targets. My record of results from the last four days suggests to me that the techniques I once sought for trading successfully with more of a swing trade mindset that eluded me for so long just might be eluding me no more... If the above suspicion is true, then there is nothing more to be accomplished by recording my actions. I will therefore plan to make this the last post I enter in this thread, and simply continue implementing this strategy rather than writing about it.
Are you planning to give regular updates about your performance? It looks good and I think a lot of people would be interested. You're using several timeframes and I don't quite understand why you sometimes narrow it down to the 1 min. when you have limited time available. Setting alarms when price reaches an important level helps me a lot. Thanks and good luck!
No regular updates about my performance are planned. I usually post for one of three reasons: It helps me develop my ideas (this purpose is essentially no longer applicable). It provides me with extra motivation to do what I should be doing anyway (preparing to trade, market analysis, etc.) I'm bored and looking for something to do. I am likely to begin posting less and less since... I have other projects I am working on so that boredom is not an issue. I'm beginning to find trade preparation and market analysis more interesting in and of itself so that I do not need the extra motivation to carry it out. The success of the system as I am currently implementing it is also becoming all the motivation I need to prepare and analyze as necessary. For me, daily charts have little to do with intraday trading, but they reveal the global bias so that I am operating with an awareness of the big picture, which in turn provides me with a certain amount of extra clarity that I like having; they REALLY help confirm the day-to-day trend; and they are ESPECIALLY useful in identifying where wholesale reversals in the exchange rates might occur, and confirming when such reversals have actually taken place. Thirty-minute charts are the BEST charts, the CLEAREST charts, for recognizing reversals in the intraday trend given the particular set of proprietary indicators I use. But 30-minute charts are not detailed enough to reveal the "inner workings" of price action, something five- and one-minute charts ARE able to do, informing me as to the precise moment I should enter positions and the exact moment I should abandon them. Because it is so much easier to make money trading off five- and one-minute charts, I will occasionally MAKE the time to refer to them, though this is no longer as big a problem since the 30-minute charts inform me as to when it makes since to do so and when it doesn't.