With all due respect MrScalper I have addressed your point regarding sticking to one market multiple times now. Am sure you are a very successful trader however I cannot change my strategy based on the advice of a random person on a message board. In all likelihood you are correct but I will need to discover this myself through experience. I disagree regarding the stats, clearly I need to track the ratio of winners to losers, and it follows that my winners need to be big enough on average to cover my losses or I don't have a positive expectancy.
Complete waste of time, which you will realize at some stage. The best advice is always the hardest to take! You are now on your own.
Mr. Scalper, there is one problem with the idea of sticking to one market. And that is the fact that the one market can sit in the doldrums all day long, while other markets are cycling nicely. So while one sits in the muck on the one instrument that is sludge, the trader is missing potential profits elsewhere. I have learned that after a year of painful market study in CL.
Natural Gas hit its target. I am not going to post every trade anymore. I am not looking for feedback on the fundamentals of my strategy, that is a given as far as I am concerned, it's the bigger picture I am interested in so will post occasional updates.
Since my last post I have taken 11 trades with 8 losses and three wins. Thanks to a big well timed swing in Gold my account is now showing a small profit, but more importantly I have learned some important lessons and gained some valuable experience. On the subject of learning and experience, I have started using KeepNote (keepnote.org) which is a great, free, desktop note-taking application. I reckon using it will add a couple of % gain to my account by the end of the year. My win rate is lower than I would like at 30%. That being said I took trades in EUR/JPY and JAPAN 225 that I would not take again. If I had also not missed that EUR/USD trade and a further trade on Corn I would be sitting pretty. I have noticed some markets (looking at you Natural Gas) have very high finance costs, so when it comes to cutting the number of markets I follow that will be a good place to start. Also markets with higher spreads. Currently flat.
The gold trade. Makes me smile thinking that shortly after I opened this trade I accidentally read an article on how hedge funds are dumping gold. A few years ago I probably would have closed my position on reading that.
Have these trades saved in a folder in KeepNote named "catching a falling knife". Not doing that again. They also could have been kept in a folder named "highly correlated trades". Who knew the Nikkei and the EUR/JPY move in the same direction.
I suspect this journal would actually be very successful if the trades weren't being taken by a complete muppet. Six trades, five losses, one nice win in the Bund for a £50 profit for the month and overall profit of £593. Realised P&L in the Oanda platform does not take into account financing charges, started with £19,800. That's not all of the story. I missed small win in EUR/GBP and a rather large win in oil. God knows what's wrong with me that I keep missing these sitters. I was discussing this with a friend who suggested he may be able to code this up, but I am not so keen on that idea. If something can be automated how valuable can it be? That being said, what won't be automated in our economy in the coming years.
Worth mentioning this trade in the Europe 50. I saw it, thought it looked gross (but how do I define "gross" mathematically), however it met the criteria so I took it and got stopped out same day. Will keep charts like this in a folder named "Gross" in the spirit of "what gets measured gets managed".