I found out a bit through more backtesting where things went wrong this week. I need to have more patience and base my trades of both the 15M and 30M charts. Also trying to do too many things at once only is nefast for my performance. So for the next few weeks I am going to concentrade on trading gbpusd only having one or at most two trades per day. Going to try to deploy better, more sophisticated chart reading skills too. Hoping that solves a few things ...
I can only guess at what “pullback till ema20 on the 5M with engulfer with the general trend” means, but when you wrote “long 1.2759 in gbpusd” I had to wonder, “Why would he go long at the top of the pair’s day range?” I don’t know how much market structure figures into your decision-making process, but, for example, now that GBPUSD is down at 1.2731, it would seem to me to make much more sense to go long somewhere in this neighborhood. Personally, I would not go long yet, because the rate is still dropping. But if and when the moving averages gave me their permission, I might consider it. (Though at 1.2731, GBPUSD does have what I think of as minor statistical support.) In terms of the broader structure however, I’m assigning what I call "major" statistical support at 1.2725, increasing in strength all the way down to 1.2714. I see “monster support” in the region between 1.2681 down to 1.2628, but I wouldn’t expect the rate to drop that low unless the pair was bearish, which it currently is not. In a nutshell, as of Friday’s close, I’m conceptualizing the “recreation area” in which GBPUSD has been given to play as basically stretching between 1.2725 up to 1.2755, with a lot more room for the pair to climb than to fall. Still, the market can do whatever it likes, so I would never enter a long position until price is actually rising. (For whatever it’s worth, or if worthless, just ignore all the above as a bunch of baloney.)
It looks to me like GBPUSD got stuck in the noise of "monster support" and was turned away/back in the neighborhood of 1.2652. However, even though I still view the day-to-day trend as bullish, once the rate fell below 1.2703, for me, the intraday trend turned bearish. It turns out that the “recreation area” I quoted above changes too much with each passing minute to be worth mentioning, so I'm going to redefine it as being the region between monster support and resistance instead of the region between major support and resistance. That said, at present, I’m conceptualizing the “recreation area” in which GBPUSD has now been given to play as basically stretching between 1.2655 up to 1.2731. Nonetheless, that zone will continue to be subject to falling as long as the rate keeps dropping.
The intraday trend turned around to join the day-to-day trend heading north about seven hours ago, when the rate climbed above 1.2684 and kept going. However, the pair has had a tough time getting above 1.2728, which I'm not at all surprised to see, given that this is a mere three pips shy of the top of the "play area" I assigned GBPUSD in the above post yesterday.
had one trade today: shorted 1.27168 and took 21 pips. For the rest it was just sitting and waiting ...
long gbpusd @1.2731, moved stop to be allready, targeting +21 pips unless I close it manually. EDIT: closed +5 pips.