My Journal for all to see

herronryan

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This will be used as my journal. I want to make it public so that I will check all trades to make sure there is actually a trade there instead of committing suicide from time to time. For the record, I consider myself a flippin great analyst for the longer term (weekly) however I do not hold trades that long even if I may be right. I am a day trader. This journal will hopefully be a record of how I do things. If you want to comment on my trades, feel free. So here we go. made some trades yesterday and today and here are the results...
 

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So here are my rules... if i break them, be sure to let me know!!!
1. - Always trade in the direction of the trend unless i have a clear reason for shorting.
2. - Only add to a loser once or twice if i am still confident but have a clear stoploss.
3. - Go for 1% or so profit per trading session. for me, depending on what i will see, this will range from 20 pips to 50 pips throughout the session.
4. - If i lose 2%, then i am done for the day. period!

some of the other things i may be doing on here is backtesting and posting the results. i may write about what i may do but never actually do. y'know whatever. this is my journal so i will just jot down thoughts.
 
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Hey bubba! Welcome aboard! :clap:

Looks like you got a great plan, now alls ya gotsta do is stick to it lol

I switched on email notifications so I can follow your trades!

Best of luck to us both!
 
well i said i was gonna post whether good or bad so here goes... before i post this, i must say that i almost didnt. i was so embarrassed. however i need to be true to myself and maybe if i post this, i will recieve some needed feedback on how horrible i did! ha!

anyway here is the deal, i know that the euro is in an extremely strong uptrend right now but i was short on the basis that it broke down out of a 2 day range. the daily stochastic was coming down from oversold. everything was pointing down... for the short term. then things changed but i didnt. i held and held and held till i was at the puke point.

i guess the lesson i learned today was this... if you are wrong, get out! trade what you see-not what you hope. at first i was confident that the longer term trend line was gonna be broken but after watching the market for a while, more and more clues said it wasnt.

i even had the chance to get out at breakeven like 3 times! did i take it? noooo. why? because every time i was in profit a few pips, i always thought, " this is it! here there she blows!"

but i was wrong. dead wrong. here is the chart.
 

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Well thanks for posting that! You are, afterall, human. Be glad it wasn't much worse!

You can make that 8% back in a few weeks - don't try to get it back in one trade is my opinion, that usually only loses more!
 
well i said i was gonna post whether good or bad so here goes... before i post this, i must say that i almost didnt. i was so embarrassed. however i need to be true to myself and maybe if i post this, i will recieve some needed feedback on how horrible i did! ha!

anyway here is the deal, i know that the euro is in an extremely strong uptrend right now but i was short on the basis that it broke down out of a 2 day range. the daily stochastic was coming down from oversold. everything was pointing down... for the short term. then things changed but i didnt. i held and held and held till i was at the puke point.

i guess the lesson i learned today was this... if you are wrong, get out! trade what you see-not what you hope. at first i was confident that the longer term trend line was gonna be broken but after watching the market for a while, more and more clues said it wasnt.

i even had the chance to get out at breakeven like 3 times! did i take it? noooo. why? because every time i was in profit a few pips, i always thought, " this is it! here there she blows!"

but i was wrong. dead wrong. here is the chart.

That is such a hard emotion to master. I've also had similar experiences where I've been counter trend trading and in my mindset I knew I was pushing my luck and on several occassions a small profit was available but then greed steps in and you hold it. Sooner or later the trend resumes and you get spanked!

Discipline is the number 1 element to being a successful trader imo.
 
Did you not say yourself you did not want to be trading against the trend.

When you went into your losing trade did you have a point in mind where you thought you would be wrong and get out? Did you have a protective stock further away from the market in case it charged off against you?

I will read this with interest as I am starting a trading journal to keep myself true as well.

I know you've mentioned being longer term but as it appeared to bimble along with out falling away for presumably quite sometime did your rationale for going short remain? Just quite often if I am in a trade and it is not doing anything I would generally look to get out and wait for a better spot.

Good luck and will keep reading :clover:
 
actually bangkoker, i broke my rules and that is why i lost. i lost my head and it was a terrible mistake. i understand this now. actually i understood it the second i closed my trade. this weekend, i had a 3 hour phone call to my mentor who showed me a thing or two. the biggest thing he said was this...

"ONLY take the highest probability trades."

i love the feedback because it smacks me right in the face and makes me realize that if i have a public journal, i may hesitate to take just any trade just to be trading.

and when you said this... "I know you've mentioned being longer term but as it appeared to bimble along with out falling away for presumably quite sometime did your rationale for going short remain? " ... here is my response. my rationale for still remaining short totally died but i was in too deep so i was praying to the trading god. and i know that praying to the trading god is a sign to get out.

i lost my head on this one. we will see how it goes this week. i have already did my analysis and discipline is key. thanks for the feedback.

mr Dubai- yes i agree discipline is the thing we all need to master!
 
Could be an interesting thread. Will be nice to watch you turn profitable and hopefully i'll be consistently profitable at the same time.:clap:
 
got my head back on straight today. here is my 1st one. i am showing the minute chart only for clarity. +9.2
 

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and my 3rd one. i close at right about breakeven because i just didnt like the way it smelled. but here is the chart. all in all today i made 16.9 pips. about 114 pips to go to make up for that crap last week!
 

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isnt trading a funny thing and soooo different to any other profession on earth. lets take today for instance. i trade all day and keep losing and losing. then i see something i didnt all friggin day and quickly reverse my position and pack up and walk to my vehicle. it wasnt 30 seconds before i had overcome my losses all day and made a profit.

30 seconds to get an entire days profit!

so i must give credit where credit is due though. i have a mentor who is constantly working with me to improve my trading and he is the reason i quickly reversed my position. he saved my **** yet again. i keep working wwith him and i can detect my mind changing the way it thinks of the charts.

anyhow, i will explain my trades. 1st entry i was above the 80ema and the long term eur/usd is clearly trending up so i went long.

well it broke to the downside of a mini range and created another mini range so i went long again.

well fartknocker! it broke down again and i went long again. at this point, i began to sweat about my position. to me, this is a clear sign that i am doing something wrong. i said to myself, if this thing pops back up a few pips, im out. it did and i closed out.

i then saw that the trend of NOW was clearly down. screw the longer term on this one. we are below the 18/20 ema and falling. i placed the exact position size of what i had long and went short.

30 seconds later, i am up for the day. have a look below.

soon, when i am comfortable, i may begin posting my account balance along with my trades.
 

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Congrats and very nice! :)

The more you stick to the rules, the easier it becomes to stick to the rules.........and perhaps more importantly, the easier it becomes to just stay out of trades that go against the rules.
 
here's my advice when it comes to trend trading the lower timeframes on any market; don't use ' X EMA below X EMA=downtrend'
the key to this is using multiple timeframes effectively, for example there are many trends on a 5 minute chart, but you have to be careful which ones you pick :).

best thing is having a daily , H4 and then YOUR timeframe, okay, so on the daily chart of eurusd we have a longer term downtrend, this is a (perhaps overextended?) pullback in the downtrend, and maybe even a reversal, even so; this creates an uptrend for H4 , so then you look at the H4; is it oversold/overbought? if you thyink it's overbought, wait for the 5 minute chart to break some support or something, and then use your emas, and then trade with your trend as it is in consideration of multiple timeframes :)

but some good trades there; i'm useless at scalping so hats off!
 
Starting to turn profitable now!

alright today i took a long and was wrong. i took another long and realized i was wrong so i closed out both positions, doubled my position size and went short. im happy today!
 

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here's my advice when it comes to trend trading the lower timeframes on any market; don't use ' X EMA below X EMA=downtrend'
the key to this is using multiple timeframes effectively, for example there are many trends on a 5 minute chart, but you have to be careful which ones you pick :).

best thing is having a daily , H4 and then YOUR timeframe, okay, so on the daily chart of eurusd we have a longer term downtrend, this is a (perhaps overextended?) pullback in the downtrend, and maybe even a reversal, even so; this creates an uptrend for H4 , so then you look at the H4; is it oversold/overbought? if you thyink it's overbought, wait for the 5 minute chart to break some support or something, and then use your emas, and then trade with your trend as it is in consideration of multiple timeframes :)

but some good trades there; i'm useless at scalping so hats off!

That is exceptionally good trading advice. Time frames are very important and the larger time frames 99% of the time trump the smaller time frames.
 
Re: Starting to turn profitable now!

alright today i took a long and was wrong. i took another long and realized i was wrong so i closed out both positions, doubled my position size and went short. im happy today!

Great job! :clap:

Flipping your position is not always the easiest thing to do, doubling that position can be even more difficult! Excellent trading!
 
to chartsy and jah dave... thanks for the advice! actually i do use larger timeframes now. i use several to try to get the feel of the flow. it has helped me tremendously!

so to recap today so far, the eur/usd has fallen like 400 pips in 2 days! so i am assuming the trend might be down. even though the longer daily trend is up and i dont know yet if this is just a sharp pullback on the daily or not, i dont really give a hoot because i was only going after the next 10-20 pips or so.

so i saw price just plummet and it started to do a mini retrace and formed a nice trendline on the 1 minute chart. so i thought, "i'm gonna short this ******* if it breaks the trendline so i set my order.

up 12 pips. woot woot!

note ( i set my limit order and at the time the spread was 2.4 pips but as soon as it hit, i was down 4 pips automatically. price didnt retrace one iota. i usually place market orders to try to avoid this but i have been told to use limit orders instead. if a broker sees a limit there, will he snag it for more than what the spread is? anyone wanna comment on this?)

ok here is my chart today...
 

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