From demo to live

Hey there,

who am I?
I am a 25 year old university student from Germany. I study economics.
I discovered forex 14 months ago. Started with an indicator based system and attended a paid teaching room where I learned a lot of basics, psychology, money management and so on.
I then switched to naked charts and trading the basic sup&res, candle patterns. So just the basic stuff.

What am I trading?
I am trading the weekly/daily timeframes. The weekly for the overall direction and the big levels. The daily for executing the trades and looking for signals.

I am trading mostly the forex majors, Gold, Silver, Soybeans, Wheat, Corn, Gas, Crude.

As I said above I am trading the naked charts and trying to keep it as simple as possible.

The purpose of this journal.
I want to keep track of my trading performance. Have a central place for screenshots from my trades, share me thoughts and also add some leverage.

The plan
I will be starting with a 5.000 USD demo account. Risk per trade is going to be 2%.
After 3-4 winning months I am planing to go live with about the same account size probably.

As I am picky on the trades and trade the high timeframes I wont be sharing a trade every single day but I will post interesting charts and setups I am looking for as well.

Let's start :clap:

I'm quite interested to see this, I myself am at a similar stages of my trading career and this could be a good blog for me to follow. Good Luck.

Let's make the plan clearer.

Risk per trade:
I will use a maximum of 2% on a single trade. These 2% I am going to use on the A+ setups.

What do I consider A+?
The trades that jump out at you and scream "trade me". Not the ones where you go "hm..let me put the fib here..oh no, there it might look better...is this a pinbar? could be!..hm"

My usual approach is trading price action (PA) with the trend. I will go with maximum of 2% on these kind of trades.
But I will take counter trend (CT) trades when I spot a good setup. As CT is usually more riskier I will adjust my risk on these trades. 0,5% - 1%.

How to handle stop loss (SL)
I will go with the approach "Target or Stop". I wont pull my stop to break even (BE) or trail it behind me.
I will have a fixed target and a fixed stop and I will leave it there till one is being hit.
I might go and take partial profits though at pre difened trouble areas that are on the way to my target.

Why do I make these distinctions?
I am following other traders in this forum and when I first started out I learned from a very experiences professional trader some good lessons.
Making totaly clear when you risk what size on which ocasion is key.
I also don't want to jump around and make adjustments all the time. I will start out with that approach. See how this is going to work over a few/weeks months, collect data and see what my journal and the equity curves tells me. And from that point I will decide what to do next.

cheers @forefit

Interesting setup on the #EPM1 Daily.

We have still 45min to go till the daily candle close but I am not going to play this because of the risk reward ratio (RRR) that is below 1:1 on this one. It is also a CT trade and that combination I don't like.

I will still watch this scenario closely and see how it unfolds.

The close of this candle will be interesting too. I like to see a close near the low of the day which symbols more bearish strength.

More comments on the screenshot.

This is not a trade from me but I a great example of the beauty of fibs.
I have been watching this trade for 2 weeks now.

It wont be in my trading statements because it happened before I started this.

I just wanted to show that setup because I think it is a real beauty
But it has still some way to go

The #EPM1 is on its way as expected and has some room to go still.
USD/CHF as well. Check out my posts from yesterday.

Today I cannot identify any interesting setups on any of my charts.

So let's get back to them tomorrow.

Patience pays!!

The #EPM1 hit the target we identifed 2 days ago..Let's see if we can get some more upmove into the original direction of the overall trend after that break and retest pattern.

On all my pairs and instruments I don't see anything worth trading but overall I see some retracements to important levels that could give us some nice entries in the direction of the big trend. But for now I will play the waiting game and come back to my charts tomorrow.

Big moves out there but I didn't get a signal on my last daily candle and so I stayed out. That's part of the game and I am ok with that.

For now I am not seeing any interesting setups that I would trade but I have some potential scenarios I am watching and I want to share. Maybe someone has something to add.

Plan your trades and trade your plan

No real good setups so far.

The GBP/USD Daily presents us an interesting one but it is not in line with the weekly timeframe.
The weekly shows us some ranging with a bounce off a level at 1,6725 last week. That is not why I am too thrilled to go long on that pair. But I included a screenshot of the GU Daily how I would have played it.

At the close of the daily bar we are given kind of a pinbar with a strong close but we ar right at an important level (1,64000).

I think you could play this setup but it is not a premium one so I will stay at the sideline, take notes and observe.

Miko1 said:

....
Plan your trades and trade your plan

Click to expand...

First trade on my account on this journal :cheesy:

I planned the UCHF setup few days ago and last night price came close where I expect a bounce. I set a sell limit and left the screen. Now the limit order has been trigerred.

First image is the plan from a few posts above and second is the new chart how it looked last night when I set the limit order.

I will be closing my trade on the USD/CHF.

We didn't see a bounce off that 0 fib but instead broke through it and closed as a bullish engulfing candle.

I am going to take a small loss but this situation looks more bullish then bearish to me. I will wait to get a new and better sign.

Good Luck & Sake Trading

I'm going Full Time Live Trader this Monday 16th May

Why not link your Demo to http://www.myfxbook.com

Thanks JDTrader. I will think about it.

When I scanned my pairs and other instruments I went over the USDCHF again I am in and I decided to leave the order but pull the stop closer. That way I will stay in but take some off the table.

That's how it looks now. I am targeting the 0.87000 area.