The Road To Profitability

Shuanl0ol

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Ok, several times during my trading career I've failed to learn from my risk management mistakes. About two years ago I had my first margin call on a 2000 dollars account, and that was the most awful day in my life. I told myself that never ever do I want to put myself in a situation where my trading "spark" will decline to almost zero.

After my first margin call I've had an fair amount of success in my trading.... I have manged to increase my account by respectively 13, 24 and 36 percent before I managed to give it away quicker than the wink of an eye (yes I know, I am an idiot.. well almost).

I think my greatest flaws in trading is that I have never manged to hold my risk constant.
From this day on my risk will be held at 1% any given trade.

Lets put out a scenario where I time after time change my percentage risk:

First assume that risk-reward for my winners is always 1:1

Trade 1) Risk = 3% ---> Trade ended up in profit.
Trade 2) Risk = 5% ---> On a 5% trade I "should" feel extremely confident ----> Well the market did not react as I saw it and it resulted in a 5% loss.

Result: -2%

A constant risk would put me in a break-even situation which would be counted as a winning month in my book :p

The aim of this journal is to:

1) Keep track of my trades
2) Developing a traders long-term success mindset by talking with others about mistakes, how one could do things differently to what I did/do etc
3) For every trade there has to be a detailed written management plan, I've been quite bad at this and this is something I will work on.

I view myself as a chartist who is slowly managing to take the step away from being a newb. Thats at least what I think.

I follow 32 FX pairs + gold and silver. All my trades is based on the daily timeframe, haven't had the time to follow markets more than that for the past 2 years. Most of my trades are based on confluence with respect to specific price action patterns. While a few percentages of my trades are based on box breakouts or pure box trading. What I mean by box trading is when price have been trading in a rectangle. I do not consider funnymental in my analysis.

While I'm on it might be a good idea of where my trading is influenced from.
It started here on T2W with the MMT thread by TD and continued over at FF j16 thread.

By the way, my journalistic skills are probably as bad as my trading skills haha :innocent:

Cheers
 
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Why is someone "who is slowly managing to take the step away from being a newb" also a "Training Literature Vendor"?
 
Markets does not appear to give me any opportunity for the night. I stared at USD/SGD setup i.e. potential box trade. But this box is in a really narrow range, which lead to the conclusion that it is not worth putting 1% at risk for a trade like this (at least according to me).

Setup facts:

1) Trend is our friend
2) bar-size isn't the best one but OK
3) 1.2000 level seem to have a quite decent balance between buyers and sellers, this would be my target if I would take it.
4) 8 pip spread on this pair make it a pass for me (not that I think it is a lot for swing trading but the profit target and entry is quite close to eachother hence making the 8 pips a lot!

I'm not getting in on this one.
 

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Silver + AUDJPY

Markets has been extremely volatile today due to press conferences and important data releases all over the world.

On the daily silver chart we have a bearish outside bar that engulfs 10 of the previous bars which to me is a indication of a significant change in sentiment. It went right through the big round number 40 and seems to want to get in to the aqua blue rectangle.
However this setup offers me a 400 pip stoploss which I cannot afford to have, it easily exceeds my "new" 1% rule. So I must pass this one.. how unfortunate!

I'm not going to bed empty handed though. AUDJPY offers quite a interesting setup. It isn't one of the 'traditional' price pattern setups, im trading this one based on confluence with major S/R (85.00) and the formed flag . There has been a huge sell pressure on most yen pairs today, one of the reasons is ofc due to the speech one of the chairman held. And the other is probably beacuse that everybody knows that whenever centralbanks intervene, price always (well almost then) manages to retrace back to it's starting point or lower.

259 pip stoploss, little less than 1% at risk. entry on the break of the prev. bar low.
My target is around 80.

Cheers
 

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My AUDJPY trade is currently +80 pips. But it gapped on the downside @ asian open. I expect the gap to get filled and continue in my direction. My stop is held at the same level as before.

Let's see how it goes.
 
EURSEK saying goodbye to zé box?

It seems to me that price is heading around 9.5000 level on this pair. The push up to 9.5000 will most likely be supported by funnymentals during the upcoming week where there is lots of important decisions to make for the market key players.


There is two way to play this setup in my eyes, you either play it on the break of the box or on the retest after the break. But then again it isn't sure that it will retest, it might have a nice rally.

So I'm playing it on the break.

If price manages to reach 9.4000 which is a solid S/R level I will move my stop to BE.
 

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Re: EURSEK saying goodbye to zé box?

It seems to me that price is heading around 9.5000 level on this pair. The push up to 9.5000 will most likely be supported by funnymentals during the upcoming week where there is lots of important decisions to make for the market key players.


There is two way to play this setup in my eyes, you either play it on the break of the box or on the retest after the break. But then again it isn't sure that it will retest, it might have a nice rally.

So I'm playing it on the break.

If price manages to reach 9.4000 which is a solid S/R level I will move my stop to BE.

Apperently my view was incorrect, I'm closing my position due to bearish price action at the upper side of the box. Trade ended up in -0.8%
 
EURSEK reverse

Looks like we are staying in the box for now. I'm a seller at the break of the pin.

Risk: 1%
Target: around 9.1000
 

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Good stuff mate, will be keeping an eye on your charts and might drop a couple, I trade similar set ups on the dailys
 
Gbpnzd

What a day!

I'm looking to short GBPNZD. The bar itself has an incredible story in my point of view.
The trend is on our side.
A huge selling power managed to push prices down all the way down from a major S/R level.

My SL is slightly above 2.000 level... the reasoing goes by the idea that if price manages to visit 2.000 and even breach it; It gives me all reasons to believe it will continue that way if so.

Risk: 1%
TP: around 1.9000
 

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Gbpcad

Here is another one I'm short on.

Made a risky entry before the break on the assumtion of that the 1.6000 level will hold.
Risked 0.1% on the entry (which was before the break)

In addition I'm risking 1% on the break of the bar with a larger SL on that one.

TP1: Around 1.5800

Cheers
 

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nice looking reversals, range is a bit too much for me, would have to be risking 5-10% to play these.

Seems that's the condition of the market at the moment...
 
I guess you don't trade with a micro account! I have a micro acc, thats why I can afford to play these =P
 
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