LBranjord journal

Hi everyone. My name is Logan Branjord I am a 24 year old musician living in the midwest and touring constanly. Since I will be travelling my posts will be inconsistent, and some trades I am not able to monitor properly due to poor hotel WiFi and time constraints. I will show my current system. Following this weekend I will summarize each day I trade with a post. Here is my journal!

System 3 ducks and a slow stochastic for confidence
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SMA 60 - candles must be above or below on all three charts
3 hour (oanda does not offer 4 hour, so i look for a strong 3 hour)
1 hour
5 minute
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Entry/Exit
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Enter when 5 minute candle crosses SMA, and breaks through latest support or resistance.
Exit when I see fit. Usually when candle breaks through the SMA for second time, or breaks through previous 5 minute support or resistance

Stop Loss/Target Profit
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Stop loss is set first, on previous 5 minute support/resistance (Just outside of it so that a candle can bounce off line without setting off my stop loss.) When trade is going well I will move my stop loss to next support or resistance to lock in profits.

Target profit initially is always twice the pips of the stop loss. In strong trends it is more. And if I am monitoring the trade and I see it continuing I reset my target further to let the trade run.

Indicators
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I use a slow stochastic, Bollinger bands, candlestick analysis, and many other things to gain confidence or keep my guard up. I am very loyal to my trading system though and these will rarely cause me to make a decision against it.

WISH ME LUCK! OPEN TO ALL SUGGESTION!

A summary of my first three days with this system before I put up the journal

May 7th 155 pips
May 8th 10 pips
May 9th -15 pips (Forced to close early because of work, did not trust it unmonitored. Bad decision)

May7th Eur/Usd position - hit target profit

Overnight I made 2 EUR/USD Trades. One was a poor Entry
Had this not been a paper trade I would not have gone to sleep and let it find the stop loss. So please keep that in mind in your criticism.

-58 Pips EUR/USD
- 28 Pips EUR/USD

EUR/USD 5 minute chart. 2 Entries, some zzzzz's, and a Stop loss triggered

Monday +36 pips. Unmonitored trades, with limit buy and sell set at resistance & support lines I set them around 7 AM waiting for breakouts. 3 ducks

I've been on the road and trading when i can here is my May Summary by day. Unfortunately i have not dated all of them.

MAY-------------------------------------
155.36 EUR/USD trade
10.28 -Use better entries now that i got ebook today
-15 Leftover trade from yesterday. Closing out before weeken spread hits. Started live journal
-86 Two trades I did not monitor all night
-38 poor entries, using perfect breaks of sma and s/r
36 Used 8am session. Totally unmonitored. Changed stoploss to -10 and profit to 20
-101 Used 1am-2am session stoploss changed to -15 and profit to 30
17 Used first breakout, exited before target was hit
32 3 ducks 5 minutes resistance USD/JPY Short 9:30pm
-18 5 min resistance. Walked away for part of the day.
14 Used Eur/Usd and USD/JPY 2:13 am
24 EUR/GBP overnight
16 7-9 pm EUR/USD AUD/USD USD/JPY partially unmonitored 5/26 MON
19 1 am EUR/USD partially unmonitored 5/27 TUES
19 1:42 am closed EUR/GBP Trade lasted a day WED
14 3:30 am closed EUR/GBP 2 trades WED
8 10:08 pm closed EUR/JPY 1 trade 10 minutes FRI
MAY CLOSE AT +106 PIPS!

My first positive month in forex. All since i learned to use multiple time period graphs.

well done, if you can trade that badly and make some piplies how would you be giving it all you got ? Mind you some people cant hack that,cos they sit there and gotta have a little bit of a pokie or something, they fidget and press buttons when they shouldn't do..... but theres only one way to find out ???

If you had to give one up what would you choose Music or Trading ?

Is Stevie Wonder a full time chicken chef and part time artiste?

Dont like the idea of these trades going unmonitored,,,(not on that strat, doesn't fit it does it ?) I suppose you could convince your band ? to become a Kraftwork tribute band and you might be able to blag having a huge techno Forex screen on stage and keep an eye on things !

Somethings gotta give........

keep the beat....

Hang on when you go to a stevie wonder concert does he start playing then **** off the stage half way through ???

Considering your not there half the time or you are asleep,trading on a intra slaughterhouse environment, then I'd say the boys done good to survive !!! Dont forget or perhaps consider you are competing against thousands of guys/dolls who are watching twitches or waiting for the price to come in, so, whilst you are part timing it, be realistic.

Its going to be very hard to improve an intra day strat (which perhaps relies on some element of descretionary action/intervention from the trader in the execution of it), when the trader isn't even there or he's asleep!!

If you get the passion for trading greater than music then you HAVE to dedicate more time to it...

Rock on..

I certainly enjoyed your feedback! And I do plan on full timing it at some point. Towards the end of the month I did learn some things. I learned not to enter a position that I cannot monitor unless I am VERY confident in it, not to be too hungry for trades if there are no good positions to take, and lastly I am learning better placement for stop losses and profit targets.

Keeping in mind that this is my 3rd month trading I am taking it one step at a time for now. My first month was a mess at trying systems and watching charts beat me up. I tried multiple methods of scalping and long term trading, none of which worked. My second month trading was April and I ended out a little better off than before. And now

May has turned around completely for me by using multiple charts and better discipline. Many people think it is unreasonable to trade full time but I can see now that it is. But not overnight. So my goal is constant improvement. If I learn something, then it was not a loss.

So in retrospect, im hoping to find some ways to optimize my trading and have another positive month of trading

And when I think im ready then I will commit to full time trading! I can't wait.

Any advice is more than welcome here.

I have had some fun using the economic calendar with a limit buy and sell on either side of the candlestick. Therefore when news is announced and there is no whiplash I'll pick up the trade in the correct direction

Also I have been using a very simple indicator. RSI 16,70,30 and as soon as it breaks the 70 or 30 and pops back in I enter the trade.

The 3 ducks is my old system and given a perfect scenario I will trade that also.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Any advice? Comments?