Si's Swing Trading Journal

Greetings all,

I will soon be trying out a slightly different strategy to the one I currently use, which will be run from a new trading account.

I plan to use this thread to post details of my trade set-ups, entries, and give a log of my performance.

I will be trading commodities, FX, and occassionally indices.

My present trading style is very much short-term, looking for perhaps 30-50 pips in moves at where I will attempt to buy S and sell R - which I will identify through the use of S/R lines and fib levels mostly. I will hold trades from around 15 minutes to a few hours but rarely longer, and always exit same day.

What I want to do with this new account is something similar, but let the trades run a longer, perhaps over a day, or a few days - thus taking more of a swing trading approach, as opposed to a short-term position one. With my current strategy being profitable I do not want to begin messing around with that, and as this is a different strategy in terms of number of trades, SR and R/R %'s I feel the strategy is deserving of its own account.

In running this new account I hope to also find out whether this approach matches, or even beats my current approach in regards to SR and R/R... or in laymans terms whether using wider stops and higher points targets over a slightly longer time-period is more rewarding than my current win/loss targets for my trades.

This account will be held with a spreadbetting firm. I will update in a few days with details of my starting bank etc... Trading is likely to get started sometime next week.

Well I have decided that this account will have a starting balance of 500.

As said this will be managed alongside my other accounts, due to holding trades longer I have no daily benchmark points for this account, but I do have some weekly ones, the first of which is a very modest 100 points, about 2.5x lower than my target with my other accounts, the beauty of this account is I will not need to withdraw an income from it, so even at that rate it should cumulate pretty quickly.

This is not to say once I am 100 points up I will stop for the week, I will try and get as much as I can out of every move, every time.

I guess another part of this little ‘experiment’ is to see if a little fundamental research along with good timing in entry and exit can produce good and relatively steady returns, for example I will not have to manage this account all day, and it could be a nice strategy that could keep me going if I were to be doing a different profession, as involvement in actual trades will only be part time.

My current strategy although I like to think it is 99% technical is probably more weighted 60-40 technical fundamentals, as I very rarely go in any direction against what I believe to be the more medium-term momentum and fundamentals of the markets, for example out of my last 50 crude trades at least 90% of them were shorts, because my general idea is that the market is going lower due to the consecutive pattern lower-lows, lower-highs, confirmed by the global economic slowdown, yet my trades last generally only an hour or two, however to be honest I could have gone in around any weekly high for the past month, held it for a few days and made a very good return, and indeed after closing shorts the market often moves further overnight or the next afternoon, which I may miss, so this will try and capture my more weekly and medium-term views and analysis on the market better than my current strategy.

In general I will aim for a strike rate of around 50% to begin with, and a win/loss size ratio of around 2/1, however I imagine actual results will differ quite a lot from this, as I will be looking to let winners run as far as I can. I will be using trailing stops.