Holy crap I made a trade today!  I finally had some time this late afternoon and I figured I would check out what’s happening on the charts.  I spotted what seemed like a fairly simple play on the EUR/USD shortly before 5pm.  I felt a small retreat on the price would cause some jumping as people bought in.  As usual, I was comfortable getting in on a buy at this time because I am looking for small gains.  It looks like my move was the right one, although my timing could have been better.  My trade bounced around a little bit before it finally broke for a few pips profit.  I managed to grab 5 pips, which is more than I usually go for!  Here are the details.

Trade Summary:

Buy EUR/USD - 1.4962
Close Trade - 1.4967
Pips= 5

Oh my god I actually made a Forex trade!  This is shocking.  What used to be a part of my daily life has slipped completely out of my life.  My last trade was back in mid June!  Some people may see this as slacking.  And, quite honestly, they might be right.  I have slacked a little bit.  But I have also been realistic.  It was easy for me to spend time completely focused on charts back when I had a full time job.  As a student, I just don’t have the time.  I am usually doing some kind of school work or I am working out.  I spend so little time watching the charts that I don’t feel completely comfortable with them anymore.  I am going to try to spend more time at this so I can get sharp again.  Today was a day where I actually had time to do this!  This was different than most of my evening trades.  In those trades, I mark off a safe zone - an area I feel the currency wants to stay within.  When it gets to the top or bottom of this zone I wait for signs that it is about to bounce off and then I trade.  During the day things happen a lot faster and you can’t trust those zones.  You really need to pay special attention to momentum and correlation of similar currency pairs.  When you see those other currencies spike, you know that yours will probably follow.  That is what happened late this morning when I got into this trade on the EUR/USD pair.  I saw a nice spike downwards and I got in.  I was in this trade for probably 5 seconds before I bagged my 3 pips and walked away.  Now, the currency did continue a nose dive and I could have easily bagged another 10-20 pips.  But, I just as easily could have had the thing rebound on me and screw me into a loss.  I always walk away when I have made my safe profit.  I am completely happy with 1-2 pips per trade.  One of the best things about trading mid day is the spread.  At 0.9 pips I don’t have to be too right in order to make money.  The smallest of movements will get me a profit.  Here is to hoping I can get in some more trading like this next week!  As always, the charts and details of the trade are below.

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.4727
Close Trade - 1.4724
Pips= 3

I haven’t posted anything to do with Forex in a while.  There is a reason:  I haven’t done any trading!  I have been busy most evenings and just don’t have the time to sit in front of the charts.  Tonight would have been ideal but I have already ruled out trading because of a large drop on the EUR/USD that takes any of my usual ranges out of play.  Anytime the currency hits a new high or a new low then I am sitting back and waiting for another day time to trade!  The spread is also at 3.5 pips and that is way too high considering that I have such small pip goals.  So, I look to other things to entertain me.  How about video games?  It has been a while since I have posted a Zero Punctuation review.  So, here is a gem.  This could be one of the most bitter and angry reviews ever.  I have to say that I agree with him for the most part.  I hate the Sims games.  Why would I spend my free time telling some little character to work and eat and sleep…that’s all shit I have to do!  I want to do things I won’t ever get to do in real life like score a goal in the NHL or car jack a guy after beating a cop to death with a bat.  Perhaps I have said too much.  Check out the review for yourself.

My god I actually managed to get a trade in!  This was a pretty easy one to see.  I like it when the currency settles into a little valley down near a low for the day.  This makes it easy to get into a buy trade with some confidence.  That’s exactly what I saw when I fired up the charts at 5:45pm and immediately got into a buy on the EUR/USD.  I didn’t have to wait long for this one to pay off.  At 5:49 I got a swift little jump upward that went about 3 pips in my favor.  I decided to walk away at that point.  This early in the evening you generally get very small movements in the 5 minute candles.  I didn’t want to stay in this trade just on the hope I would squeeze out another couple of pips.  Besides, my strategy is all about small gains that add up over time.  3 pips is more than enough for a couple of minutes of work.  I know I haven’t traded much at all this year, but I have managed to make pips every time I do.  I can’t wait until school is done so I can do this more often!  I know I have yet to release any kind of strategy guide on how I trade.  I honestly didn’t think school was going to suck so much of my time.  I am in the middle of my 2nd of 3 semesters.  3rd semester is a lot lighter.  Hopefully I can put something together at that point.  I would be happy to see how much money people could make using my strategy!  Here is the chart for today’s trade.

Trade Summary:

Buy EUR/USD - 1.3834
Close Trade - 1.3837
Pips= 3

There have been some big changes in the EUR/USD since my last trade on the 14th of May.  The biggest thing is that the currency pair has risen almost 400 pips!  That kinda sucks because my account is in US dollars.  Oh well.  Thems the breaks!  Once again, I really wish I had the time to be looking into the charts more often.  I have easily proven that I have a method to making money.  I just need the time to act on it more often.  My method isn’t about big gains, but small controlled gains that add up over time.  Once I am a fire fighter I will have more time to dedicate to this business.  This evening I fired up the charts before 6 PM and found a nice little range that seemed fairly predictable.  I was able to spot a small sell trade almost instantly so I didn’t even wait to find an ideal price entry.  I jumped in at 5:46 PM and was out 5:50 PM with a nice little 3 pip gain.  I really don’t have some grand lesson to teach you because this one really didn’t take much work at all.  All I can tell you is that 3 pips doesn’t sound like a big deal.  But, if you are working with $100 pips then you just made $300 bucks in 4 minutes.  That’s not bad at all.  Here are the details.

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.3989
Close Trade - 1.3986
Pips= 3

I didn’t post anything yesterday because it was my birthday and I was running around having fun.  Today was spent recovering from that fun.  Since I was laying around I figured I might as well check out the charts to see what was going on.  It turns out conditions actually looked good to make a little trade.  I had a very small range in which the EUR/USD pair was moving in.  I got into a sell trade just after 7 PM.  It moved slowly but finally hit a small profit of 3 pips at 7:21 PM.  This was a pretty simple sell trade to get into.  The Euro was coming off a daily high earlier in the day.  When I got into my trade it was right after some upward movement lost momentum.  I figured this currency had a rock in it and it wanted to drop.  I was right so I made money!  Hopefully I can actually get some trades in this month.  I have been trading so rarely that I almost felt like I should remove the “day trader” title on this blog!  Here are the details.

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.3633
Close Trade - 1.3630
Pips= 3

Holy shit it has been a long time since I made a Forex trade!  I just haven’t had time with school and everything.  So, last night I finally had a little chance to fire up the charts and see what was going on.  I honestly didn’t want to do too much thinking.  I just wanted to take the most basic information and pick my direction.  More than anything this trade was just about getting my feet wet again.  Lucky for me my timing was perfect.  I noticed a large downward movement earlier in the evening.  Normally this would keep me off the charts but I really needed to trade.  I saw an opportunity for a sell trade and I jumped on it without hesitation.  I sold the EUR/USD at 9:46pm.  I was in the trade for about 1 minute and then I walked away with a 3 pip profit.  I know, not a huge gain.  It did feel good to actually make some money in the brokerage account of mine again.  Hopefully with the end of my first semester on the horizon I will be able to get more trades in!  Here is the chart and details of last nights deal.

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.3358
Close Trade - 1.3355
Pips=3

Oh my poor little robot.  I had already mentioned that last Friday my robot got the shit kicked out of it on a couple of bad trades.  This was mostly the result of having weighted these trades very heavily.  It’s tough when one loss is about 10-15% of your capital.  Things started to look back up for the start of this week.  I was hoping to be able to report that the robot managed to get back to where we were last Wednesday.  No dice.  The robot got pimp slapped on some trades during the day and I am now down about 23% from my initial deposit into the demo account.  Again, I am using a demo because I don’t know anything about this robot.  I plan to give it another couple of weeks to see how things go and then I might scale back the pip target/stop loss down from the default setting of 40 pips.  But, you do need to give these things time to work out.  Every trading system will have some losses.  As you can see from the details below, I do have one large trade still open and it is in profit.  If it hits the target I will be back to last weeks total.  One thing that you should notice is the drastic rise in buy trades.  It was something I bitched about over the last two weeks.  I noticed the EUR/USD rising and couldn’t understand the sell trades.  It seems the robot figured it out and has been buy happy all week.  Since the currency actually was rising I think the timing on the entries was poor because these stopped out even though the currency ended higher.  One obvious way to solve this is to make the stop loss much larger.  That is not what I will do.  I like the security of the 1:1 risk:reward ratio.  You can click on the image below for more specific details on the robot’s activity to date.  The graph is a great visual as to what has happened.  You can see the very sharp drops.

I know I haven’t been very personal with my posts lately.  Unfortunately I am in the middle of a crazy-busy schedule.  I barely have time to eat and sleep!  Wednesday is supposed to be my day off where I can catch up on school work and study for tests.  Instead, I will be going to the fire training grounds in Mississauga (near Toronto for you outside of the area).  Although this fucks my schedule pretty hard, it is going to be pretty cool!  We are going into the training buildings to do some search and rescue.  They smoke the place out so you can’t even see your hand in front of your face and then get you to move around in teams doing rooms searches.  It can get pretty tough with all the bunker gear and breathing apparatus.  They also make you go through some confined spaces that are barely large enough to squeeze through so you need to remove your air pack while staying on air.  This is definitely not something to do if you are claustrophobic.  They run things like the military so it probably wont be a good idea to stop and take pictures, but I will see if I can snap a few pics off my blackberry after I am done.  On Saturday we go back to the training grounds and do live fires!  Now that will be really cool.  Anyways, as a result of all this madness I really haven’t been looking into the charts.  I know the EUR/USD has risen sharply over the last week so the timing works out for me.  I don’t like these sharp rises because it usually means new highs are created in the evening hours.  That isn’t good for my style.  My robot is still trading though and I will let you know if he was able to recover from an absolute ass kicking he took on Friday.  More details on that will come tomorrow.  So, for today, I give you a comic from SMBC that is related to the life of a student….a student whose mom is Chuck Norris!

Yesterday I mentioned that I would be posting the results of the Forex Robot I was testing.  I mentioned in this post last week that Expert-Advisors has a free robot to test out.  I figured I might as well give it a shot, the price was right.  When I mentioned that I was going to give an update on results I had it up and running for almost a week and was up about 7%!  Unfortunately the robot got it’s ass kicked as the EUR/USD has risen sharply over the last day.  For some reason, this robot seems hesitant to get into buy trades.  It has made a total of 36 trades in the last week which seems pretty high to me.  Of those trades, only 6 were buy trades.  Considering the upward movement in the Euro over the last 24 hours and the fact that the robot made 9 sell trades I question the logic.  But, it doesn’t take a genius to trade this market.  It takes a system that can make money and an ability to follow your own rules.  The robot can’t break it’s own rules as it has a hard stop set for all trades at 40 pips.  Let’s see if it can recover and bring the account back to profit over the next week.  Here is the account summary.  You can click on the image to get a larger version if you can’t read this.