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

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

I really do need to spend some more time working the charts.  I suffer from the same problem as many of you though.  Time.  I just don’t have it.  When I do have it, I tend to rush thinking that I have to make a trade to make the most of the time.  That is a dangerous mentality to have when trading.  I managed to get some time yesterday evening and I did manage to make a little bit of money.  My problem was what my problem always is when I am rusty.  Timing.  I got into the trade too early and then exited too early.  The reason I exited so quickly is because I was tired from being in the negative as a result of my bad entry.  Had I got in when I should have, I wouldn’t have felt beaten up and would have been able to stick this one out for about 10 pips.  Instead I walked away with just over 2 pips.  I know that isn’t bad but things setup well enough that I should have made this easy hunting.  This trade went against me almost immediately to the tune of 9 pips.  It almost hit my stop loss but it stayed on the nice side of things and came back down.  Oh well.  It was nice to shake off the rust and get back in the game.  I probably won’t have time to trade for the rest of the week unfortunately.  Like I mentioned before, I am still in exam mode in school.  From what I hear our 2nd semester is a little more practical and a little less academic so I am hoping that translates to more trading time!

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.2926
Close Trade - 1.2924
Pips=2

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.

Last night was a little dicey for my tastes.  I will save you the suspense, I still traded and made a profit.  Unlike most days, I didn’t like the way this one played out.  Since I am usually only looking for 2-5 pip gains, I don’t like when trades work against me more than 5 pips.  Most nights I would bail on a trade that went against me because the charts stop lining up and things start looking screwy.  Last night I actually stayed in the trade even when it was against me by 9 pips!  The movements were very jerky and the EUR/USD looked like it didn’t know what it wanted.  I felt that I would get a crack at a positive trade and stayed in until my low goal of 2 pips hit off.  I immediately walked away and was rewarded with a slip in my favor of an extra pip.  The trade actually went positive for me earlier but it wasn’t long enough for me to exit.  All in all this was juts a weird trade.  I think I may have been more lucky than good.  I guess my discipline allowed me to get out without getting greedy!  As you can see by the chart, if I had stayed in I most likely would have hit my limit and walked away with a fairly large loss.  I think the problem here was entry timing.  I really should have been more patient.  My upper barrier proved weak, but I didn’t give the market enough time to prove that for me.  My trades don’t usually take 27 minutes like this one did.  Tomorrow I will get a chance to do things right!  Here are the details…

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.2576
Close Trade - 1.2573
Pips=3

Well this worked out nicely.  I just finished explaining my thoughts on Forex and now I have a trade to show you from yesterday evening.  I am especially proud of this trade because the EUR/USD was pushing down all freakin day.  That made it tough to find a range to work in.  I finally found a lower barrier that I could work with and I waited patiently for a buy trade entry.  A buy trade in these conditions can be very dangerous, so you need to get out quickly when things go bad.  This is another example of strong support from my correlating currencies.  The USD/CHF was tipping me off to a little upward swing.  I got into the buy at 7:25pm.  This one fluttered around for a long time.  I got a little nervous and thought about bailing when I was at zero and could have walked away with no loss.  The USD/CHF kept me thinking I could at least bag 2 pips from this movement.  So, I waited.  Finally at 7:33pm I caught a little movement and walked away with 3 pips.  Not bad at all.  Remember what I wrote about trade exits?  See, I am still learning.  I almost walked away from a nice profit.  The reason I didn’t is that I had confidence in my reasons for entry and nothing changed in the charts to make me think this was no longer a good trade.  Gotta have faith in your system!

Trade Summary:

Buy EUR/USD - 1.2674
Close Trade - 1.2677
Pips=3

Sorry for the very late post today.  Considering how busy I am this week, I am shocked that I was able to get a trade in.  I have tests and mid-terms in pretty much every class of my firefighter pre-service program.  On top of that I also have a presentation due.  But, I am still a trader.  I came home around 8pm tonight and just fired up the charts to see what was going on.  This trade is actually pretty interesting.  My reason for entry wasn’t based on the current movement of the EUR/USD.  I was watching one of my correlating pairs, the USD/CHF, and noticed my lower barrier was holding strong.  I predicted an upward movement in that currency.  Since that pair usually does the opposite of the EUR/USD, I got into a sell trade at 8:30pm.  I don’t trade the USD/CHF because the spread sucks compared to the Euro.  As I suspected, the Euro then ignored it’s upward movement and dropped slightly.  I walked away when I was up 3 pips but it slipped down to about 2.5 pips at 8:31pm.  I will call it 2 pips because I like to round down.  I was a little upset with my exit on this trade.  I really had nothing to signal an exit but I got out just because I really wanted to be able to show you all this type of trade.  As I say, I could teach you all to do this better than I actually do!  Below are the two charts I really made use of on this trade.  You can see that I don’t have fancy looking indicators or anything like that.  You can have all that crap on your screen and still have no idea how to win a trade.  I keep my tools and rules simple.  My gains aren’t huge but I don’t lose too often!  When you don’t have much in the way of draw downs you can risk large amounts on your trades.  I won’t tell you how much I made on this trade…but if I had a $100,000 account then this trade would have bagged me about $1,100.  That’s over a grand in just one minute!  Don’t let people tell you that it is all about the pips.  That’s bullshit.  What good is gaining 50 pips a trade when your win percentage is only 60% and your losers hit you for 100 pips?  That type of trading pimp-slaps your account.  My style of trading may only get me 20-50 pips in a month but I don’t fear those large losses.  As a result I can weight my trades very heavily.  That’s what makes my trading strategy very different from anyone else.  This also makes my strategy very safe!

Trade Summary:

Sell EUR/USD - 1.2604
Close Trade - 1.2602
Pips= 2

*here is the screen shot from the actual trade on the EUR/USD

*this is the USD/CHF which actually lef me to the trade

For a lot of you today is President’s day.  For some of you north of the border, like me, you are enjoying Family day.  And for the rest of you suckers, today is Monday.  In light of those holidays I probably won’t be trading today.  Something will have to look really good to me later in the evening to convince me to trade.  So, in my effort to continue to add value to your visits, I bring you a good dose of religion.  This comic is courtesy of Sinfest.  This strip caused my first visit to Sinfest and I was very pleased to find some hilarious comics in their archives!  There is always something to be gained by not trading.  You obviously gain a lack of exposure to loss.  You can’t lose anything when you don’t trade.  And, when you consider what happened to the market, a 0% loss would have looked good for most of us.  For me, I gain time to find hilarious things on the Internet.  If I am not going to make money, I might as well find something to laugh at!  Enjoy.