I got greedy on Friday...

Got greedy on Friday and bought CAD against CHF and EUR. The result: -9%. The problem is that I'm far away from what should have been a confirmation to enter the trade. As I said, greed is my thing.

Things I think about:
- Oil (still see nothing to formulate a bullish scenario for CAD, yet nobody does, which is bullish).
- CADCHF (I have technical reasons to believe there's a reversal around the corner on the weekly charts).
- EURCAD (I have the technical reasons plus everything else in the medium term).
- As I trade stocks, I guess equities are set up for a bullish momentum in the short term and then go bust in a sharper correction than the last one. For now, beside the FED story, prices were mostly driven by Crude's fall. If technically that's correct, does it mean that Crude is gonna make a move? Screw the fundamentals (in the short-term), there are lots of events that can accomplish this. If all this happen, my long on Loonie does not look so helpless. Anyway, have I got it wrong, I'll trim down my positions and wait the hubris to fade away before taking further action.

Russia-Turkey boat shot = good for Oil (CAD)?
Saudi Arabia's deficit (~$133 billions/20% GDP) made officials envision structural changes for 2016, as oil's low price may be the new normal. Question: what's low price? $20-$35 or anything under $70.
What about Canada? Can they stand low prices as the Saudis are ready to?

I must add a few words about myself. I’ve traded stocks for almost 9 years, with good results. Equities are my main entreprise. FX is just a small part of my business. I had an account with IB, switched off to FXCM, and after FXCM went through all the gloom and doom in January, I withdrew all my money and parked it with Varengold Bank. I still have this account (>30K and up 42% YTD), yet I will not make references to it for privacy reasons. I’m an US citizen and offshore accounts aren’t really smth to talk about. This account reflects my approach to FX, swing trades based on technicalities and event-driven movements, from a couple of days to weeks. It also covers my approach to risk-management when it comes to FX (less than 1:1 leverage, depending on convinction), that is to reduce volatility by capitalizing on a certain statistical edge through binomial distributions. That means that if my expected edge is 63% over a sample of data, I’ll try to basket-trade that edge through multiple positions across multiple pairs and get the same exposure I’d get if I’d only run one trade.

The other part of the story, which will be the bulk of this thread, is that I chose to refund my FXCM account with $1700 in February. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to gamble it away, but at least to get aggressive and pursue a greater risk. In September, it went up to $2630, together with both wild swings and bad run. Then I blew it in 5 trades (never underestimate your bad luck). It rests now at $1100, meaning that I’m pretty much down YTD. I care for the money, believe me! Here comes this thread, as I intend to make myself accountable and maybe scare off the bad karma. Most of my trades were/are derived from scalping M1 charts (I have time to do it before the NYSE’s open). I had great satisfaction by doing it. My biggest losses came not from scalping, but from swing trading intra-day (H1-H4) both with guts and stupid leverage. When it was clear that I was on the wrong track, I couldn’t take the losses (they were too big); I had to scale them down and take higher Tfs into consideration, which magnified the risks. So here’s what I want to do, starting with this moment and making it a resolution for 2016. I’ll keep scalping, which I wouldn’t be able to write about. I will also take some trades on the daily charts, with high probability in my books and let them run with 5:1 leverage. Beside that, I’ll try to identify risk-reward (>1.5x) opportunities and commit 2% of the account with them.

Whenever I’ll mention a trade I’ll be taking, I’ll assign a number (like Trade 11) and an etiquette (Trade 11/sw for swing trades; Trade 11/ rr for risk-reward trades). Whenever I’ll make reference to a trade, or simply close it, I’ll reply to the post containing it. Hopefully, I’ll boost(ify) (without gambling) this account during 2016. Hopefully, I’ll meet some of you along the way. I’m not much of a teacher, so don’t expect to find aha unveilings here. I’ll try to be pragmatic, meaning to make money (clean, rinse and repeat). You got it! English is my second language, try to understand my limits if you’ll get annoyed.

Managed to get almost even on this idea (which hasn't started to take place).
+ 1.5% (on long CAD short EUR):
- 1.8% (long CAD short CHF): exited right away, which explains the loss.

Still believe that EURCAD is a great idea. (I wouldn't touch USD, getting sick of it, since it's so crowded and nobody knows what volatility may bring up).
Once again, why is EURCAD a great idea?
a) The only driver is Crude.
Today, at 10:45 am EST Poloz spoke (no volatility whatsoever), early in the morning Manufacturing Sales were below expectations, German ZEW up, reaction: market is schizoid, CAD goes up (because of Oil).
b) EUR is going to break down in the coming days
c) Crude is going up (again, this trade has all the components to get insanely contrarian).

Meanwhile, it's not safe anymore. CAD is going down again soon.
I'll get back to it (and keep it) only when CAD's long is trending on H4.
Whatever skills and tools you have to follow trends, get them on H4.

Another trade I'm willing to take is short EUR long TRY. Don't have time to explain now that the only factor behind TRY pessimism was the conflict with Russia (which is done and gone). Not to mention TRY's positive yield, this is a trade to consider (with great risk/rewards).

Another trade I might consider, yet a bit esoteric at the moment is long TRY short ZAR (South Africa is rated almost at the junk level and despite the correction is USDZAR it looks similar to the USDRUB in the past). I might be wrong tough.
Here's the synthetic pair to trade TRYZAR:

sell USD/TRY
buy USD/ZAR
----
buy TRY/ZAR

Funny that I did the opposite the entire day.
Not only that I stayed out of shorting the EURCAD (which I advocate), yet I fought the market all morning on the long side.
21 trades, 15 winners (all longs, during a pretty ugly downtrend).

Attached Image (click to enlarge)

it looks goofy. in fact, almost each time I was expecting a >15 pips move, which never came as long as I've been watching the screen.

Started to test the waters.
a) 1:1 short EURCAD (don't have the confirmation yet, but like the price level)
b) 1:1 long EURTRY (weird action in TRY, I believe it will go up back to where it fell off; these two trades kind of hedge themselves)
c) 1:1 short EURNOK (oil is going up, the same theme, can't wait for many confirmations in krona, and the price looks promising).

I'm still interested mostly in EURCAD. When I'll have the impression that the trade is valid and manageable, I'll make it 5:1 and scale in based on p/l.
EURTRY, if it goes up, it will be ok to take it. If it doesn't, it's too late for my r/r.
EURNOK (it's sound fundamentally; as I said already, NOK moves rather abruptly at times and there's no reason to look for inflexion points).

My thesis remains the same: EUR is going down. Oil is going up (anything consistently up will make CAD, MXN, NOK to jump).
TRY and ZAR are rather esoterical propositions. I can't explain them well and I'd rather not get involved myself too much with them.
Russia just warned that will take any turkish plane down in Syria. TRY didn't react as it did in the past. Which means smth, at least some strength.

This crap with EURCAD is killing me.
Although I've been right all along the way, I couldn't stand it anymore and started to short, mainly since it opened lower and WTI futures higher.
Added and added, at one point I was 30:1 and had to clear everything before this rally started (-2.3%).
Now I short it again with 17:1 and am down smth like 9%.
Classic hedge funds bullshit. They ramp up on one stupid idea until there's nobody left in the trade.

Equity: $1028
My target for this short is to keep everything toward 1.4250-1.43 (there's a lot to get there). Still, I worry that things will suddenly go insane and won't be able to get correctly in the trade (mostly because of gaps during the holidays).
The problem is that it may still go higher 1-200 hundred pips.

I stopped posting here because I withdrew all of my FXCM account.
I made a hefty profit from the ideas mentioned above (comparable to the account size).
Besides FX, I was right calling the last correction in equities, which I'm adamant about (and which will revive sooner than most expect). While Crude was a struggle around $27, I swallowed it (after averaging down a bit) and made more than 10% on the trade.
This is my last post on ff.
Bests to you all!

p.s. eurusd will retest 1.06 before late summer. if it goes toward parity, european union will end (because of china devaluing). Next Christmas will bring you the Deutsche Mark :-)