Happy trading!

Hello!
Decided to start a trade journal to keep track of my decision
-itll keep me a bit more honest to myself more than anything else im hoping.
-Im doing a mini account with incredibly small lots
-interbankfx seems the least scamish- so im using their account with smallest lot sizes
money management- 0.01 size lot out for every 100$ i have in my account, .10C pips for now

DONT COPY MY TRADES! im a newbie who has no idea what he is doing- i dont want to be responsible for others losing their money.... (too...?)
Ive been demo trading since august, I think I still kinda suck.

Im hoping real money will make it more serious/thus allow me to be more successful/careful/at least teach me some new lessons

What im trading with:
-james 16 price action- i like double bar lows, pin bars, bearish outside bars/etc, but i didn't join his private group so thats all I know from him.
-Support/resistance- trading the bounces and avoiding going against strong s/r
-trend lines- pairs tend to obey them quite often.

I spent a long time scalping but it really took alot of me, but i think I learned alot about how things move.
So my current "system" is to trade off of weeky and set TP/SL based on dailies/use dailies to further examine local s/r/price action/etc.

-My sl is fridays high/low, my tp depends on the charts but I generally make it with atr.
-i definitely need help making the right tps! too often my profit in pocket erodes/get out to early. I dont know many good strategies for setting tp.
-I suppose my goal is to make ~100-200 pips a week between 6 pairs with my money management 100 pips is about 10% Though Ideally once i actually have capital id be more than happy with like ~2-5% profit/risk a week.
-I trade 6 pairs- eur, gdp, nzd, cad,chf, jpy against US
-Seems smarter to me: i could trade only eur for example, but by doing more pairs I spread out my risk a bit/ loser trades cover the winners a bit. +i get to learn a bit more by actually doing/thinking more.



So if I make a stupid trade let me know- more importantly let me know WHY
-I still need to learn alot!
-my success rate is 50/50: if im being serious/ doing my best Im about at break even in demo trading. As opposed to bottoming out endless accounts like I used to I think ive come a long way.
-Definitely teach me/direct me towards any good learning tools/info/places that could improve my trades, I would appreciate any help
-Keep it constructive please!
So Ill post my trades on sunday nights when the weekly bars open, but will keep an eye on things a bit as the week progresses.

So see you guys on sunday!

orders place at 6pm sunday, not knowing any good tp/sr i arbitrarily set the tp and sl of all orders at 50tp and 50pt sl I traded mainly off of dailies this time, but wont put in any more trades untill next sunday.
Potential risk: 300 pips, 12% max loss, 12% max potential gain.

eurusd short @ 1.4847 reasoning: seems to have shifted to trend downward
gdp/usd short @ 1.9642 reasoning: upward trendline broke, headed downwards
nzd/usd short @.7912 reasoning: seems like it will bounce off off a historical resistance
usd/cad short @ 0.9941 reasoning: price consolidating, but still seems to be trending downwards.
usd/chf short @ 1.0894 reasoning: looks like price recovering from retracement/headed back downwards.
usd/jpy short @ 106.63 reasoning: strong downward trend

my eur/usd+gdp/usd trade would have worked but I set the sl way too low.
otherwise if i hadn't put such tight stops it would have lost only minor on a few others.

But i lost 50 pips on 6 pairs for a total loss of 300 pips, and I got fed up with the weekly method and went back to scalping. Weeklies are probley still more robust but Im not comfortable with the stop loss sizes required.

So I went back to scalping 15 minute gdp/jpy charts and it went fairly well.
-Ive almost actually made up for half of what I lost earlier in the week.
-Problem is when I scalp I make so many trades that its a bit hard to post them all here, so i attached a screen capture if you guys wanna see how im doing
-Notice: most of my trades were done on the 6th, coincidentally this was when i should have been studying! funny how I seem to do my best when Im trying not to do something else

Things I learned: stick with what I know!
mistakes made scalping: 6/22 trades were non profitable: these were mostly misreading signals, and recently a symptom of me trying to see something thats not there.

So current pip count= -190 which is up from -300.

I wonder with the gdp/jpy

If I placed an order for something small at any given time what are the odds that if i waited that my tp would be hit?
geppy ranges so wildly it would almost impossible not to be hit unless you go long at the exact bottom of a trend or short at the exact top.

The bad thing with this strategy of no stop loss and wait is all it takes is one mistake however unlikely it may be to bottom you out.

-Perhaps balancing it with jacko's anti-hedging strategy?
honestly that never made a ton of sense to me, putting out an order in the opposite direction doesn't seem to help in my mind it seems entirely likely that it could yo yo hit a stop for the hedge and go right back up again.
Seems smarter to just get out of a losign trade and redirect energies

Happyguy,
I noticed you went short the EUR/USD and USD/CHF at the same time. These two currencies have an inverse correlation more that 80% of the time.

When one goes up the other goes down. If you are only trading six pairs you need to take this into account.

Check before you enter, are you looking for US dollar strength or weakness, and take trades that match your market sentiment.

Also Jacko trades long term and his methods of re-entering a lost trade would not suite what you are doing.

Roy

its dumb to trade entirely price action it seems
forex factor has nice news reports too but ive never known how to take them into account.

definitely kinda hard to keep up with a journal while you scalp
-posting my trades in a screencap form is most convenient
-especially since im trading 15 mins now

last night was great! while i should have been studying I noticed that the price of gdp/jpy was ranging by like a 40 pip range, this is when i do my best. Perhaps I should only trade on these situations? it really works great. (for me)

today ive had 3 trades and my first loser of the week, I had noticed the price had been banging against a resistance and thought it would go back down, which it actually did, but not before going up and just barely hitting my sl. Hate those, so painful!

current pip count this week: -93 pips
this is up from my last week close of -190, and after my initial big blunder that left me at -300.
this means that in the last couple of days I managed to swing 100 pips with a relatively simple strategy (ranges). I still feel like I know nothing, but perhaps Im on to something? how do you know when you are good "enough" to risk real/more money?
(after going back and forth I returned to demoing before starting this post so im not actually risking/losing any money... sorry!)

perhaps im getting prematurely proud of this performance (im still in the negative after all/ do stupid things often) trick is to be able to maintain it consistently. I think many people go broke thinking: wow I won a bit, why aren't I risking more? then have a run of bad luck.

blek! ive had a lousy trading day
put my stops too close! my calls were right- it was headed short but not before a small retrace that stopped me out. (i actually did this a couple of times too)
I had a couple of small 10 pip victories but on the whole it was a loser day.
back up (or down) to -144

makes me wonder:
probley a better idea to set stops based on the actual terrain- above a high/bellow a low/etc rather than the base -30 pips (-20+spread) that im willing to lose on each trade.
Read through steviet's thread (boy thats a journey) and he tends to use 1000pip stops but is almost never wrong.
I seriously wonder- if you put both a short and a long out with like a 10 pip tp isn't like almost 90% odds that both tps will be hit given enough time?
gdp/jpy ranges so widely that its almost a given with some patience. But then that kind of risk only allows like 3 mistakes.


At my current risk to reward I need to win ~3 trades to make up for one loss. (though sometimes depending on the size of ranges/my mood/etc i take bigger profits.)
It really makse it a bit more difficult! (on a day like today)
balancing risk vs reward vs probability of success is probley one of the harder trading dimensions