Thexder's journey to(ward?) freedom

I don't live from it (maybe soon) but I am at home full time so I have all the attention to give that cable demands.

Went long with just one mini lot this time. Now that I feel better about my methods I'm going to minimize my risk and try to build up the account. At this rate it shouldn't be too long, and when I get so far along and more experience I'll go back to increasing the lot size and hopefully the account will exponentially grow.

Today's Result: +35

I set a buy order above the congestion of Asia and when it was triggered I looked at M1 to trail the stop up beneath all the valleys until it got stopped out by falling through as shown on the highest blue marking.

Nice trading Thexder. The use of 1 min charts isn't widely touted as a primer for those learning the ropes, but with a feel for price action patterns, there are excellent trades to be had throughout the sessions, both long & short...couple that with fibs and projections and there are more than enough pips to squeeze, even in a relatively narrow range day.

Hey Thex,

Do mind clarifying a little on where you place your stops based on the "conservative strategy" from your Nov. pdf? I'm not talking about what you do with the 1 min chart trailing the stop, I mean based on just what you have in your pdf that you backtested where you said you were able to make a few hundred pips a month consistently. I am backtesting it on vHands right now and am getting stopped out too much to make a decent return.

In the pdf you say "an arbitrary stop of at least 40-50 pips should be considered if the normal stop is aby smaller". And you also say "the normal stop loss location for these type of trades is behind the swing pivot line."

The problem is, for example, I place a long order after a retracement to at least the long fib on a new candle body opening above the long fib. I place the stop at the swing pivot. Then price goes down to the short fib stopping me out at the swing pivot, but the bias remains long and eventually shoots up to reach targets but I have been stopped out at a loss despite it being a good trade.

One solution is to place the stop below the swing low in this example, but then the risk:reward is worse. What have you found that consistently works? Is it all discretionary?

Basically if the swing range was around 50 or more, I would feel confident with a stop at swing pivot but if the swing was only 40 or something, I'd probably put the stop way at the other end of the swing (100% instead of 50% retrace). But in the testing I did, the pivot gave enough wins for those several hundred pips.

Is there a specific day or set of days you saw big failures in the testing that I could try looking at too?

In October, I had a whole week of almost all stop outs, but still came out with +310 after all that.

Here's the ranging month of October that didn't move very far in either direction but gave still a few hundred pips.

Here is a couple stop outs on vHands just to show you examples. Arrows corrospond to the same color fibs. The gold and grey arrows are stop outs, the green arrow is a win. Don't know how well you can see this info but here t is.

Correction, the green fib is drawn wrong, upside down and the top should be 3 candles back, sorry, but I'm sure you can see with the loosing fibs.

There, I took the green fib off, it just looks more confusing with it on and it is irrelevant anyway.

I pulled up a chart of those 2 trading days and drew all the fibs (3) I would have pulled for Nov 5 and 6. It could be done differently looking at it now vs how I did it in the PDF due to discretion with all the choppy action, but what I did turned out mostly the same.

The grey fib shows that the pivot would have been stopped out after taking the break short, BUT this fib range is only 32 pips wide so in this case my stop would have been all the way at the swing high, and not gotten stopped out. That's where I say anything ranging less than 50 or 45 wide, I put the stop at 100% instead of 50% to start with.

The Violet fib is drawn in a jumble of ranging and choppiness, so I took the most recent high and low points that had a reasonable pip range. THis range was 35 pips and so any smaller swing would not be very much worthwhile. When the break out came, the target was easily achieved without risking the stop even if it was at pivot. Also this break out came borderline to where I'd place a trade before London opens so maybe I'd not have even taken it.

The Orange fib is taken after the Violet fib completes by reaching targets and retracing, then forming a new low to pull to. The trade bias is properly long and the target is met easily.

So the method was to pull the swing somewhere during Asia and start the day fresh and blind, taking whatever comes and if there's more opportunity after the first trade, follow around as it completes and begins again.

I guess it goes back to the royal question of "where do I place the fibs?" The third example I took as well and won on, there was one AFTER that one that was stopped out.

The first one I have marked was pulled from the big down move, and was stopped out before the london session (I am using Alpari for my data, GMT 0 I think). You ended up trading after that move by picking a run from the ranging choppyness and won.

Are you suggesting don't place fibs on bigger moves like that?

When starting a day out I go against the grain usually of trying to figure out the daily long or short bias and just look at the Asian session as the set up, so that's why I ignored the big move and fibbed the small ranging period. Regardless of a recent trend, things were demonstrating that they were stuck in a rut and it had to break out one way or the other, and even if a first break out should fail and reverse, then the reversal may be the winner, or if both directions fail, it's still stuck in a rut but getting bigger and so it's time to use caution and wait for something clear.

Just like today's trade. Yesterday was a big down trend, then things started spiking and consolidating at the bottom during Asia. A break short occurred but then turned around and broke long and that was the winner. With stops, a failed break shouldn't matter much because when the winner is picked up it should at least allow break even overall.

So that's where I choose to draw fibs on this swing method, I don't look at what's going on recently and what levels are tested. I just start fresh every day. That's why it was originally a short term scalp method with just small easy to reach targets and now I'm finding ways to allow it to pick up on bigger moves too.

It's not worth posting a chart for this update, I took a short tonight but it got stuck around T1 and then started going the wrong way so I broke even but now it's reversed back in favour and gone even lower, but too bad for me. I think that may be it for the week now.

In retrospect if I had more experience and less fear, I could have justified holding onto the short rather than jumping out because technically that roll back after the initial down move was just a single up move with an exaggerated sideways stall - so I could/should have waited for it to officially form a new high/low and stayed in for the ride down.

But using M1 is new to me this week and so I'm still learning how price moves way down there. And I think I'm getting the feel for it. So next time I wait it out and watch for a proper high and low to form and make its intentions known.

Net result: +30

If I were doing the conservative T1 scalp I would have had less than 10 pips after spread.

Went long just after Asia when we reached above psychological 1.9600 and trailed the stop with M1 until it fell through. Currently anything can still happen, price is hovering around near my stop out but I don't care what happens, this is enough for a day's work (3 and a half hours) and I get to go watch TV now.

There has to be something on at 3:40am.

Net Result: +16

The session started out with a big run up through Asia and every candle was a higher high or equal high so there was nowhere to pull a fib until after London started and the big retracement formed a high behind it.

The down move went beyond 61.8% and even though there were no candle bodies crossing down beyond the 38.2% retrace level, I decided to pull the fib low up to the bottom of the retracement candle. Usually I'll only update a swing level if a body has gone at least 38.2% AND a wick or body has gone at least 61.8%. But I'm only using the fibs as a target gauge in this example, the bias isn't shifting back and forth, it's always long - so since I'm looking for a long break out with the long bias, it doesn't really matter if I relocate the swing low. All it does is make T1 more realistic to achieve.

The long break out came, I got in, and at one point I was up around +50 but I waited for the M1 stop out and netted +16. That's good enough for a wild & crazy night. Besides who's to say I should cash out at +30 or +50, it could have gone on to +150. When it does, I'll hopefully catch it with this approach like recently when I captured +70 walking the stop up.

And I still managed to get out around T1 this time.

Managed to net another +11 after spread and leaving breathing room.

After that first spike up, the M1 chart showed a cleaned up and recovering price action with newly forming higher lows and higher highs, and on the H1 chart this was bouncing off the Intraday Long and heading up.

That first spike almost reached Intraday high and I figured maybe price is making another run at the high. So I went long when price cleared one of the higher high's and I trailed the stop until it was hit.

Sometimes I still do stupid things and lose 30 pips here and there but overall it seems I'm able to recover from those mistakes (and learn from them, and make less of them less often) so I may be on the road to success soon. But my account is still a screeching infant and very threatened. I'm trying to build it back up without help from my wallet, then ideally make it grow in the positive direction for a change. I think this is the first time I've been able to place so many trades in a week and come out either even or on top instead of wondering where that other $200 went when I wasn't looking. It's only play money that I can afford to lose so when I blow an account I just re-fund it. It's a hobby. Other people blow the same amount gambling or buying stupid things, to each their own.

Note to self: Despite by now knowing better than to do things like chasing a trade or trying to predict a market instead of reacting to what is present, I still sometimes do such things and that's where most failed trades result. Therefore the problem can be cured with more attention to discipline. When I take trades based on my established methods I only lose out when there's no way to have avoided it anyway.

Those who helped me find my way (which I'm still finding) know who you are by now and even with all the help and inspiration I'm still innerly satisfied to know that in the end I still have taken what I've learned elsewhere and made it unique to me in at least two ways I can think of right now, the swing scalp tweaks and the M1 trailing stop method. So I couldn't have gotten this far without this site and everyone I've talked to on it, and I'm happy to know I didn't just "find a method and take it". I need a sense of accomplishment if I'm going to do this 5 days a week forever hopefully.

Nice mornings work Thex.
So are you live now with real money or still on demo?

Whats your leverage? (Go easy on me here, i dont really understand leverage yet)
All i know is each pip is $10 for me if i buy 1 lot, and i usually buy 1 lot.
Are you the same? Do you usually go with 1 lot or fractions of a lot?

Did you ever experiment with a trailing stop EA?

I don't understand the leverage either, I forget how that works and factors in. But I'm live with real money and it's only a mini account so one dollar per pip, and I am just doing the one lot at a time now. I forget if that's what leverage translates into, how much money you can control with your max allowed lot sizes (I can do up to 25 mini lots or 2.5 regular lots). So each mini lot controls $10k of real (or bucket shop virtual) money.

And I can't use EA's because my broker is just web based so I have to do things manually. I use MT4 for charting and analysis and enter the trades via java interface.

Maybe it's good I don't have that power on tap just yet. Even if I had a good EA approach I could end up with some kind of glitch that makes me lose everything.

Cool man, i see. Web based broker? Jave interface. Nice.
You seem to really know your tech stuff!

What did you make of that jump today?
150 pips and still going...