My GBPJPY trade journal

Thanks Travpip. Do you have an indicator to automatically plot the standard daily pivots and such or do you draw them out every night. Thanks

i just plot them manually from actionforex webpage everyday (just move the lines from previuos day, i think greg does it like that too mostly). I used to have same tool as greg, it is easy to find (just search in the forum, it'll be there.) and just add it to the mt4 experts indicator folder. i dont have it now. i find after a while those tools end up corrupting my platforms somehow...dont know why..

Chart and trade summary

This was a buy vs. sell trade indicated by arrow on summary.

No trade. Chart.

Hi Greg
Did you trade any of that upward trend on friday from 130 to 135?
travpip

Hi Travpip,

No, I missed the great move up off the CPP on Thursday as well as the move down Friday morning. Busy with other stuff.

Chart and trade summary.

Chart and trade summary

Chart and trade summary

That was a nice start to the week 300pips
good stuff Greg

Hi Travpip,

Yes, Sunday session was an unexpected eye-popper. It's nice to be sitting in the cockpit when Trending Momentum shows up.

Cheers,
Greg



Price is the genius, we are the followers.

i am only starting to trade for real recently with an experimental amount of 1k usd and i hv already lost 80pct of it. everyone including my friends and colleagues are telling me its impossible to make a decent living trading retail.

looking at greg eye-popping pnl like this 160k plus profit a session really makes me wonder when i will reach this level or whether that will ever happen but nonetheless this thread is givin me proof that it is POSSIBLE.

so i be continuing workin hard.

thanks greg for sharing trades.

Hi Spiceymonkey,

Glad you find my charts helpful.

A couple comments: I don't know how long you have been studying forex. I've been at this game ten years, and many years of losing. Along the way I took classes, read books and books, paid for high-priced seminars, listened to fortune tellers, read "tout" sheets, followed signals, listened to the experts, tinkered with every indicator under the sun, always sure I was on to the holy grail.

I Still lost. Reason: I hadn't found my game, my own style and a strategy that I believed in.

The purpose for sharing charts, analysis and summaries is to show that, yes, winning at forex can be done. (All it takes is endless committment. Little by little you begin to get it). It's to show how I approach the charts each session, my thinking. I diagram the setups I see and have learned to recognize through practice. Then I write it all out to be sure I've really understood.

* * *

P.S. Incidentally, as I've said before on this link, I try to ask two questions before I pull the trigger on a trade:

1) Why am I placing this trade?
2) Is there any reason I shouldn't be entering this trade?

These two questions make me pause before jumping in. They make me check my analysis one last time to make sure I haven't overlooked anything.

Cheers,
Greg

Chart and trades summary

brilliant again. amazingly consistently a winner.

i was just there thinking about that last trade of yours that quickly retraced 31pips as you said.
As the trend was deep into the move and at all time lows were you concerned/nervous of a reversal that could take off quickly back up to S1. price has now gone down further past s2 and below 126 now beside the point.

Would it have taken much more for you to close it at a loss (as the need for a decision was happening quickly in real time)or would you have held (as you did anyway) cause the stochs and macd were all down on 1hr,4hr and daily.

Interested to just know your thinking/decision at that point on how to get out of it, as these situations i get into quite often and it always seems like the other option would of been better.
I have been trying to keep a tighter stop (not let it get away from me), but then found that if i have waited a bit longer it would of returned into a winner, but inevitably the one i hang onto turns into a catastrophe....
i am just trying to become you!, harder done than said
travpip
ps, you say you have been trading 10 years..how long did it take before you achieved total victory as in the warrior trader sense, and did your family think you where crazy in pusuit of this before this came.
i have 1000s questions sorry, just one other,
do you set your trade (take profit) and walk away or do you prefer to keep an eye on to continually analyse it

My trades started going wrong the minute i went live. almost got
80% wiped out. Took a while to get back on my feet and figured
out where the momentum is going. The hard part always is figuring
out the trend. Once that is done, trade with the trend, the rest is just technicals and
since the trend is your friend, a little mistake heals itself.

got back up to 50% - still long way to go.

Hi Travpip,

I can't answer all the questions that come along. But regarding your questions:

I was in the losing column for about seven years. By year seven I had a win average of about 60-70%. My goal was to hit 100% wins. I'll never get there but it is something to shoot for because I have a strong interest in minimizing losses (even 90% wins can take out your stake if you're not following money management rules and/or don't have a trading strategy in place).

I have a long-suffering wife. The losing years were tough.

Incidentally, I don't go around telling everyone and sundry that I trade currencies, as most people don't understand forex and/or regard it as gambling (because they don't understand it). I don't want negative feedback from nay-sayers derailing me from my deep conviction that forex is a wonderful, amazing vocation. Most successful traders are solitary individuals. You never hear from them.

As to my last trade for the Monday session, I wanted to show the thinking process I often go through when deciding to exit or stay the course. Like I noted in my analysis about trade #7, my indicators were saying down. However, at the time price was at an "iffy" area as far as I was concerned. There could be a significant pullback or bounce which might really impact the pips I'd made for the session. So at what point would I have thrown in the towel and cut my losses? Each situation varies. Probably fairly soon after I was -31 pips. It depends on the momentum at the time and other factors. It also depends on my threshold for pain. Quickly considering the options, I decided that percentage-wise price was heading back down. Turned out to be the case, in fact price headed much lower than my entry point as the night progressed. (So why didn't I hang in there and capture another 200 pips after the return to downside? Easy answer: For me, I had already overtraded. If I've had one to three winning trades in a session, I've been lucky. I'm pressing my luck after that. Seven trades in a session is over the top on my risk/reward meter. So I quit after that last risky trade, wiped the sweat off my face, and I didn't care a whit if GBPJPY dropped another 500 pips before the U.S. session was over).

Lesson relearned: I've got to watch the tendency to get greedy. The problem with a greed mentality is that you never have enough pips, you always want more and more. But the more trades you make in a given session, the higher the chance of loss. The other thing about greed plays (overtrading) are that they foster a nasty habit which is hard to overcome. Why be greedy anyway? There's another session right around the corner, another Trending Momentum 100 pips setup waiting in the wings. Advice to myself: Walk away, clear your head, forget about trading for several hours.

* * *

Note: It is very important to keep in mind that price is king, price will do whatever it wants to do. This is to point out that indicators don't predict, they just indicate what has happened and what may happen, no guarantee. But I respect them. If my indicators are starting to look a bit edgy (possible reversal, etc.), I get edgy, particularly after I've had a nice run (achieved +100 pips daily goal).

Again, I always try to look for the highest probability, risk/reward setups. For me, this is Trending Momentum, ideally between pivots, with at least a 100 pip opportunity. One of the benefits to this approach is that I'm not spending 24 hours a day at the computer, hoping, wishing and praying for a trade, any trade, I just want to get into a trade. I've discovered that there are usually very few hours worth trading, the best time being around the London Open until 2-3:00am (PST).

Another point that's helpful to keep in mind is that you are up against the very best traders in the world, as well as highly sophisticated computer models (used by banks, etc.). They make money by taking our money. I try not to kid myself, the competition is worthy and tough. I'd better be as sure of my trade as I possibly can be. So it's become obvious to me over time that I want to follow the money, i.e. Trending Momentum. These are the highest probability, risk/reward setups for a day trader like me looking for more than a few pips--or looking to avoid losses that eat away at my stake.

Cheers,
Greg

thanks Greg appreciate your answers and the effort, much appreciated.
thanks

to greg,
i hv studied quite a lot of trading books and articles for only about a year or 2 so i think the knowledge i hv about the market is way below what you have. i tried to use discretionary strategies like what you did but i have a accuracy problem so i decided to switch to a rigid trading system where i have a FIXED entry and exit. and what's more, i read so many times about discipline i decided to stick closely 100% to my rules and that has some problems in itself.

like this trade. i set 2 lvls (the 2 yellow horizontal lines) as my entry point and close out my trade before the week ends. flipping my direction as price crosses the 2 lines. i stick to it super closely IRREGARDLESS of what happens. i am so emotionally disciplined that i allowed a 600+ pips trade turn into a 140 pips loss. and i think that is ridiculous. in other words i had 4 losing trades for a total of 560 pips loss and one breakeven trade. and normally after this kind of weeks, i will stop trading and doubting my system and the homerun will come. this always happens.

so i think my problem is a combination of greed (waitin for my homeruns of massive pips like 700-800 pips) and lack of confidence (i don't trust my discretional exits, even though i had took time to learn TA and is good at it).

and so greg, one of the 1001 qns series: did you start real small and build your acct to the size you have now or was it a sizable amount when you started?

hey, sree~! way to go pal! all the best!