Daily Yen Scalping

This is my first trade journal after quite a long period on FF. I've learn a lot over the last year and a half and feel like I've finally reached a point where it's worth starting one of these things.

I owe a lot of my recent progress to stratman, who is unfortunately relegated to the Commercial forum and won't be able to post here.

Also this thread might be better labelled intraday yen scalping, as daily might be misleading. I do my analysis on many timeframes Dailies/H1/M15/M5/M1 and enter on M5/M1/10sec.

Without further ado, here are my trades for the day (total +20pips):







I also made some analyses of trades that I didn't take because I wasn't actively trading at the time:

Good start on the Journal.

Thanks Slack.

Here's my first trade of the day, and my first live trade for a long long time. I'm only playing with 1,000 unit sizes at the moment to ease myself back into putting real money on the line. So that equate to a risk of around $1. High stakes, I know.

Nevertheless, I made 9 pips off this entry. I was a little cautious as there had already been quite a long uptrend over the past few hours.

Looks like a perfect entry and exit to me... nice job. Wish my last trade was that pretty.

BTW, what is your SL; fixed or ?

Thanks Slack!

My SL is 10 pips + spread, as per stratman's rules. I watch the trade very closely with my finger on the button ready to close at the first sign of trouble. I think that's very important when playing with an unpredictable pair like GBPJPY.

Right-on! I do the same thing; ready to exit should momentum really slow down.

Another trade. Not too happy with this one, but bagged 8.5 pips nevertheless. Part of me wanted me to lose this trade so I would learn a lesson. Hopefully I'll remember to not jump in too quick next time!

Another scalp... 7.9 pips woo!

I still feel like I'm too cautious. The trade blew out to 27 pips only 4 minutes after I exited. ARGH.

Note: Entry is vertical red line, exit is red X.

Trading day complete at +25.4 pips.

No loss.

Now off to my night-shift

Interesting stuff. Keep up the good work.

You mentioned Stratman's rules. What are they, or mind sharing a link where they can be found?

Hi Mindsphere

You did ask me to comment so I'd thought I'd drop by, love the charts, how do you write on them like that btw ?

Anyway hats off to you scalping GJ in this manner, brave man. One thing I dont know if you've looked at in depth is trade management for this style of trading, I think your returns in relation to spread cost is quite prohibitive, definitely feel you need to run some of these for longer/more pips, paying out say 3 on spread on each is quite steep for the pip returns.

I dont know your strike rate but if its high you could look at a 2/3rds type affair. By this I mean take your 1000 units and divide by 3 so 333 units. When you reach 1/2 times risk in profit on a trade e.g 5 pips, scale out 2 thirds creating a free and let the last third run - and I mean run. You can move stop to BE at a point to lock in the profit on the 2/3rds out. If you have a high strike rate this method can be effective.

All the best

Limey

Try the pipware thread in the commercial section


Hey Limey, thanks for dropping by! The charts are done with Jing - it's free and rather nifty - http://www.techsmith.com/jing/

You're right about the spread cost posing a challenge with this style of trading. I was thinking about something similar, scaling out a little bit of the position and letting the rest run. So many of my entries seem to be followed by good 20-30 pip runs (or more). Perhaps I would be better closing out 2/3rds at the point when I would normally close the trades and leave the rest to run with the stop at break-even. It's efficacy would be quite easy to evaluate.

I really do need more statistics on my trading approach before I can really evaluate anything like this though. A hundred or so trade should do it

In another thread today I was musing about how the yen pairs might pose good opportunities due to their high spreads. I wonder if there is less in the way of automated arbitrage going on which makes the movements more predictable. By this I mean, perhaps pairs like EURUSD are harder to trade from a scalping perspective as there are too man people trying to scalp the tiny edges provided by similar approaches to mine. People taking tiny profits at SR zones could cause more whipsaw on such pairs thereby making the signals harder to read. Just a thought.

Had a rather bad day. Didn't lose overall, but didn't follow my own rules and got far too emotionally affected by my initial loss (for a trade I should never have taken). Up 2.8 pips for the day.