E/U 123 D1

Introduction
I’m a 29 year old male living in the US in the Central Time zone (GMT -6:00). I’m relatively new to FX and wanted to start a journal to see if it is beneficial. I have a good paying full time job that I actually like (how many people can say that?), and have no inclination to make trading a full time endeavor, but maybe someday down the road. Since I don’t have a lot of time to spend in front of the charts, I will be trading on daily time frames. I’m happy with slowly but surely and some profit each month is better than none. Not really concerned with how slow as long as I’m gaining. My goals are to build my account without taking any profits. When the gains are more than I am making at my full time job, then maybe I will thinking about “retiring” and trading full time. My plan is to demo on FXCM micro for 3 months and then go live at the beginning of 2011. I guess taxes will be easier starting in January? I don’t know anything about how taxes play into FX.

Method
I like the way the EURUSD trends, so that will by my currency of choice. I also like simple trading without indicators, so I will trade the 123 method. I learned about it from Feb in The System II thread, but will be applying it to the daily timeframe because of less noise and I’ll trade with the trend. My TP will be 100 pips and my SL will be the low/high of the candle I open the trade on for 2 days, then on the third day, I’ll move my SL to the low/high of the candle before it, and so on. So, I’ll close the trade if there is a lower low for buying, and higher high for selling. Three or more candles in the same direction will establish a trend or trend change. At least one candle in the opposite direction will define the retrace. With this method, there aren’t many setups a month. Maybe 3-5.

Comments and feedback welcomed.

2010
October - +200
November - +100
December - ?

2011 – Live
June - 0 (2 trades, +100, -100)
July - -86 (1 trade, -86)
August - 0 (0 trades)
September - +100 (1 trade, +100)
October - 0 (0 trades)

Here is a chart showing how the last 3 months should have went down. 14 trades taken, 3 lost. Total pips taken (not accounting for slippage, spread, etc.) = 902.8 I'm not sure what I would have done for the trade on 7/20, so I exited at the low of the previous candle.

Hindsight is grand, but I doubt this is enough data. It does give me encouragement to stick to the plan though.

A very simple idea. My advice is: Demo it until youre brain bleeds, then demo it some more, then use small amounts of money you should have wasted on drugs and women any way.

+100

+100

I had two opposing signals: the first one was a buy @ 1.41576 and a sell @ 1.36963. After a couple of days passed and neither one was hit, I wasn't sure what to do, so I canceled both entries as the market was not continuing its upward trend and was moving sideways. I didn't want it to hit one of my entries and then bounce back inside the bracket. In hindsight, if I would have kept my entries, then I would be +100 off the buy entry. If I kept a closer watch over what the market was doing, I may have replaced my buy entry.

lopazopy,

Thanks for posting your "small effort" strategy. I'm subscribing because I think your basic setup has some merit. It's been a week since your last post. I'd like to encourage you to continue this for at least a month longer to evaluate the results.

Have you tried this on GJ?

Good trading,
BC2

Thanks for the response.

I have not given up on this method. I continue to monitor the charts looking for setups. Like a lot of methods, this works best when the market it trending. Looking at the EU daily trend, it is moving more sideways than up or down. As in my last post there was 2 setups at the same time, but I removed them both because I didn't know what to do. It looks like if I left both of them, I would have been successful on both accounts. It has been trending down for the last week, so maybe I will have a setup soon. Maybe I should have entered a sell trade yesterday? If I take a trade, I will post the results here.

At the beginning, I looked at other pairs and I picked EU because of the trending qualities. I have not looked at any other pairs since.

+100

I should have had about a 35 pip loss yesterday, but I wasn't paying close attention to the charts.

Overall your doing all right, so with the holidaze over lets get back into trading.
It gets easier with practice.

I had gotten away from trading for a while, but I decided to get back into things. I opened my first live account on the 8th and had my first real trade today. I'm glad it was a success. That's always a good way to start trading.

+100

-100

Here is another situation where I had two opposing signals - one buy @ 1.44407 and one sell @ 1.41015. In the future, if I have two opposing signals, I will cancel both and reset.

Also, I'm starting to demo at the 4H time frame. Same setup rules, but with a 20 pip tp/sl. There are more setup opportunities.

Taking another look at my last trade. The candles are making higher lows. Looks like my sl was too tight and I got whipsawed out. There was a lot of news that day. It's hard for me to justify a tp that is lower than my sl, but this shows that it would have worked.

-86
I forgot to post my trade on July 25. I decided to get out a little early instead of going the full -100. No chart at this time, might have a chart on other computer.

No trades in August. The E/U has been ranging with no clear trend, so I have stayed out of the market.

+100
Many candles going in the same direction before a pullback candle.

This trade is from the 10th.

+100

This trade from the 24th.

+100

The chart doesn't show the trade history, but I sold at 1.34185 and bought at 1.33180