factorof2's trade journal

I very recently got started into forex by a friend running a couple demo accounts on some various brokers. For the most part I did fairly well, staying profitable and not losing too often. I thought I'd be able to jump into a live account real fast because I must be good at this. Well, at first I was doing fairly well, I managed 10% return on my balance in only a few trades! Things were going well, and then I made a couple of bad trades with bad stopouts and lost most of my profit. I came to several conclusions looking over my trades.

1) I wasn't profiting from trading. I was profiting from gambling. I was trading on short term charts without much respect for support and resistance levels, despite having read plenty about them. I thought I knew what I was doing, when it's obvious that I didn't.

2) I was overleveraging myself. With proper risk management (which of course I'm not exercising the way I should be) I was only allowed a stop-loss region of around 8 to 10 pips. What a horrible mistake that was.

So luckily for me, I managed to realize all the nonsense in my habits without actually breaking myself or even losing more than about 7 or 8 percent of my deposited money, so here I am to keep a small trade journal starting with next week's sessions. I'll be trading lot sizes of around .025 as this will allow me good stop-losses while risking about 1% of my account on each trade. I will be posting charts I used at the times of trades as well as analyses. Please feel free to comment on them and tell me what I'm doing right and wrong. Thanks and good luck to all you other traders.

Well the first post of this is going to be pretty boring since I really didn't trade today, for the most part I was still a little shaky about entering some of the trades, despite that they would've all turned out to be good trades, but that's fine. I only entered one today as the PA was bouncing up and down below the previous daily trading channel testing the bottom of the channel each time. All my timeframes indicated shorting was the best idea so I waited for the price to climb a bit toward the channel and testing the daily trendline I had plotted. and my EMAs to turn back a bit and entered at 1.32208 with a SL at 1.32358 and TP at 1.32008. Hit my TP pretty quickly (in a matter of less than 10 minutes) and exited the trade. Small lot trading to manage my risk appropriately and this is my first trade and first successful trade of this journal. Chart attached. Hopefully I can scrape out a couple trades tonight to close out my day, but +20 pips for a pretty short term trade was a nice way to start out.

Currently looking at a possible opportunity to go long on the USD/JPY, it's sitting at about 10 pips above a major support level and is consolidating pretty tightly.

Got stopped out of a poorly timed short position for -15 pips on EUR/USD. Need to wait for a better signal to come around.