I shall become more powerful than you could possible imagine

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away I was once but a learner. Now I have come full circle and have embraced the force. I was struck down, but have now become more powerful than my antagonists could possibly imagine.

I have had many adventures since I first began, and have collected much wisdom. I am now putting this wisdom to work and expanding my coffers to continue the good fight.

As I accumulate new trade ideas and thoughts, I will post them here to provide myself with a rolling journal of my efforts.

Now to start putting it down pen to paper! In this post I want to lay out my plan and my rules. Some people have style, we call them artists, and they're usually not relevant until after they're dead. Traders use rules, it's how you survive and thrive. Here are mine:

1. I will be trading GBP/JPY exclusively.
2. I will be using 1 day / 4 hour / 1 hour time frames.
3. I will be trading using price action and no indicators.
4. I will be building my entries off of the daily and 4 hour time frames, 1 hour bars are only used for further clarification.
5. I will be using a conservative t/p on my 4 hour trades, and slightly longer targets on my daily trades.
6. I will only accept trades on at least a 1:1 risk/reward basis for 4 hour trades, and 2:1 for daily setups.
7. I will always have a stop loss in place.
8. I will pass up a 4 hour set up for a daily setup.
9. I will not be using more than one trade each direction at any given time, and the orders expire after 12 hours on the 4 hour time frame and two days on daily trades.
10. I will not worry myself about being "right".
11. I will not let my focus be on chasing returns.
12. I will focus on making good trades and being consistent.

Secondly, here are some rules I have for this thread itself:

1. I will update this log after the fact.
2. I will not be turning this thread into an "interactive trading" thread.
3. I will gladly answer questions I get in PM's.

Some background on me and mine.

I have a background in investment and asset management and have had an eye towards the forex markets for almost ten years now. I have had a couple of brief stints in the market, but the capital at hand was too small to really be profitable or worthwhile. I have sat out of live trading for several years now (check my post history if you don't believe), but have decided after making consistent book on demo'ing again that I should enter my hand into live trading.

My goal is to supplement my personal income, so I am not looking to hunt outsize returns, but a few percent per week would be more than enough. Also, having learned my lessons from before, I am also quite patient and humble compared to how I used to be. I would gladly settle for a solid ten to twenty five pips per week, if that was all I could make reliably.

My trading method relies on price action, and price action alone. I have had my stint with indicators, and every time I eventually came to the realization that in the end they were showing me extrapolated out of date data projected forward. I'm not mocking or dogging on anyone who does use indicators in their trading, it's just simply not for me.

I mostly look for 4 hour setups, and daily setups. I look for patterns such as squeezing triangles indicating a potential pop, double bars, inside bars, outside bars, congestion, etc. If I only saw one good setup per week that was worth 25 pips, I'd be more than happy with that. I also do not try and rack up several hundred pip trades that last a month long. I've done that before, and while I wound up over 1,000 pips to the better, that's not my goal here. My goal is to make an average of 25 pips per day.

I will be focusing on a single currency pair, and one that I have years of experience on, the GBP/JPY pair. I have had good experiences in the past on working the EUR/AUD pair, and to a lesser extent EUR/JPY. However, I feel that there's too much overlap in there, and it's best to stick to the one I do best at. After all, this is about making consistent returns, not trying to rack up the highest score.

Now, for the first week's wrap-up:

1) I tried to extend my force powers of multiple currency pairs mastery to my live trading, and it didn't work out so well did it? If I had stuck to the plan and stuck to only GBP/JPY I would be a solid 10% up right now. Lesson learned: stick to the damn plan.

2) I took a couple of trades that were deviant from the rules I laid out for myself. One was a teaser trade that led into another setup. If I had've stuck with the rules and applied them to the "teaser" trade, it would've been a single winning trade instead of a smaller winning trade that helped offset a negative return trade. Lesson learned: stick to the damn plan.

3) I let a couple of trades go in without setting hard stops in them. The result was that the trades "exited" when the opposing order direction was triggered. The result? I only guaranteed myself a single losing trade instead of allowing for two trades that could've cancelled each other out. Lesson learned: stick to the damn plan.

When I do a retrospective, and I look at the results of the week, I would be up just over 19% if I stuck religiously to the rules instead of being an idiot.

Lesson learned: STICK TO THE G-Damn PLAN! ROFL learned me good

Another lesson learned early this week in sticking to the plan. Had a wonderful setup for a solid 55 pip gain, but got a twitchy finger and got impatient. Had I just left the original set trade in place and just went with that, I would have booked a solid 55 pips to start the week, instead of losing two trades before and backing out.

I think I've just about exhausted all of the "let's try this instead" mistakes and have only further and further proven why you stick with the plan. Being disciplined by losses is a strong disciplining.

So last night taught me the importance of looking at extending my order expiration limits. I had a beautifully set up trade that the order expired about 30 minutes before it happened, leaving me out of it. So while I didn't lose anything, I did miss an opportunity for a solid 55 pip gain, and I'm slightly frustrated about this. Well, time to just hold back and be patient and wait for the next set up to come.

As the wrap up to this week, we have another lesson of learning to back away and just focus on those wonderful setups that take a day or so to build up, instead of "well, that looks like it'd be worth a look for 25 pips". Those invariably turn into a negative 25 pips.

Look to see a much slower and more considered Jedi trade book coming next week. My goal of the next week is two 55 pip trades and if it builds, one of them is actually an 89 pip trade.

So this week turned out to be a good week after all. I fell prey to the my previous issue with lack of discipline and impatience on Sunday and it cost me...dearly. From then I realized I needed to figure out a more concrete system to work with and I have.

Once upon a time I made great use of the Vegas tunnel method, albeit slightly tweaked. I felt like now was the time to look back to that method that I enjoyed some mild success with previously, and see if I can't apply any of my new wisdom to help improve the situation. Happily, that's exactly what happened.

I decided to take a hard look at how my previous trades had faltered and how I had managed to wound myself. I almost reached the point where I felt like "I might as well just do the opposite of whatever it is I'm thinking of doing". From there I managed to get it together and put some confidence back in myself. Sometimes you need that external confirmation to your decisions in order to push you that extra little bit in the right direction, and returning to the Vegas method I used to use was exactly that.

After comparing my blunders to what the tunnel method would've done, I easily saw how I had managed to get on the wrong side of things. With that confirmation in my mind, and the new tools in my corner, I decided to pursue trading from a new angle.

The confirmation of this great turn around was the set up and take down of a 144 pip move in the GBP/JPY pair. What a great way to end the week!

I'm back baby!

After turning down the volume of entries/exits considerably and being much more choosy about my trades, I've been able to sidestep those duds and focus on the pay-off trades. Another good lesson in patience as well, as two of the trades on the docket were definitely longer distance than a simple 25 pips here or there. It was very tempting to simply close out after seeing +40 pips, when the trade has another 80 pips to go.

I feel that I need to give a rather serious update here, because it's a big one. Specifically, I had an epiphany a couple of weeks ago, and my trading has turned around since then.

I was reading through MikeW's trading journal since I wanted to see how some of the other old-timers are getting on and see if there's something else that could be gleaned from his posts. As part of this, I decided to download a copy of FXDD's MT4 platform and apply my system, as well as some components of my old system to it. While looking through the charts, it hit me like running into a brick wall at full speed, face first. I knew that Oanda's charting was all "wrong" due to the offset of the time frames and inclusion of extraneous irrelevant data, but I never realized just how badly it was affecting my performance.

After picking through some of the MikeW thread pieces, I decided to also do a bit of back testing of my previous trades against the data laid in front of me from the FXDD MT4 client. Whooo-boy...That was a real gut check!

I decided to start using the new MT4 charting moving forward, and damn if I'm not the happiest man out there for doing so! I've attached a screen-snap of the turn-around I've experienced in my trading since the weekend of the epiphany.

To lay it all out, I was hurting, badly. By doing things the wrong way, I had managed to drop my account to 20% of the initial equity. After slowing down, doing some meditating and mental discipline as well as updating how I make my trade ideas, I've already come back 250% from that low point. If I can continue to keep this new attitude and direction (which I damn well better), I have zero doubt in my ability to get this account back to my initial funding level by the end of October.

Alright, off to a rough start this week, but Sunday nights always seem to be less than perfect for me. A loss sucks, but it is what it is, and I took the trade based on what I saw. Instead, a good GBP/JPY short has kicked off, so let's see how that settles out.

Remind me to not trade Sunday evenings any more. Was able to bag some good pips overnight to make up what I had lost and a token amount on top of that. Now to sit tight and see if we have any good new trades begin to form up. Will keep the post posted on my new posted position when I post to my post again.

Took a position in EUR/USD last night. The problem was that I had gotten a bit impatient and moved my entry closer than the original set up dictated. Because of this, I burned myself for a stop-out when if I had've left the original entry in place, I'd be up marginally right now. Take it from me kids, patience is a virtue, and a profitable virtue.

You're not wrong. The hardest part for me when learning this whole trading bollocks was mastering patience, letting the market come to me and never try to chase it.

Thanks for popping in and leaving a note. It's always good to know you're not the only one experiencing the same thing. I'm now perusing through your journal to see how other people are approaching their methodology. I've come to learn that one of the best ways to learn is to take note of how other people are learning too.

Again, last night, impatience got the better of me. I've come to realize that if I avoid the first six to eight hours of market open on Sunday evenings, I'm all the better for it. However, the plus-side is that the trades lined up after that eight hour window turned out well and I'm now (marginally) already up on the week.

It's been a long, fraught, and dramatic several months. I blew it. I'm exiting this failed adventure again, after drawing down to a whopping 6% of my starting capital. Let that sink in...

Some people just aren't cut out for trading, and I very painfully learned that for myself. While I like to think that I had some good trade ideas and could come up with some good analyses, I didn't have the discipline to back it up. As such, I blew myself up.