My first "proper" live account

I've been in/out of FX for quite a long time (~6 years), mainly in demo but also had a few unsuccessful small "training" live accounts.

Opened this one up and posting here mainly to give me some more encouragement to trade as responsibly as possible.

Will try to update this thread with some trade justification etc.

Here are a few points to the strategy I plan to trade:
- Mainly PA/trend based
- EURUSD/GBPUSD/EURGBP/USDCHF/USDJPY main pairs traded
- No strict SL/TP, these are based on levels of recent support/resistance
- Further to the above, SL will generally be max 2% of balance away from open price and TP depending on perceived strength of trade.

Have a larger deposit to make if I can prove consistency with this balance.

Good luck young sir.

Just a mini question Does this explorer takes extra time to set up or being kept running or it's one time thing then you don't need to look back. I mean can it be automatically connected to your broker account to deliver the data right away ? because I really don't have that much time to login here and there typing data ... another question is is that just for the fx market ? because I'm tading many other things as well that I'd like to keep it monitored. .... And good luck with that champ

Good luck! Consistency is key. Same amount of effort to make $1 as $1k. I'm doing something very similar before starting a large account as my trade explorer is small as well. Hope you feel the pressure with us watching just as you would with your real account.

Well Done Boss! Actually I am impressed. All we the people are wanting to get upgraded his present situation to the better!! Good Luck.. And wish to me so...

Thanks for the posts and encouragement so far!
cristiano: As far as I know it'll only track FX - but as for the automation it's just a matter of entering the info such as:
- Broker
- Account no
- Investor password

Then it'll periodically (from what I've seen I'd guess the update interval is max 5 mins) sync with your account, so no need to enter data other than the initial config. (It'll also pull in info on past trades, quite useful really!)

As for trades so far, had a noticeable dip early in the week as I was trying too hard to scalp and not riding any losses. A good 2/3 of these would have hit my T/P had I let them run.
Later in the week I was pretty USD heavy (short on EURUSD and GBPUSD, long on USDCHF), and a little more confident (1hr/4hr/daily charts seemed in agreement PA-wise), so allowed these to run for longer until eventually closing just before the end of Friday's London session.

The reason I closed out is mainly that I'm still wary of the weekend close, and potential resulting gaps. So my plan for now is to close out all trades by close of play Friday, then analyse where I'd have been. Once I get a better feel for it I'll start to brave leaving them open.

Hope everyone's had a good weekend!

Stopped out on a few trades USDJPY/GBPJPY overnight, looking back my entries weren't as strong as I thought at the time.
Since JPY pairs are the ones I'm least familiar (and successful) with, I've decided to only demo trade them for a while, and perhaps half my usual position size on live trades when most confident.

I've made a few tweaks to the stretegy as I get a feel for trading live:

1. I found I was spending too much time flicking between charts looking for an entry, this was getting me frustrated and I'd end up convincing myself to open a position that wouldn't necessarily tick all of the usual boxes. Also, I found my usual strategy didn't seem all that agreeable with XXXJPY pairs. For this reason, I've cut down my open charts to just EURUSD for now.
2. While focusing on 1hr/4hr/Daily charts in order to find what I felt were stronger trends, I often felt I was missing out on my usual scalp trades. Plus, to risk just 2% of my account with a swing trade, my lot sizes were small, thus it'd take a lot of movement and generally a lot of time to generate any return. Scalping is more suited to my personality, as such, slightly bigger lot sizes, 5m/15m/1hr charts and tighter stops (while still sticking to the 2% per trade) is the way I'm going. That's not to say such trades won't occasionally turn into swings.