Cutting the cord with M1 scalps

Entered with a sell stop just below the support. I drug the stop loss as it went. This was a relaxed and confident scalp. EU or GU actually traveled further at the same time. I was watching them to see if they were in step. Looking back on it, the AUD was higher on the strength meter then the EUR or GBP. That should have clued me to a slower move on this chart, but I did not like the other chart set ups as well.

Cap.
This, albeit an old thread, might be of use to you. He looks for ten pips a day only. Bit outspoken at times but did post useful stuff.

http://www.forexfactory.com/ryanmcd

This linked me to a profile, not a thread.

Hello capstone,
Thanks for sharing.
Can you upload the indicator that I surrounded on your chart ?
Thanks a lot.
Cheers.
Goodgame42

He does not have one dedicated thread but appears across several threads begun by others i.e James16.

Sorry -I thought you would click on his posts to the right of his profile or click on images/posts under "posts" on his profile.

Here is a link of his "images/charts for your perusal.

http://www.forexfactory.com/search.p...rchid=13688852

Posts only (no charts)...

http://www.forexfactory.com/search.p...rchid=13688891

Hope this helps.

Here you go. I do not use the pound for my currency, that is built into the indicator. The information you will care about works regardless.

Went long here and moved SL up quickly. I moved this based on my small loss this morning on USDJPY. I set this for 1 pip profit. It hit my 5 pip at the yellow trend line but I wanted to give it room to move through, up to the quarter.

Three trades from late today. Not when I should be trading. Ideally I should be done at noon EST. The yellow line is a trendline from M5. My buy mistake was obvious. I bought at an oversold position against the trendline. Very foolish. I then went for a sell on a break of the low, but no dice there either. Finally, it breaks the trendline and continues to my TP at the BRN.

My biggest angst from today was not taking all the other trades that were available. I should be up big today, but am not. It was not because of hesitance this time. It was because of Netflix ..... I'm kidding....it was simply my lack of focus today and lack of self discipline. Forex exposes our weaknesses.... It is also important to note that I set a SL and a TP and then left. That probably helped.

Two trades this morning. I got myself up early. 4 AM my time. Took a shower to wake up a bit. It was hard getting the contacts in! Took a buy on the EJ that failed. Then took the short that signaled. That evened me up on the day. EA or EU were much better pairs to trade this morning. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. I am trying to use these strength meters to identify which pair to focus on, but let's be honest, they are all measuring in the past and lagging. I sometimes think it best to focus on 2 or 3 pairs and that is it. Take what they give and move on. Is that what you do Mongo? Do you have just 1 or 2 pairs up at a time and do your thing with them?

hey capstone, are you still trading for a living?

Two AJ trades this morning.

Unfortunately, no. That is the point of the thread. A journal of the journey. I think I am closer than I have ever been though. The goal is by the end of October'ish of this year.

Hope you get there buddy. I was trading full time back when the Eur was at all time high and lost everything when i went to bed with an open trade and no stop and the Eur crashed! Still hurts when i think about it. Was hard to explain to the wife and took some getting over emotionally! Been on demo ever since going round in dumb circles and hating the world of JOB. Starting to become happier with trading again. One day I hope to tell my boss to f..k off and go live again but I know my discipline is still not there at the moment. Its a strange world that we are fascinated in here. I find that my friends and family could not give a monkeys about it and coulnt be less interested. I think if you can survive the current craziness then by October you should know if it is possible.

Good luck with it all,
Iak

Thanks for the encouragement. Good luck to you as well.

I have been there and done that. Now if I were a trader that had the space to put up 9 monitors, I could have multiple things up that I wanted to trade. However, I am not, nor have I found that I am able to truly focus like I need to when I am trying to look @ multiple pairs. I have two thoughts about this. One is, if I did have all those monitors up and wanted to possibly trade them, I would have to trade a longer time frame than I am currently. Second, and this kind of really helped me the most, was just embracing 2 pairs tops. In my head, I really just wanted to pick one and ignore everything else, but I have found, that 2 is good as I try to pick pairs that don't necessarily move @ the same time. So when 1 is probably consolidating or ranging, hopefully the other pair will be moving.

Every trader really has his own way of doing business. Each person has their own edge they like to look for, their own time frame, their own set of indicators possibly. I like to trade the fluctuations in price throughout the day. So for me, I have found, that yes, there are a number of pairs that great to trade. I started with USDJPY when I first started. Had no reason other than name recognition. Found that @ the time, it didn't move as much as I'd like. I then went to the EURUSD. That was better. Then I discovered the EURJPY. Love that pair. It had nice fluctuation throughout the day, I could 'see' it pretty well. I have since stopped trading that pair, simply from a math standpoint. With the yen losing so much value in past year, now the pip value on both the the USDJPY and EURJPY has dropped below par - or 1 I guess. So to keep the math simple, for a small lot - a $1000 lot - the pip value is under .10.

I want to trade things that give me a pip value of no lower than that. Trying to get the most bang for my buck. So long story short - I now trade EURGBP - which has a pip value of .15 on $1000 lot - and I trade the AUDUSD - which trades @ par. EURGBP doesn't really move much until London opens, and is usually good enough through sometime in afternoon. It is not that great during the Asian session. The AUDUSD is great during Asia - and really is a decent pair for me to trade almost any time. I like the AUDUSD as pip value is good and the margin requirements are low. EURGBP has higher margin requriements, but it's pip value is higher, so they are almost on equal footing in my book mathematically.

The important thing to remember, is to know what your edge is, know how long you are comfortable holding a trade, and know your math on what it is you are trading. Once I was able to sleep @ night and was @ peace with all of the above, it took a lot of the anxiousness out of trading for me. I think that sometimes we as traders tend to really make things harder than they have to be. By really zeroing on what I was looking for and what I was comfortable with trading, then I could be @ ease that those decisions didn't really need to be thought about too much. Then I was really able to focus on just being excellent @ my craft. There are days where I'm far from excellent of course. But I'm at ease with how and what I'm trading.

One last thought. I think that before I was able to lock in on what I was doing, I was always afraid that I might 'miss' something on another pair. Once I realized there will always be things I will miss and that it was impossible for me to get every move everywhere, I was able to settle down if you will. I consider it to be a scarcity mindset. Like there are only so many moves and I by God I have to be able to see them all or I will miss out. When I changed my mindset to really, more of an abundance mindset - I realized, there are plenty of trades to be had, regardless of what pair I am looking at.

Hope this makes a bit of sense. Trade well people!

Mongolian

@ Mongo - Thank you for your insight!

Here is my first trade this morning. I did not get out of bed early today. Looks like my stop was a bit to tight. I did not jump back in because I had trendlines on there originally that stopped my thoughts of pushing higher.....analysis paralysis....sometimes, simpler is better!

Here is a follow up trade. Yes, it was CT (sshhhh, don't tell anyone), I took it based on divergence of stoch and the quarter line rejection. The goal was simply to get back to even. It offered a bit more, but as a CT, I have no trust in it.

Focused on one pair this morning, AU. It did not take long for a great set up to appear. This was strictly a M1 trade. Looking at the M5 and M15 TF said it might drop, so it made me nervous. It didn't though. It may still be rising, I do not know. This is over 3% today and I will take that everyday! I manually closed, mostly out of excitement to bank these pips. I guess I could of closed half and let the other half run. I also could wait for a close on the opposite side of the pink MA to trigger a close. As of now, it looks like I could have doubled my return. Again, I'm alright where I am at. This builds and compounds. This trade was more than I made yesterday selling a car. Now that is exciting!!

The other parallel is back to poker. In Hold 'Em, there is a thing called rabbit hunting. It is when you fold before the turn and/or river, but you want to know if you would have "made your hand". I learned to never do this when I play poker, it only leads to bad decisions later. Trading is very similar to poker.

Have a great weekend everyone!

No trade during my hour this morning or yesterday. I really need to get up. Even getting up and being here an hour earlier may help. It would not have helped yesterday, but it would have today. There were set ups at around 5:20 on every USD pair I look at.

Took this bounce off the MA. It got to my 5 pips (1%), but I was targeting the quarter line. Took a -0.1 pip loss.

A small loss on UJ first thing. The long was based on bounce off 100 and the CCI, as well as a 123 pattern on M5 chart. I kept the SL tight. Looks like that may have burned me.