My Monthly Returns

Z6

Best of luck to you my friend, and be safe...

Thank you brother for the best of wishes. Best of luck to you as well.

Another read during my lunch that is appropriate for this thread. Hope you enjoy.

http://www.forexschoolonline.com/sta...-and-not-pips/

Update to my game-plan. I have opened a $3K account with FXCM and decided to hold off depositing the remaining $5K due to the advice of my mentor. The $3K account is big enough to use wide stop losses that will make my analysis of the chart invalid if it is triggered while keeping my risk management intact. In the meantime, I'll continue saving and growing my capital while I trade this account. I have not proven yet consistency in my trading nor discipline in following my trading plan. If I can't steadily grow this $3K account, what makes me think I will steadily grow a +$10K account? Take a look below for great insight on keeping a trading journal from babypips school.

"A trading plan is an organized approach to executing a trading system that youve developed based on your market analysis and outlook while factoring in risk management and personal psychology. A trading journal is a log of all your trading activity. The journals objective is to monitor both the performance of your trading system AND your ability to execute it with consistency." - Babypips.

Be back at the end of May with an update.

Looking forward for your update.
Best of Luck with your trading and Green Pips to you.

Your mentor gave you a pretty good advice. However, if your understanding does not allow for consistent profits, no matter what your account balance is, the performance will be the same. meaning - if you do not have a positive expectancy system, your account will erode either fast or slow, depending on the money management. The mere fact that you put less or more money in your account, does not give you any edge. I think you have pretty good psychological attitude towards trading from the beginning, as you respect money and think about protecting them, but you need to build the other aspects of understandng, which will happen with lots of time and effort. I will be following your posts. Good luck

Update: I have not traded with my newly funded FXCM account for this month. Working in a classified building for long hours daily gives me no time to properly analyze the markets at this time. But I still actively analyze the markets on the weekend and see if what I have been learning "plays out." Also, I continue to learn from the FF forums and found some great insight from FF member fartist regarding on how to develop a trading plan? (The material posted below is NOT mine.) I'm hoping for the month of June I can have time to take some trades but will follow a strict trading plan and with focus on collecting statistical data to determine my expectancy.

How to develop your trading plan?

A trading plan is a structure, or a set of guidelines, that defines your trading.

It removes subjectivity in your trading, minimize the roller coaster emotions, and keeps you prepared at all times.

So, how do you develop a trading plan? Formulate a plan. Have defined rules to enter/exit the market.
Once youve completed your trading plan, forward test it in the live markets to get performance data. (testing for positive/negative expectancy)

Executing your trades consistently isnt enough. You must record down your trades to collect relevant statistical data to be able to make an objective conclusion whether your plan has an edge in the market.

I would recommend having a sample size of at least 100 trades, before deciding whether your trading plan has an edge in the markets.
After you have a sample size of 100 trades, you can look to review your statistics to see whether you have an edge in the market or not.

The most important trading equation you must know:

Expectancy = (Winning % * Average win) (Losing % * Average loss) (Commission + slippage)

Brother, I continue educating myself daily in this business and your words are worth gold, I did not see it clearly the first time I saw your post, but now I do. Take a look at my prior post in this thread before this one, it stated what you have said prior. I was reading through all my threads for any value information from other traders and saw this. Thank you.