My live journey to become a trader

I took my time, a long reflexion before publishing my post, but one day I need to jump for real and I will use this diary as a proof and support.

Today is a new day, the day of truth, facing the reality. Blowing up the bubble of my dreams such as those crazy start-ups fund raising. I fall in trading around 5 years ago. I was totally in the downside of my life, and easy money was appealing such as a fortune teller. I spent day and night reading, learning. Moving from one forum to another one, browsing around for the ultimate indicators, the holy grail strategy. Jumping from a promising EA offered for a shitty price to a more promising solution. Beginning creazy between all these options. I loaded more than 600 indicators in Metatrader, one after another. Building in my mind ultimates strategies, victorious martingale, hedging solutions. Doing quick mind backtesting with a partial behaviour and from jumping to the sky after finding the inglorious bastard strategy, seeing billions in my eyes, changing my life, running the world to fall in the dark edge after meeting a specific market situations that totally run out my promising idea.

During the years I reduces some expectations, life changed, found a job and kept in one part of my brain for the forex trading. Sometimes getting back during a period, testing several ideas and then drop out by not finding a 100% accurate solution. I learnt the rules, but rules are boring, dreams, expectations are more appealing to my mind. Sometime I started crawling hundred of candles, trying different situation, adapting my strategy each time and then, opening my eyes, 3 am in the morning, totally lost on a planet.

I tried to get superficial appearances, speaking trading to my nearest circle, bothering my wife on it, projected her the shiny future. I participate to local trader meetup. I do really enjoyed the discussion. But in fact the reality is different. Spending time on forum, indicators, reading articles, experts analysis is interesting for the knowledge but I was not practicing. Only few demo accounts and I think only one shitty 50$ real account on a non recommended broker. I understood the main principal and issues but never applied it myself.

Today, I reach a crossroad. Shut down until the end any trading stuff, or moving my ass and doing something effective and seeing whats happened. Today I want to start for real, stopping to talk about but to be part of the action. If I dont do it, I wouldnt have tried and I have two options, stop trading before starting and moving to another hobby or making it real and see whats happen. If it doesnt work I would know why and I would not regret.

I will use this forum as a diary, a good way to motivate myself and using it as a sort of coach and support. Please, feel free to ask questions, support or criticize, the web is a place for sharing. And if you find similarities in some of my previous behaviours, do not hesitate to share.

Cheers,

Pipsfisherman

I am glad you have come to realize that trading is one of the hardest way to make an easy living. It has fooled many fools.

What do you want to get out of trading the markets?
What makes you different from every other trader on FF?
Why is your strategy more superior than the strategies on published on FF?

Hey,

I came here by accident, but the things you wrote are more or less the same things which are in my mind!
Wondering how far you have come until today ?

Hey Hoffi4201,

Thanks for your message and sorry I just have seen I got an answer to that thread today.

Well. I haven't give up trading It took me a bit of time to work on my own structure. But I think, I'm on the right way.

Strategy is a calculation of strength between currencies. 24 pairs are monitored a the same time and based on each currency power and direction the right pairs are selected after that for pending orders. It can be long on some and short on others. It helps has well to secure profit and I remove automatically duplicated orders in case of correlation between 2 pairs.

A 1% balance target is set and then all orders closed when target reached.
I’m using as well pyramidalization to maximize profit on the pairs when the trend is well catched.

I have two versions, one with large size lots, and another one with small size lot to reduce risk. My Trade Explorer is connected to Forex Factory, so you can check details.

Here a quick overview of global performance.



And here the monthly ROI performance





I'm now actively working to develop my own indicators and EA. That's a real pleasure to do my own optimisation, and results from the first strategy is going in the right direction.

Happy Pips,
PipsFisherman

Hello everyone,

Here is a quick update. Things are still going quite well. On my small lot size I suffered some losses and add to fight to come back to the initial achievement and over passing it. I came back to 15% and moved now to 29%. But at the end it’s “only” 4% more than in september. That’s part of the game.



Happy pips and enjoy the end of the year !

Cheers,

PipsFisherman

Wow. My last message is from 2019. Pretty impressive. Seems life runs so fast. Not publishing doesnt mean not working on forex but I had to admit that I was quite busy on the non digital part of my life.
I started back few month ago after finally taking the time to improve some piece of code of my historical strategy that wa not bad at all on my point of view. Here the detail below and performance are as well connected to my Forex Factory Profile.






November Gone. I started a new test challenge on one of my strategy and after a bit more than 2 months and a half, wanted to share the performance do far.
I'm testing live (in demo mod) 4 versions of the same strategy to finetune the final version with the best parameters. Backtesting are definitely useless for my configuration, so always prefer to run it directly on the platform. (Metatrader 4).
Overall Strategy Idea:

1. Assessing Currencies Strength
2. Based on previous point, taking entry on weaker / stronger pairs combinaison
3. 28 Pairs Monitored
4. Basket Trading
5. Consolidation with Grid Trading to maximise trends
6. Trade Recovery
7. No trade during News / No trade during rollover and anormal Spread
8. Running 24/5 on a VPS to catch

I run 1Y ago a first version of the strategy without stop loss to check the performance using different model. All the 3 versions of the test went high (best one with 98% Growth in 7 months). But as often everything blow away during a market move against my positions. By analysing past performance, I saw that except very rare situation (end the deadly last one), the drawdown is rarely below 5 or 10% while I often get 10 to 20% win in a row.

I launched end of september a new test, the current one with four versions of the same strategy with 2 variables. Stop Loss at basket level of 5% or 10% and Basket Take Profit at 1 or 2%. (Win Rate is around 70%).

Goal is to determine if 5% drawdown doesn't cut too early some potential winning trade. And if the trades going in the right direction, does reaching 2% is as easy as 1% and is it better to make regular 1% or 2% at the end.

The 2 months confirmed what I was initially thinking. The 10% drawdown is useless, it takes more time to be reached, and it's better to touch a 5% SL and start again to grab pips instead of waiting recovery from a potential trend change.2% TP works better than 1%. Doesn't take too much more time to close the gap between 1 and 2 and at the end, in 3 positive days, a 5% drawdown is covered.

I got a difficult start, pips in negative and took time to touch the SL. (I prefer a rapid SL than 2 weeks floating). SL at 5% statistically should happened only one's every 2 months. Was "fun" to start with that. But then it worked as intended.

Reaching 10% growth in November and bring the total growth at 7% (recovering from the bad october month performance).

Goal is now to continue running, focusing on the SL5TP1 and SL5TP2 which are the most promising. Will be happy to share more in december / january and answer your questions in the meantime.

Hope it helps