I am starting my own trading journal today - I hope this posting is in the right place.
Although I am not prepared to share my systems, I will report my trades in full and share some lessons that I have learned over the past 10 years of trading. Before anyone gets too excited, I should point out that my trading record is nothing to sing about. I am probably around $400k down since I started (I haven't got the exact figure at hand but it's about this much). Of that, maybe $150k is from trading losses, maybe $50k is what I have spent on trading systems/education, and the remaining $200k is due to commissions on trades and on interest charges on the bank account from which I originally borrowed money to trade with. I don't have the exact breakdown of the figures at hand but it is roughly like that.
Over the past 10 years I have had some profitable periods but they were always followed by significantly higher losing periods. So I am writing this journal to try to help myself to understand what I have been doing wrong, and share any lessons that I have with whoever might be interested. Also if anyone wants to help me with advice I would appreciate that. I am just getting myself ready over the next week or two to start trading again and in the mean time will talk about what I have been up to.
I work full time in Australia and therefore can only trade for 1 hour in the European open and also for one hour in the US session close. I worked out that staying up till all hours of the night to catch the US open meant that I was half asleep and able to trade efficiently, so I had to find ways to trade during my own hours.
This journal could be of interest to those of you that are just starting out trading, in the sense that it will serve to illustrate how difficult it can sometimes be. Some of you may be wondering whether it is possible to trade for a living and it seems like the few people that can do that are not necessarily always willing to come out and say it, and no doubt they have good reason. In fact I've never met anyone who has proven to me that they do this but I am sure there are some out there that prefer to keep a low profile. Strangely enough in spite of my dismal record, I believe it is possible and I hope that I can get it all right now and demonstrate it with everybody watching me and holding me to account. Once I get up and running I will post all my trades, hopefully in real-time if I can, you can even sim trade along with me but I don't recommend anyone to actually take any of my trades since firstly I am not presently a profitable trader and secondly I am not licensed to give trading advice.
I like to categorise trading systems as being based on either trading breakouts or on using oscillators for trading within a range. I've always been more attracted to breakouts and have spent a lot of time in developing my own breakout systems, and in backtesting commercially available ones. When I started with forex some years back I was trading breakouts on EU (EUR/USD), GU (GBP/USD), and GY (GNP/JPY) mainly. I was trading a commercial breakout system with up to 100 pips target/35-100 pips risk on EU and GU, and up to 200 pips target/55-165 pips risk on GY. When the currencies were moving this would yield results, but more often than not they weren't moving. It is difficult to know whether they will be moving or not before the trade. It ended up like trying to win the lottery, and my hit rate was not high enough.
More recently I am trading futures, especially ES and 6E. A lot of the systems I have are based around ES and this is a good starting point for beginners. Some go for 4 ticks with 8 ticks risk, some for as much as 20 ticks target with 5 ticks risk. Every system I have bought or developed is a bit different. I found that I would never get anywhere unless I had two things in my own system: my winners should be bigger than my losers and my number of winning trades should be higher than my number of losing trades. Being a breakout trader I did like the ability to catch bigger …