It's late, I'm tired(and done trading), but I had a profitable day. Today was 57 trades, 50 pips profit for a 3% increase in equity with no more than .5% drawdown on any trade. Pretty much how I like my days to go! Little here, little there.

This is a chart from tonight's session. I don't have one for the trades I took in the US afternoon session.

I don't know if this qualifies as a journal, but it shows what trades I took and when. I knew that big drop was going to happen, and wanted to short, but I had something else to attend to, so I had to get out. Oh well, there were more trades (there always are)

Also, for those of you interested, because of MB Trading's new commission schedule, not only did I not pay any commission, but actually about 5% of my profit was from getting paid for limits! Nice.

Congrats on creating a journal, I look forward to more.

Mike

Here's the story of my scalps tonight. Was trading very low leverage, still managed to make 1.1% with probably less than .4% max drawdown. Wasn't going to take any chances on longs with the sharp spike piercing the ascending 4H TL. Looking like we might get a dead cat bounce and resume the trend. Whatever, I'll find out what she does when I wake up tomorrow!

Hi @DarkPool, if you start posting to your journal daily you may have a chance to win an iPad or other $600 tablet, check out the contest here:

Big Mike Challenge - Win a iPad or tablet... I'm starting a new contest for March! It will begin March 1st and end March 31st. The prize will be your choice of one of the following tablets: Apple iPad Samsung Galaxy Tab Viewsonic G-Tablet Archos Tablet Dell Streak Photo …

Mike

Well it wasn't my best night, but still managed to make 1.3% although with almost 3% drawdown. I let myself go to 5ish percent drawdown per trade on GY just because you need to give it more room and my accuracy rate is high enough that I can justify the higher risk. On other pairs, I generally limit it to 1-2% loss per trade depending on PA and TA.

Would have been better to be short on that big down move, but patience and TA (I allowed myself(planned, not averaged down!) to scale into that position, up to half of my normal position size) kept me in until I was able to get out with a bit of profit. It came very close to hitting my mental stop.

The volume spike at 1:28 told me the rally was probably was over so I went short for a few quick ones. Got out when it started to get choppy. Should have waited for the touch of support at 133.80, but oh well, you can't take all of it every time. But we'll die trying right! LOL

This is what you call building a position. I really only do this on GY because it's zones are so wide(and choppy). I was very confident of another push down(before a possible retest of resistance), the volume spike at around 3:50 confirmed, and it was time to rock.

Profit was .9% and max drawdown on this trade was a little over 1%, I was going to cut it if it got to 1.5%, there's a long way up to go, even in a strong down trend...

I never take liberties with exits though and was not married to the short, it was acting weird at 133.98 so I placed a buy limit at the bid and got out on the first spike down. Not about to let you sad sacks take back my profit! LOL I'm really done for the night, VPS connection closed!

Do you know your average MAE and MFE per trade? If you are routinely risking 5% to make 2%, I'd reverse your entry

Mike

Big Mike 

Do you know your average MAE and MFE per trade? If you are routinely risking 5% to make 2%, I'd reverse your entry Mike

I don't know what those numbers are in my case. I do know that I have an average win rate of 80+% and I usually can manage to grow an account 1-3% per day with no more than .5% dd on most trades with some extreme trades going as far as 5%(but rarely). I'm working on filtering those out, but when I do that, I tend to filter out the letting profits run too, so it's a double sword.

I agree that a 5:2 rr ratio may not be the sandwich everybody wants to eat, but on GY and more volatile pairs, if my analysis supports it, I'll let dd go to around 5% because my system is usually right and in the rare instances it isn't, I can make back 5% in 1-3 sessions.

It's a hell of a lot better than the 50+% that I would do as a newbie...

But to answer your question, no I don't generally let it get that far. .5-1% is about as far as most of my trades go, I let price action determine the final stop.

I have 2 different strategies. One is the one position/full leverage/tight stop(5-10p(1-2% risk)on GU&EU), the other is scaling in and holding. The second one, I take lower leverage and give the trade time to breathe, sometimes that means going against me a bit, but patience and waiting for the market to come to me(or where I think it's supposed to be) are what that plan is about. And my system hits 80+, so I try not to get greedy.

I think one of my main problems is trading against myself in competing timeframes. I make an analysis on a higher TF and then I'm scalping on the lower TF and I forget to place stops accordingly and let the trade go way against me, and then come back to where I thought it would be.

NinjaTrader has a built-in report that will calculate MAE and MFE. It may be an eye-opener, or a way to further increase profit.

Mike