Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I might Win a Tablet but I might just get rich trying
I didn’t trade very well last night. There was finally a trend during my trading session and I had a valid set up. I even had my orders in but when the next candle didn’t break out of the setup candle I cancelled the orders. I wasn’t convinced of the trend strength and I was actually right in my interpretation as this trade would have been a loser. I just don’t think it’s a good thing to start altering techniques like that. Normally I would only cancel orders if the next bar broke out of the wrong side of he setup bar (it didn’t).
I feel a little grateful to have escaped a loser but if that had turned into a winner I would be very annoyed at myself for messing up my entry. I actually felt a little miffed for the whole rest of the session as it kept grinding in the right direction.
The good news is, I didn’t compound my error and jump on board just to get in. I have certainly learned never to do that
I did one trade last night. It appeared to be set up OK and gave an OK signal but in hindsight it appears I was still in the daily range. My trade was followed but the two alternating legs that I’ve been noticing each day around European open. Seems like you need an absolute cracker of a trend running to make a trend trade before that happens. Yesterday’s range wasn’t so obvious (to me at least) so I thought I was OK
Still, you can only trade what you see at the time, it’s always obvious afterwards what you might have done differently but you can’t get too wound up in that.
I will be watching for a stronger trend in future though. All I need do is look to the left and see if I’m trading above or below what I see there rather than in it.
I had a lucky escape last night. Trend was down and there was a valid setup, it was below the immediate price action so I put in a short order. It broke out of the high side of the set up bar first so I cancelled the order and saved myself a full R loss. Looking harder I realised there was news out within 10 minutes of that so I shouldn’t have placed the order in the first place.
I quit as 8pm approached because there was a raft of news there too. Really, yesterday evening was filled with news in my normal trading window so it probably would have been an idea to simply not bother. Occasionally that happens and I’ve found it can be a nightmare.
I had to go to Launceston yesterday to run a few errands. It’s a pretty little city that sits where the Tidal area of the Tamar river meets the fresh water running out of the hills and mountains. It’s about 100 km from home so thankfully we don’t have to go there too often but when we do we make the most of it and fit in a decent lunch and a walk into Cataract Gorge. It’s all good fun but that’s a long-winded way of saying I didn’t do any trades last night.
I did have a look at the charts this morning and basically they are a repeat of many that have been on here recently. A Range that persisted all day with a false break around the Euro and London open
Daylight saving ends in Europe and London this week end so I will finally be getting into the juicer part of the action on Monday.
That was another very quiet week. Just the 1 trade for 1 loss. I’ll gain an hour this weekend on the Euro zone and another hour next weekend so hopefully I will be in trend land then. As they say, the proof will be in the pudding
Seeing as Sunday seems to have come around again this week I will share a technique for turning your scalps and swings into bigger gains.
The idea here is to run a normal trade but keep perhaps one contract open if the overall trade is in line with the daily trend. Imagine a small scalp or swing trade that makes (say) 25 pips on 6 contracts but you just happen to be aligned with the daily trend and maybe even at some S/R level or other.
In this example you would have taken 25 pips on 5 contracts and around about 800 pips on that last one. Your gain for that trade then is 154 pips.
Initially you might leave the stop on the last one at break even so if it was hit instead of getting 25 pips for the trade you get 20 and a bit. So ultimately you are risking 5 pips to make an extra 120.
Where and when might you do this? I prefer to look for levels on the daily charts and I like the idea of using what Borowski calls the S.E.X. lines. Simple and Exponential moving averages of the same duration. A level of S/R close to where they cross can be dynamite.
Naturally you might do a few of these on successive days at around that level and carry a cluster along for the big gains. Ideally move your stops on the daily chart using whatever technique you prefer PSaR works nicely as does ATR stops. Just remember to squeeze up your stop a bit each day especially if you have negative carry and also watch out for the weekends and that gap that occurs while the market id closed. You can manage this by avoiding this technique on Fridays or using a guaranteed stop. Once the trade gets going your stop should be wider than the gap anyway.
Despite the change in hours in Europe it turned out to be another ranging day.
I have been watching for divergence as explained by ESFXtrader on this forum along side my usual trend chart and toward the end of the session a divergence appeared so I took the trade. I ran my stop into a 1-pip profit as soon as I could and that’s pretty much how the trade ended. Eventually the down trend continued much later in the evening and a second divergence that would have delivered a handy profit occurred at 2020 but I was well and truly gone by then.
I made 1 pip on 7 Micro contracts so I’d call that a scratch but I think the trade went well and I did what I should do so I’m relatively happy with that.
When I turned on my PC I was staring at an uptrend that started around 1400 that was going along quite nicely.
Looking left there seemed to be a significant high at 1.4116 from 0200 and I thought this rally might stall at that high. I decided that I would trade with the trend if I got a retracement back into my 20/40 MAs or against the trend if I got divergence around that old high.
As the evening panned out I did three divergence trades and each one failed. By the time I finished the third one I realised I had lost sight of where that old high was and that I was now shorting well above any level that I would deem a failed test of the high. This, coupled with the fact that major UK news was coming out in ½ an hour, made me stop for the day.
The other thing I missed in the heat of he moment was that there were a couple of decent with-trend set-ups in there that I ignored because each one came at the end of a failed trade. I seem to think I deserve a pause at the end of a trade while my brain does a little dance about what just happened whereas if I just forgot that and stayed in the flow I would look at the market from a fresh perspective and ‘see’ the other opportunities that were there. These didn’t retrace into the 20/40 MAs but not much does during a strong trend.
All up I don’t think I did too badly. I ended up down 0.1R because I managed each trade well even if I did pick them poorly
I think it was Einstein who said that insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result.
I seemed to have a repeat performance of Wednesday. I did one countertrend trade that I closed for a scratch just ahead of the news. Then I missed an entry with the trend, which bolted away for what would have been an easy profit.
At the time of the entry I had my charts all zoomed up so it wasn’t obvious what was happening when the hammer formed. I would classify myself as a rules based discretionary trader so I tend to look for repeat performances of things that make money but only enter if they are not against some resistance or support and I have time to get at least break even before a news event. Sometimes, however, my charts can lead me astray because of zooming and panning out.
I have to say that writing this journal is hi lighting certain repeat performances of my own that I would like to erase with this being one of the major ones.
Tonight is Non farm Payroll so that’s a non trading day for me and then I have the weekend. I will use that time to see if I can encode something for Hammers and inside reversals so that I can’t miss them in future.