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Welcome to this trading journal where I learn to trade profitably by placing live trades.
I have decided today to only trade Brent Oil and WTI cfds with Oanda. After a few months of trying to trade 5 currency pairs and Oil, I have decided to narrow my focus on just the 2 crude oil contracts, reason being I would spend to much time analysing the market and miss goods opportunities.
I'm currently down 22% on my live account, mostly as a result of sporadically taking trades without a good exit strategy (both winners and losers). Hopefully I can turn that around going forward by day trading crude oil.
I aim to place around 1-5 trades per day and keep tabs on my positions. This can be a little tricky as I work 5 days a week in a large organisation but have now figured out ways to make it work.
The reason I choose to day trade is to eventually make high returns say 300% p.a compared to EOD trading <50% p.a.
My initial goal is to just take trades every day, using good risk management. I hope the constant daily terror of placing live trades will force me to properly define my strategy and to test it against historical data.
This is just an initial post to get started. I will build a more detailed plan of the specifics of trading bit by bit as I progress as a trader.
Chart 1 attached - Wed 15 July 2015 - 3 long counter trend trades = I should not have been trading counter trend as price did not spike downwards (so no sharp reversal to follow) - Result +£12.50
Chart 2 attached - Thu 16 July 2015 - 1 short trade stopped out by 1.5 pips before reversing, entered to early aswell. - Result -£23 and too fatigued to place any more trades.
Next Step - To remove 5 currency pair from watch list and focus on Brent and WTI only. This should reduce impulsively jumping on to a trade and waiting for a better entry.
Each day I will post my EOD balance today being £779.40.
Came in today bearish looking at the daily chart, the day turned out to have good potential shorts. Brent closed up slightly where as CL closed slightly down.
Took one trade at 10:20 London Time on BRN. +£3
After returning from my lunch break around 12.30, could've re-entered at a similar price to make 30+ ticks.
However, I had forgotten to hookup my mobile phone to my computer(which I need to bypass my work firewall to live data, remote desktop etc); so didn't recognise price action that would've prompted another short.
Also couldn't place more trades due to being busy with work. The problem being that connecting my mobile phone causes all traffic to be routed through it. It's works perfectly for accessing internet at full speed, but when accessing work network files it is really slow and intranet sites sometimes do not load at all.
What I need is a way to select all Google Chrome traffic to be routed through my phone but all other traffic to be routed through my work ethernet.
Would anyone have suggestions on how to do this? Bearing in mind I do not have admin access rights.
Tuesday 21 Jul 15 - No trades due to workload at the office and connection to charts still not working. Able to access them through mobile tethering but this slowed down access to company file servers to a snails pace, which would not suit my busy day.
Wednesday 22 Jul 15- Managed to find a way to access charts without slowing down file access. Hopefully this will continue to work and serve my goals of placing live trades every day.
4 buy trades mostly in the wrong direction. Possibly due to lack of pre-trading analysis.
Trade 1 - Long for a quick spike up which failed and would've set up a trade in the opposite direction (Selling more where I sold to close the trade) LOSS -£10.50
Trade 2 - Long for a quick spike up, made the amateurish error of forgetting the Crude Oil report. Could've closed the trade with a decent profit if I had known to watch the market at 3.30pm London time. . LOSS -£13
Trade 3 - Long to see if prices would go higher, also failed. Exited realising market exhaustion. LOSS -£8.35
Trade 4 - Reentry of trade 3 but then realised price had probably stalled going higher. Selling more after exit sale would've made nice profit. PROFIT +£1.40
The cause of the losses was being stubborn that Oil should rise today. I felt I couldn't go short after losing in 3 long trades.
Need to be more open minded and take trades from both sides.
Overall, feel good that chart access is working from my desk at work and now have no excuses not to trade and get better at it.
Still failing to hold winners. Really need to look at some historical data to gain some confidence.
Unfortunately crude has been in a downtrend for the last year so the data may not be representative of the coming year which could be a side ways chop on the daily chart.
29/7 Lost 30 pips by having too wide an initial stop. Also shouldn't fade news? Need to do historical research to find out!!!
30/7 CL - Took profit too quickly, then decided to fade move incorrectly.
30/7 BRN - Sold at the high of the day, but was unable to accept the position and ride it.
Decided to trade euro today as it seemed likely a big move was to occur looking at the dailies.
Will probably stick to eur/usd and eur/jpy for a while so must start doing some historical research on it. The advantage is data is freely available for forex. Having trouble finding good data for brent crude.
Took some long trades on Eur/usd and Eur/jpy but was too early. Could've got in again for a massive gain but was too unfocused after initial losses.
I have been trading Cl exclusively for several years. It has many quirks and often moves differently than many other instruments. I came from a forex background and found out quickly what worked on currency pairs like euro/yen..pound/yen etc..didn't always translate to the same strategies on Cl. But once you learn it's tendencies, you will be much less likely to be fooled by it's numerous false spikes and other odd occurences.