Forex Experiment

Day 41

Disaster has finally struck, I think it was inevitable. I sensed that this was coming as I've just felt under too much pressure with all the losing days recently. The last two days had been pure frustration due to the lack of movement and it all came to a head yesterday. I had full sized positions on in both the EURUSD & EURJPY and was away from the screens for about 15 minutes. When I came back I had been slammed in what was later reported to be the start of a hedge fund unwind of EURJPY which also hammered the EURUSD.  I was down 50 pips before I even knew anything about it. Frustrated at how long it had taken me to get 3.5 & 1.3 pips the previous days and how easy 50 pips had been taken away, I just couldn't face the prospect of chipping away to recover. So I did the worst thing imaginable, I just let them ride, 'hoping' that they would bounce back up as has been happening a lot recently. Sadly for me it never happened and in fact the selling got worse and worse. When I finally could stomach no more I had lost more than half of the profit made in the project so far and I am now so far back (back to Day 19) I don't think I can stomach recovering in the same fashion. I've decided to review the whole project in light of the 41 days of experience I've obtained and redesign the parameters to address the problems I've faced.

In summary what I want to achieve -
1. Retain the goal of turning $10K into $250K in 1 year.
2. Probably retain the 10 pips per day idea in principle as it's a realistic goal, but I need to remove the pressure of recovering from losing days. Losing days need to be accepted and the way to accept them when they happen is to have a plan and goal that allows for them. Currently I don't really have that and that has led to this self sabatoge through lack of discipline. So I'm probably going to take a weekly view instead of a daily view. For example 50 pips per week instead of 10 pips per day. Not sure if this really helps, I need to think about it, but it might help psychologically which is the key.
3. Whether it's a daily view or weekly view I need to factor in more days of not trading. For example UK public holidays I'm just going to forget about trading along with golden week. I need to factor in more holidays and days where I just don't feel like trading so as to not force me to trade when it doesn't make any sense.
4. I'm going to look into the idea of using auto stop losses. I really don't like using them in forex as you get spiked out so much but yesterday was a classic case in point where the exit decision would have been made for me and I would have saved a lot of pips.
5. The other big problem with the way I'm trading at the moment is that there is always a chance of a big downside hit, like yesterday (although obviously it should never be as bad as it was), but a big upside bonus is limited as I'm taking the small pips every time I can get them. I need to think about how I can possible ride more upside, although so far my experiments with letting profitable whole or part positions ride has not been successful. This is where a weekly view might help me as combining a wide auto stop with a position that can run for a longer period without me watching the screen might be better.

So, the project is sadly on hold until I've redesigned the parameters with the same objective in mind but addressing all the issues I have had so far. I'm sure the end result will be better for it as I've been thinking for a while the way I'm trading at the moment is too hard to sustain over a long period.

Day 40

Start Balance                     $16,053

Today's Profit Target             $209.29 (Day 37)
Required Position size         207,000 (JPY), 172,600 (USD)

Trades

1     +86,300K         EURUSD        *1.6 pips         (2:43)
2     +103,500K       EURJPY         *1.8 pips         (3:17)
3     +86,300K         GBPUSD        *-6.3 pips        (2:49)
4     +103,500K       EURJPY         *1.2 pips         (1:39)
5     +207,000K       EURJPY         5.1 pips           (0:17)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                      3.5 pips ( $75.22 )

End Balance          $16,053

Project Status 

Day 40 end target  $16,830
4 Days Behind (dropped back 1 day since yesterday)
$703 behind schedule or 33.57 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

I didn’t trade too much today but what I did was a complete waste of time. It was May day bank holiday in the UK  and I figured because of the previous weeks holiday in Japan & China that the Asian session wasn’t going to be up to much either. So I decided to just skip Asia and try and trade the the first half of the US session where I figured there would be the most action. Waste of time, it was like watching paint dry, there was hardly any movement at all and typically the only fast move on offer was against me in the GBPUSD

I watched the market for 3 hours and could hardly stay awake from the lack of activity. It was very frustrating and I just about managed to end the day slightly positive after being behind most of the time. I feel like  I’m totally out of sync with the market at the moment and I’m still struggling to have the confidence to put a full size trade on. I managed only one out of the five trades today but at least as it turned out I got the right one.

Day 39

Day 39

Start Balance                             $16,016

Today's Profit Target                     $209.29 (Day 37)
Required Position size                 207,400 (JPY), 171,500 (USD)

Trades

1     +207,400K     EURJPY         2.7 pips         (0:42)
2     +103,700K     EURJPY       *4.0 pips          (0:29)
3     +103,700K     EURJPY       *-11.4 pips       (1:07)
4     +103,700K     USDJPY       *4.1 pips          (0:22)
5     +103,700K     USDJPY       *-5.0 pips         (4:35)
6     +207,400K     USDJPY       -5.4 pips           (4:29)
7     +85,750K       EURUSD      *-2.6 pips         (0:07)
8     +85,750K       USDJPY      *0.5 pips           (3:32)
9     +85,750K       GBPUSD     *7.6 pips           (0:05)
10    +85,750K      GBPUSD     *4.0 pips           (0:02)
11    +85,750K      EURUSD     *7.3 pips           (0:30)
12    +85,750K      EURUSD     *-4.7 pips          (0:05)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                              1.3 pips     ( $36.45 )

End Balance                  $16,053

Project Status 

Day 39 end target  $16,613
3 Days Behind (dropped back 1 day since yesterday)
$560 behind schedule or 26.77 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

I didn’t trade yesterday as I had a massive hangover after celebrating Liverpool’s champion’s league semi-final win so today I should have been feeling fresh and raring to go. I can’t say that I really was though. Confidence is still missing and I could only bring myself to put on 2 full sized positions out of 12, the rest where all half sizes.

This day was really a tale of two sessions, pre & post non-farm payrolls announcement. I didn’t start until late afternoon near the start of the European session and it should really have all been over on the first trade. Greed got in the way as I had 10 pips on the very first trade and a few minutes of opportunity to take it. However, I got greedy thinking I could get a lot more out of it and paid the price. I ended up selling it in two halves for a measly 2.7 pips in total after it starting retreating. After that I lost confidence and switched to half sizes which turned out to be a blessing as the 3^rd trade was a disaster and I lost 11.4 full pips on it. Apart from that big move there wasn’t a whole lot of movement anywhere as the markets where gearing up for the non-farm payrolls release. Up until the release I had held onto a very large position in USDJPY which looked the best chart technically but it didn’t move and I ended up having to close it out before the announcement for a loss. At announcement time I was down 13 pips.

I don’t normally trade NFP as it’s too late in the day really and with Oanda widening the spreads you can only trade after things have settled down. Besides that I think it’s really just a crap shoot and even too volatile for my scalp trades until any kind of direction looks established. But I didn’t start until late today, and because I was down at the time I figured I could see if I could trade it post announcement. I had also received an email invitation to a webinar sponsored by GFT, details below

Trade Non- Farm Payrolls LIVE with Wayne McDonell - FXstreet.com, FX Bootcamp & Trade the News sponsored this extraordinary event. Don’t miss out on a great opportunity to learn keys to trade this economic report and ask questions to experts while the market is moving!

Despite major problems with the audio on the HotComm s/w they used it was actually a very interesting and educational session. Wayne  didn’t provide exact entry or exit signals but talked through his approach and what he looks for in trading the news. I think I picked up quite a few good ideas from his talk. I didn’t actually follow his trade plan but apart from the regrettable last trade of the day I managed 3 successful trades post NFP. The NFP number was 88K which was way down on what was expected and way down on last month so it was clearly USD negative. The first trade I took 10 minutes after NFP and I got 7.6 pips in 5 minutes in the GBPUSD, the second I got 4 pips in 2 minutes shortly after the first trade also in the GBPUSD, and the 3^rd trade I got 7.3 pips after holding on to it for 30 minutes. As it turned out I’d got out near enough the top of the EURUSD and my last trade I tried to get in on what I thought was a retracement but it had run out of momentum and quickly moved down. So I ended up the day with 1.3 pips, which could have been better, the last trade was unnecessary as I should have been happy with 6 pips for the day at that time. But after being 13 pips down going into the last 4 trades I’m not unhappy. The most interesting thing was that 1.3 pips actually equates to $27 on my current position size but due to the length of time I had my JPY shorts open during the day I ended up getting $36 for the day, a full $9 was interest earned in having those positions open.

So the week in review. I got 40 pips out of 4 days trading, so that’s good. I made a new milestone with the bank up 60%. I had no losing days with 22 winning trades out of 35 for a win rate of 63%. I started the week 3 days behind and I finished 3 days behind. Quite satisfactory really considering the other things going on this week, Oh! Yes did I forget to mention that LIVERPOOL  are in the Champions League Final. Again. .

Day 38

Start Balance                     $15,661

Today's Profit Target             $201.28 (Day 35)
Required Position size         202,400 (JPY)

Trades

1     +100,200K     USDJPY         *1.5 pips          (3:02)
2     +200,400K     USDJPY         5.1 pips            (0:04)
3     +100,200K     EURJPY         *-6.2 pips         (1:56)
4     +100,200K     USDJPY         *9.0 pips          (1:29)
5     +200,400K     EURJPY         7.8 pips           (0:23)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                      17.15 pips         ( $353.13 )

End Balance          $16,016

Project Status 

Day 38 end target  $16,398
2 Days Behind (pulled back one day since yesterday)
$382 behind schedule or 18.24 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

Today was another day with some pretty volatile behavior. The markets this week are very unforgiving.  I assume the lack of participants is resulting in much bigger, faster, swings and without any prior indication in terms of news or chart patterns providing clues.

This blog seems to be increasingly about what should have been done in hindsight but hopefully I’m learning from this and making better trade decisions with the knowledge. Today I was convinced that the USDJPY was going to break through 120 as the USD had been getting some support over the last few days. The chart looked very supportive of this view so this was the pair to focus on today. With more confidence I should have just put one full sized position on when I did and been patient, my entry price was 119.85 so there was excellent potential to get a lot of pips quickly if it triggered stops through 120. After 3 hours of waiting I started getting impatient as there was little real movement and it was frustrating as every time it popped up it was just as quickly pushed back down. Trade 2 I took while trade 1 was open and it was a very fast 5 pips from 119.86 to 119.91. After another 15 minutes I lost patience and closed out the first trade for a few pips as I was getting worried maybe it wasn’t going to progress and may actually fall instead as the EURUSD & GBPUSD had started to tick up. There was also a lot more movement in the EURJPY and it also looked primed to go higher. Switching pairs at this point could have been a huge mistake but it did turn out well in the end. After waiting through 30 minutes of little movement in the EURJPY position I regretted switching pairs and re-entered the USDJPY for 119.92 (in my share trading past, this is something I’ve always struggled to be able to do, i.e. re-enter a position at a higher price after selling out of it, but for whatever reason I find it psychologically a lot easier in the currency market where the concept of ‘value’ for a pair has no meaning to me).  1 hour later and neither pair had moved and then out of the blue I got slammed in the EURJPY, just like I did in the EURUSD the day before. The pair sank 20 pips in less than 5 minutes. It looked very similar to the day before, i.e. a quick fall through a thin market so I took the view that a quick bounce was on the cards. And just like yesterday I had banked enough credit to be in a reasonable position to try it despite sitting on a large open loser. The bounce up came but it was a very nervous first 10 minutes as the first bounce failed and I was starting to look at being seriously in the red. Another ten minutes later and both the EURJPY & USDJPY took off upwards together. My large EURJPY position recovered from being 5 pips down and I banked nearly 8 pips. At the same time I closed out the half sized EURJPY for a loss of 6 full pips (at the worst point this was 12 pips), but the best of all was the USDJPY which did exactly what I had predicted at the start of the day and surged through 120. I closed it for 9 full pips (18 pips really as it was half sized) at 120.10 just 4 pips off the top before it retreated. It actually collapsed down to 119.6 a couple of hours later before marching all the way back up again. After the scare with the EURJPY and the extreme volatility I was very happy to get out for the day with 17 pips but if I'd have stuck with my conviction at the start and took the full position in USDJPY at 119.85 I could have got 25 pips and with a lot less stress. This market is really hairy at the moment and I’ll be glad when Golden week is over.

So in summary I pulled a day back today and a new milestone was achieved with the bank now up 60%. I’m still 2 days behind but I’m still happy to try and chip away back to schedule.

Oh! And did I mention Liverpool beat Chelsea to make the Champions league final which made today’s pips even more sweet especially as I only had 4 hours sleep before getting up to watch the game, hardly ideal preparation for trading. I’ll be getting well pissed tonight to celebrate so there might not be any trading tomorrow.

Day 37

Start Balance                     $15,449

Today's Profit Target             $201.28 (Day 34)
Required Position size         199,400 (JPY), 166,800 (USD)

Trades

1     +99,700K     EURJPY          *2.5 pips      (0:50)
2     +83,400K     EURUSD         *-9.4 pips     (6:41)
3     +83,400K     GBPUSD         *3.8 pips     (1:02)
4     +166,800K    EURUSD         5.4 pips      (0:48)
5     +83,400K     GBPUSD         *4.7 pips     (0:09)
6     -83,400K      EURUSD         *-2.3 pips    (0:23)
7     +166,800K    EURUSD         5.9 pips      (0:07)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                      10.65 pips ( $211.73 )

End Balance          $15,661

Project Status 

Day 37 end target  $16,186
3 Days Behind (same as yesterday)
$524.94 behind schedule or 25.74 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

I knew things would be even more quiet today in Asia as the Hong Kong, Singapore & China markets were all closed in addition to Japan’s Golden week but I didn’t realize how much of Europe was on holiday as well, apparently it was labour day, whatever that is? 

Despite it being quiet I managed to eke out a few pips on the first trade in the Asian time. I was also feeling very confident that the EURUSD was going much higher today after analyzing it in every possible time frame so I put on a position in Asian time and let it ride. I was sure this was going up but not sure enough to go full size, my confidence is still AWOL at the moment. The half sized position turned out to be a blessing in disguise as this trade was the victim of the true evil of the currency markets and I couldn’t begin to do it justice without an image.

The attached image shows what can happen at any moment in the currency markets, funnily enough this never seems to happen to me in the right direction though. Fortunately this is the first time I’ve been clobbered this bad so far in this project, but it has happened to me on several occasions in other accounts, usually in the GBPUSD. I had this position open for nearly 4 hours when out of the blue it sold off 30 pips in less than 5 minutes (the image is a 1 minute chart), up until that point it had been oscillating around about +/- 8 pips around my entry price, the red line on the image shows were my entry level was. This sell-off happened without any news whatsoever. The news service that I receive through one of my brokers said that most traders were at a loss to explain what happened. But I guess the markets being quite thin due to all the holidays probably contributed to it. I was very lucky that it was only half sized for a couple of reasons. One was that it meant I didn’t have to sell it straight away, I was 6.3 pips in credit at this point so I had a bit of room left to move. But secondly it allowed me to trade against the sell off if it spiked up. I was actually away from the screens when this happened (bad timing) and came back as it was attempting it’s second attempt to move back up (2^nd large green bar at the bottom of the dip). At this time it had recovered about 8 pips from the bottom so I was around 23 (11.5 full sized pips) down combined with my 6.3 pips in the bank meant that I wasn’t in too bad shape. But I was pretty frustrated after being so patient and waiting for hours only to see it go so far into the red so quickly. I took out another full size long position thinking it might continue to move up quickly and I could get some quick pips. As can be seen on the chart It did move up quite orderly but it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get 5 pips out of it (trade 5), I don’t average down as a rule, as I think it’s usually a very bad practice, but if quick scalp trades look on offer I’ll often take them before closing out an existing losing trade. Of course my original position was also recovering some of the loss at the same time so things weren’t looking so bad. In the end I closed out the original for an 18.8 (9.4 full size) pip loss which wasn’t a great result, I could have got out much better but just got it all wrong. My original view on the EURUSD turned out to be correct as it later went on to make almost a new high so I could have actually kept this and made a really good profit on it, but that’s another story.

I had a break at this point as the thin markets were not to my liking and only being 2 pips up I knew I had to come back to the market later when the US opened to finish the job. Two more half sized positions had me chipping away up to nearly 5 pips and then I decided on one last full sized trade to end the day. This was as the EURUSD was pushing up near to it’s previous high and I got 6 pips very quickly to end the day with required pips. Looking at the chart the next day, the EURUSD had sold down 60 pips in the hour following nearly hitting the high. It really is no wonder it’s so hard to make money in this market. 

Day 36

Start Balance                     $15,229

Today's Profit Target             $198.68 (Day 33)
Required Position size         196,200 (JPY), 164,300 (USD)

Trades

1     -98,100K         EURJPY      *-1.4 pips     (0:42)
2     +82,150K        EURUSD     *-8.2 pips     (0:30)
3     +82,150K        EURUSD     *-5.4 pips     (0:19)
4     +196,200K      USDJPY      14.2 pips     (1:06)
5     +196,200K      EURJPY       1.0 pips      (0:05)
6     +98,100K        USDJPY      *0.6 pips     (0:54)
7     +98,100K        EURJPY      *1.7 pips     (0:22)
8     +196,200K      EURJPY       0.0 pips      (0:09)
9     +98,100K        EURJPY     *-2.6 pips     (0:10)
10   +98,100K        USDJPY      *1.6 pips     (2:23)
11   +164,300K      EURUSD       4.9 pips     (0:05)
12   +82,150K        GBPUSD     *4.7 pips     (0:09)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                      11 pips     ( $220.21 )

End Balance          $15,449

Project Status 

Day 36 end target  $15,977
3 Days Behind (same as yesterday)
$527.37behind schedule or 26.2 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

This week is going to be very slow during the Asian session as it is Golden week in Japan. Consequently all but the very first trade where taken during the European session. The movement was stuttered during Asia and it was just too hard to pick anything that didn’t just stop moving. Also the spreads didn’t return to normal until Europe opened today making Asian time trades a bit more expensive than need be.

My confidence has still not returned after so many losing days of late and this has resulted in me bottling it and mostly placing half sized positions. I have to get over this as it’s of course just adding to the number of trades I have to do each day and making the day longer than it needs to be, it’s also encouraging me to over-trade rather than wait for the best opportunities. Having said that, if I’d have gone with full size positions today the first three trades would have busted me and it would have been another 30 pip losing day.

I guess I got lucky then today, as the first trade I felt really good about, trade 4, I put on the full size and it came off very well with a 14 pip win and bringing me back to flat after 3 losers. Perhaps the moral here is to not trade if I don’t feel confident about it and stick with the full size. Had I done that today I may have just done the one trade, a situation I would love to get back to. A few weeks ago during that great 14 day winning run I was averaging less than 5 trades per day and since that streak ended I’m averaging nearly 9. It is noteworthy that none of the 4 full sized trades today were losers (3 winners and 1 flat).

There was nothing particularly interesting about today’s trades worth commenting on except to say I tried the exact same trick as last Friday with the last trade of the day. Everything was lining up just like last Friday with the USD pairs appreciating in anticipation of the announcement of the core PCE Price Index in the US. I followed the same procedure with a take profit stop in place and this time the spreads did blow out when the announcement came out. All the GBP pairs spreads temporarily moved to 20 pips making it too expensive to get out. I didn’t get the same huge move as last Friday’s GDP but it was good enough and when the spreads closed again I got out with 4.7 full sized pips. My take profit stop was eventually reached half an hour later which could have netted me another 5 full size pips but I really wanted to just end the day with a positive result and I got 11 pips which will suffice. I have to discipline myself to stop when the time is right, and although this day wasn’t overly long, I was still at the screens most of the day even if I only placed one trade before Europe.

Trade Profiles

Last Posted - 4th May

Day 35

Start Balance                         15,470

Today's Profit Target                 $201.28 (Day 34)
Required Position size             199,000 (JPY), 166,400 (USD)

Trades

1       +99,500K     EURUSD        *-2.2 pips (1:21)
2       +99,500K     EURJPY         *-4.4 pips (1:19)
3       -99,500K      USDJPY         *-3.6 pips (0:15)
4       +66,900K     EURUSD        *-3.1 pips (0:36)
5       +99,500K     USDJPY         *-6.9 pips (4:13)
6       -166,400K     EURUSD        -5.5 pips (1:25)
7       +99,500K     USDJPY        *-7.6 pips (3:42)
8       +99,500K     EURJPY         *2.8 pips (2:13)
9       +99,500K     EURJPY         *3.3 pips (0:28)
10     +99,500K     EURJPY         *2.8 pips (0:14)
11     +99,500K     EURUSD        *2.8 pips (0:11)
12     +99,500K     EURJPY         *-0.7 pips (0:16)
13     +99,500K     EURJPY         *2.2 pips (0:09)
14     +99,500K     EURJPY         *1.5 pips (0:42)
15     +83,200K     GBPUSD        *16.8 pips (0:16)
16     -99,500K      USDJPY         *-4.1 pips (0:03)
17     -99,500K      USDJPY         * 0.0 pips (0:09)
18     +83,200K     EURUSD        *-4.0 pips (0:11)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                           -12.8 pips         ( -$240.87 )

End Balance              $15,229

Project Status 

Day 35 end target  $15,700
3 Days Behind (2 days back since yesterday)
$541 behind schedule or 27.59 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

Today was one of those days I just shouldn’t have traded, I didn’t feel right from the start and consequently only had the courage to trade half size lots with the exception of one trade. Instead of trading halves I should have just had a day off, again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. The problem being of course this project really doesn’t provide much room for having days off and I’ve already miscalculated how many days holiday and non-trading days there will be. So achieving the goal in one year is now likely to require more than 10 pips per day on average. Having said that, this week has really had very little to do with getting 10 pips per day. Since losing 33 pips on Monday I just can’t help myself wanting to get back on track. This is a major problem as it is encouraging me to over-trade, but I’m not sure what the solution is yet, losing days really do suck big time, especially large losing days. I’m also very unhappy with the big increase in the number of losing days of late, 3 in the last 7 is just way too much.

So what happened today? Well it was really quite tragic but the end result was far better than I could have hoped for at any point during the day. There was a few position sizing errors today, Trade 1 half size was wrong, it should have been 83,200 not 99,500, I compensated for it by opening trade 4 a litte later, open concurrently, which made it an effective full size. Trade 17 I got the wrong size as well. It's just careless really and I should be past these basic errors by now.

I was down all day and was looking at a very bad losing day at several points. The first 7 trades were all losers although I did have some winning trades before they were all closed out, as a few of those trades were on for several hours. 18 trades is far too many and I had 10 losing trades, my worst in 1 day. It was also a long day, 10 hours from starting the first trade to the last trade. I just couldn’t get it right today and trade 15, the only notable trade, really saved the day for me. This was quite a high risk trade as I was down 21.5 pips at this stage and the GBPUSD can move very quick, but for once in the day I was very confident of it coming off. The pair had recovered after a huge sell off the previous day and was pausing along with all of the other currencies awaiting the US GDP figures. The figures were well anticipated and continued upside looked very good. I put on a take profit stop on the pair as Oanda often widens the spread around announcements so you can’t really get out without paying a big price in spread cost. As it turned out the spreads didn’t widen but it got so volatile it would have been hard to know what price you would have got with a market order. Anyway the trade went perfectly to plan, the figures came out, just as expected the USD got sold off more against every currency and my stop took me out 5 pips from the top of the spike. This got me 16.8 pips and got the day back down to a relatively nice 4.7 pips down. I tried a few more quick scalp trades but none of them came off.

So the week in review. I started the week 1 day behind and then had a terrible start on Monday taking me 6 days behind schedule. I followed that with three very good days to get back to being only 1 day behind again, but I couldn’t complete the week with a positive day on Friday. After Monday though I would have probably have taken this end state, clawing back 3 days in 4 is pretty good. Next week I need to return to being more patient, forget about trying to catch up, and just try and let it happen naturally. I want fewer trades each day as the current day’s activities are giving me no free time to do analysis and look for up and coming trade opportunities. The bank is up 50% in less than 2 months and despite the small size of the bank so far I think that has to be considered very good in anybodies books, so I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself.

Day 34

Start Balance                 $15,026

Today's Profit Target         $196.11 (Day 28)
Required Position size     194,100 (JPY), 163,650 (USD)

Trades

1     +163,650K    EURUSD       2.9 pips       (3:32)
2     +194,100K    EURJPY       21.8 pips      (1:47)
3     +81,825K      EURUSD     *-6.1 pips      (0:00)
4     +81,825K      EURUSD     *0.4 pips       (0:16)
5     +81,825K      EURUSD     *-0.6 pips      (0:00)
6     +81,825K      EURUSD     *1.9 pips       (0:13)
7     +81,825K      EURUSD     *2.4 pips       (0:03)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                      22.65 pips         ( $443.75 )

End Balance          $15,470

Project Status 

Day 34 end target  $15,566
1 Day Behind (1 day improvement since yesterday)
$96 behind schedule or 4.91 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

I didn’t start trading until really late today after watching Liverpool perform miserably against Chelsea  at 4:30 in the morning I had to go back to bed and catch up on lost sleep. The currency markets continue to baffle me but nothing will puzzle me more than the lack of desire and effort the Liverpool players showed in such a massive game with so much at stake.

Consequently rather than being to active today, and after yesterday’s marathon, I decided to choose a couple of positions and be patient. It paid off big time with the EURJPY position. I bought the EURJPY just below 162 and when it got through it triggered stops and I’d banked nearly 22 pips in no time after having sat on a couple of pips for an hour and half. Trade 1 was in and out of the money for hours and after closing Trade 2 I decided to close it out for a few pips. As usual it was at this point I should really have stopped for the day, and as usual I didn’t. I had 24.7 pips from two trades at this point. Anyway I switched to half size and consequently had a bad loss on the next trade, it always seems to happen that way. 4 more quick scalping trades and I’d had enough.

So another very healthy pip day since blue Monday has brought me almost back on schedule. Just 5 pips behind, it would be incredible if I was back on track by the end of the week (tomorrow) as it took 15 days to recover the last time I was 6 days behind.

Day 33

Start Balance                     $14,344

Today's Profit Target             $186.16 (Day 28)
Required Position size         183,100 (JPY), 154,400 (USD)

Trades

1     +183,100K     USDJPY         -4.4 pips     (7:04)
2     +154,400K     EURUSD         6.2 pips     (0:21)
3     +154,400K     EURUSD         9.6 pips     (0:00)
4     +183,100K     EURJPY         1.5 pips      (0:03)
5     -154,400K      EURUSD        1.8 pips      (0:04)
6     +77,200K       GBPUSD        *7.7 pips     (0:08)
7     +91,550K       EURJPY         *1.0 pips     (0:33)
8     +77,200K       GBPUSD        *-2.5 pips    (1:20)
9     +91,550K       EURJPY         *3.5 pips     (0:07)
10   +91,550K       EURJPY         *4.7 pips     (0:26)
11   +91,550K       USDJPY         *0.0 pips     (0:00)
12   +77,200K       EURUSD        *2.1 pips     (0:25)
13   +91,550K       EURJPY        *-0.4 pips     (0:28)
14   +77,200K       EURUSD        *1.5 pips     (0:32)

* half the full sized position. this is the equivalent no. of pips if the position was full sized.

Total                          36.4 pips     ( $682.55 )

End Balance              $15,026

Project Status 

Day 33 end target  $15,365
2 Days Behind (3 days improvement since yesterday)
$339 behind schedule or 17.27 pips on tomorrow’s pip value.

Comments

Wow this was a very busy day, I traded like a madman from 10:30AM to 8:30PM. It was a public holiday in Australia but that doesn’t effect the market with the exception of a quieter AUD obviously.

Way too many trades to go through today but with the major exception of the first trade they were all very short term quick move scalp trades. The first trade was actually a huge disaster in the making and this could have very easily been a losing day. I had it open nearly the whole day and it was down 22 pips at the worst point. I was very relieved in the end to get out with only a 4.4 pip loss, funniest thing was getting paid $7 in interest for having it open for 7 hours. I was in and out of the next 6 trades while trade 1 was still open and after going past the 10 pip mark I switched down to half size. Apart from trade 1 everything was just going really well and my confidence was high, the EURUSD & EURJPY particularly were so predictable for short term pips and everything was coming off. At 8:30PM I was seriously thinking of continuing on but decided better of it.

Finished the day with my highest pip win so far, biggest $$$ day (win or lose), pulled back 3 days to be only 2 days behind and the account reached another milestone by passing the 50% increase mark.