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.