It's been over a year now since the original project blew up. I realise in hindsight that the parameters under which I was working where just too stressful and destined to fail. The reality is that it just makes no sense to have to trade every day and therefore trying to get from 10K to 250K in one year, although possibly still achievable, I think it placed way too much pressure on myself.
In the last year I've been back contracting at UBS and consequently not really had time to focus on the markets and trading. This hasn't stopped me from throwing away money trading when I was not fully on the case. Smart huh? Consequently I find my bank severely depleted after some severe suicidal and revenge type trading that immediately followed the end of the project and then some other similarly bad trading throughout the year. As punishment to myself and as an enforcement of discipline, which was one of the failings last time round, I'm forcing myself to trade with this depleted bank. If I can't build this bank back up then so be it, I refuse to take the easy route and dump more cash into it.
So what next? This time round there is no end target for the bank in any specific period of time. I'm just going to keep going, targetting the doubling of the bank in a period of 54 trading days. I definitely won't be trading every day. In fact I'm still contracting 3 days per week (mon->wed) so it's likely I won't trade many days at all each week. That's fine. The goal is within 55 days of trading to have doubled the bank. And then I'll just attempt to do it again. We'll see how things go.
So what else is different this time round -
Limited currency pairs. I'm only trading those pairs with good tight spreads, no more GBPCHF and GBPJPY trades with a 6 pip spread. Spreads change between each session and are best during the european session but the following pairs are all 2.5 pips or less during europe. I'll trade any of these pairs any time as long as the spread is 2.5 or less.
AUDUSD, GBPUSD, NZDUSD, USDCHF, USDJPY
EURUSD, EURGBP, EURCHF, EURJPY
Strategies. Nothing hard and fast here as yet, Ill probably still focus on scalping fast counter trend moves. I'm also going to look at offsetting correlated positions when I think it makes sense. What killed me last time, at least psychologically, was the super fast move against me. In fifteen minutes the move against me had wiped out the previous 7 days of hard earned pips. The idea here might be to be long EURUSD and short GBPUSD at the same time, that way if a massive USD move happens it's unlikely I could lose 50 pips in a short space of time, of course that doesn't help if it's a massive EUR move only. I'm not sure about this yet, I'll have to do more analysis on it.
10 pips. Last time I nearly always stopped trading after getting the daily 10 pip requirement. This is still essentially the goal and especially for individual trades, however when things are seemingly going well it might make sense to try for more on subsequent trades.
Catching Up. Last time round I found the desire to try to catch up after losing days quite intense, and this placed even more stress on myself to get more pips. This time if I go behind I'll just ignore where I am on the curve and just continue on as if I was on schedule.
