Karl, nice trade yesterday. I wasn't online yesterday, had to move house. What a pain in the ass:-)
I have filled out forms that I have to get back fom the Financial Services Board here and then I may go live. It is all the stupid forex regulations we have here.
At the moment I am long USD/JPY @ 110.27. We will see where that one goes :-)
Closed @ 110.51. Nice little profit for a morning trade.
Karl, how are you doing? I have added a new rule to my strategy. I will only trade 1 pair at a time so that I might focus on the trade more acutely. I will start off small and usually add to it unless I really believe I have caught the trend then I jump in with both feet. What do you think?
Back in @ 110.26. I like the way this pair is trending;-)
Called that one wrong and took a 12 pip loss. Still up for the day though:-)
" I will only trade 1 pair at a time so that I might focus on the trade more acutely."
I've the same rule, I'm trading only the EUR/USD until I do a comprehensive trend analysis. That's gonna be a while.
I figure that I don't want to be doing a lot of trades, so limiting myself to one pair and studying the trends makes sense.
I haven't opened a trade yet today, I'm looking at shorting the eur/usd if it makes a failed run on today's high.
Looking at the eur/usd on the daily chart, there's strong resistance 2081 - that's been the high of day on April 13th, 19th and today.
I'm waiting for the market to move back to near there, then I'll take a short with athe stop just above the high.
Short eur/usd @ 1.2062
Stop @ 1.2083
Target @ 1.2045
A good sign, market moved two pips in my direction just after I entered the trade. Trade with the tick.
Whoops, now I'm down 3 pips ;-)
Stopped @ 83 -21 pips. Back to break even for the week.
there's my lesson for looking to pick the top and not waiting for exhaustion.
Short @ 2091
stop @ 2112
target @ 2045
What time does the US fed rate come out?
My trailing stop is @ 2076, I'm following the move down with the stop above the latest high. I'm looking for a move to 2056 before a meaningfull bounce with a second higher high.
Shinken's here's a great site I found for important news times.
http://aboutforex.com/fundamentals.html
Here's a link to the top 10 forex books at amazon.com
http://www.forexnews.com/education/default.asp?loc=books
Trailing stop to 2072, I'm looking for one more leg to this down move.
I'm going to come out even on the pips for this and my last trade, but I maxed out my leverage on this trade - 4X the volume as the last. So I'm going to break about even for pips for the day, but up money - which is more important.
:-)
Trailing stop to 2069, just above the last formed 5 minute bar.
Phantom spike, out @ 2069 for 22 pips.
Up 1 pip for the day, 22 for the week so far.
trailing stop should have been @ 2072, above the last high on the rebound.
That's the trouble with using 5 or 30 minute bars for stop placement, they don't always show meaningfull price movements.
5 sec and 1 minute for entry and exits, 5 minute and 30 minute for determining trend and revesal points. Duh.
"I will start off small and usually add to it unless I really believe I have caught the trend then I jump in with both feet. What do you think?"
I'm going to start with a slightly different technique - jump in with both feet, then get out of the trade in sections: something like
exit 50% at my target, and the remaining 50% when the market hits my trailing stop.
That way I might lock in a profit, then follow the market as far as it wants to go to catch the full move. I'm still working on trailing stop placement, I think it's one of the most important techniques in a trade.
This last trade I stopped out 13 pips from my target but locked in a profit with my trailing stop. The market has rebounded to 2085, I would have lost 16 pips without the stop. Now I can look at going short again at a better price.
Market rebounded to 2104, I would have no doubt stopped for a loss without the trailing stop.
I'd go short again but it's time to take my dog for a run at the bird santuary. We've got this great park just a few kilometers from town, owned by Ducks Unlimited. There are dozens of trails, the longest about 5 kilometers, that go around a serries of lakes.
I take my dog for a run there just about every day after tax season, very relaxing place.
The US rate announcement is at 14:15 New York time, I'm waiting to see if there's a reaction that I can trade.
Scalped a quick 12 pips on the eur/usd spike enter @ 2117 and exit @ 2105. Didn't want to be greedy, just pecked a few pips while the elephants danced.
Shinken I've started my journey into Trend Analysis.
I got the idea from a book I read a few years back by Victor Sperando. He studied trends in different time frames for years, back to the inception of the Dow if memory serves.
I've started simply, just figuring the number of up days to down days in the past 31 trading days, on the uer/usd. I'll start using the data to predict the direction of the next day.
For 31 days there were 16 up, 14 down, and 1 no change.
The streaks:
up 1 day before a down - 4 times
Up 2 days before a down - 4 sets
up 3 days before a down - 0 sets
up 4 days before a down - 1 set
Down 1 day before an up - 6 sets
Down 2 days before and up- 2 sets
down 3 days before and up- 1 set
down 4 days before and up- 0 sets
So, today will be a major up day, so there's a 44% chance that tomorrow will be a down day, 56% chance that it will be another up day.
I'll continue the study until I have at least a year of data, then I'll add in diffent trends ie- in an up trend how likely is it that the next day will be up? In a down trend, given the same circumstances as the last sentence, how likely will it be that the next day will be an up day.
I'll keep building the data base and use the probablities to help me determine trend, entry and exit points. Lots of work but if it were easy ....