TraderGav.com

Gav's trading blog - Perseverance, Consistency, Confidence

Gav

Monday’s trading

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I was not available to watch the market yesterday due to my busy day job. No trade was made. I missed the move of NZD/USD and EUR/JPY in the Asian afternoon. I do not incline to put on any day trade in Monday morning (Australian hours) as spreads are normally still in ‘holiday mood’, too wide to be stomached by day trader. Things will normally get back to normal when Japanese market is opened (that’s 10am in Melbourne, Australia).

Well, no trade, no R. Btw, my gut feeling tells me I will be living in the world where 1 AUD= 1 USD soon….uhm, time to plan for a vacation in Miami ? 😎

So you want to learn trading, part I?

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I wrote this blog post back in September 2007. Sadly, today, most of the blogs I referred to had either removed or broken. I will try to update this post in the near future.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for resources to learn more about trading, please have a look at my Back to Basics of Trading series.

I have a couple of friends asking me how to start trading or do I have any tips for them to start trading. Well, I am not a pro, nor a trading coach. But, I can share some great resources that are available online, in the blogosphere.

First of all, my trades are based on technical analysis, which means I am reading charts and looking for trading opportunities and setups mostly from price charts. I am not a big fan of fundamental analysis, it is too tough for a slow man like me to understand.

So, here we go.

First, armed yourself with skills to involve in the market. Making phone calls to your broker, or getting ‘tips’ from your colleagues or uncles are not skill. Learn how to read a price chart, how to analyze the market technically or learn how to read financial reports and analyze the market fundamentally. Some nice blog posts are available on the web freely on this area.

  1. Toni Hansen’s Trading lessons
  2. Drawing Trend lines from Trader Mike
  3. More on Trend lines from Trader Mike

Once the price charts are no stranger to you, it is time to move on. So we read charts, but how are we going to deal with market? To start trading, we need to have a setup. A setup is a specific condition/situation that market presents to you and gives you the chance to enter the market. As you might know I am a big dummy fan, all my trades are based on dummy setups. Some people live and breath with indicators for trading setups, nothing wrong, as long as it works for him. Here are some good resources:

  1. How I trade, and analyzing charts from Trader-X . (The respected and mysterious trader’s site. He’d left blogsphere, but catch his blog before it is gone)
  2. Finding the right set-up(s) from Trader-X
  3. Chairman Maoxian’s trading for dummies (This is the best trading secret on the web, I really hate to share with anyone :-p)
  4. Trade setups ( a library of technical setups from Trading-naked.com)
  5. Strategies from Corey at Afraidtotrade.com
  6. OONR7’s trading setup

Alright, we have setups, looks like we are ready to make million now. Nah. The next big thing in trading is about risk and money management. You can’t trade without money. The bottom line is to protect yourself (your capital I mean!) when having bad days. Trading is a probability game, you only have high probability trade but not sure-fire trade. No setup will give you 100% success rate. Face the fact! So, how much can you afford to lose? how many contracts or shares should you trade? Money management is essential for trading.

  1. Accuracy Vs Risk/reward ratio from myself, Trader Gav 😉
  2. How to be consistently profitable in stock market from Movethmarkets.com
  3. Position sizing from Trader Mike
  4. Starting out with basic from Dr.Van K Tharp
  5. Expectancy is the next key from Dr. Van K Tharp
  6. Expectancy from Trader Mike

Enough? No. … Now you should have known that trading is a serious subject, serious business. Ok, I will continue in part II, this post is just too long.. 🙂

Chart of interest: AUD/USD 24-September-2007

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Another strong week for Aussie dollar (Stronger than I’d expected!). We are back to the 1989 high again. Lovely.  Well, are we looking at the high at 1984 around 0.97 soon? uhm..never underestimate currency market, nothing is impossible. Anyway, I will still day trade in Long position at the moment, but I will be a little bit stricter now. I am watching 0.8830-5 area.

Let’s see.

[photopress:audusd_daily28sep2007.gif,full,alignleft]

Here is another pair that I am watching closely recently. EUR/JPY. I am going for Long position.

[photopress:eurjpy_daily28sep2007.gif,full,alignleft]

Month in review : September 2007

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My last review of monthly trading result was at March. The relocation, new job and new timezone etc forced me to make certain changes in my trading. Well, in short, I am still trading dummies. I start day trading Forex actively since mid of September. Here is the review of my day trading so far. I am not sure if I am going to review my result online regularly, if I found myself under pressure because of this, I will just stop it.

All right, September, I day trade Forex exclusively. Started from mid September, I made 19 trades. Unintentionally, all were Long trades. I am refining my dummy trading on Forex along the way, such as choosing a right time frame that suits my current work, risk appetite, and time zone. Towards the end of the month, it was kinda tough as I saw my trading result started to slip, partly due to over trading and taking sub par setups. Forcing myself to get disciplined again, I was lucky to catch the run of EUR/JPY.

Here is the summary:

  • Number of trades: 19
  • winning trades: 9 (~47.3%)
  • losing trades: 9 (~47.3%)
  • Break even/scratched: 1
  • Total R earned: 6.2
  • Expectancy: 0.33
  • Biggest winner: 5.78 R
  • Biggest loser: -1.02 R

Here is the performance curve.

[photopress:sep2007result.JPG,full,alignleft]

TraderGav dot com now on wordpress 2.3

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Click here to get The Blog Profits BlueprintIt was quite a smooth process to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.3. Well, my old layout does not support the new platform, so I have to do some changes to this one. I am trying to do some cosmetic stuffs.

If you have found some broken links, or having problem browsing the site, please, do shoot me a comment. 🙂

I am not trading today. Btw, do check out my Hot deal page for the latest bargain I have found on the internet.

Thursday, No trade

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As mentioned in my twitter, I was busy with non trading matters and missed out all the profitable entries of AUD/USD, NZD/USD, AUD/JPY and EUR/JPY. It was supposed to be another multiple Rs-day, but well, sometimes, you can’t have it all in life.

Look at the Aussie dollar, we are back to 0.88 again. The currency trend is stronger and longer than I’d expected. Lovely.

I might not be available for trading again on Friday. I thought I might as well close the trading month now. I will do a monthly review over the weekend.