Glory Glory Manchester United. Do I need to say more? Look at the score board of the latest European champions League match. We storm into semi final now. (well, look at the sissy Chelsea). We slaughtered AS Roma 7-1.
Glory Glory Man Utd!
No futures trade
Maybe I am fated not to trade futures today. I am having couple of problems with Tradestation as mentioned in my Twitter. First, charts were frozen, right before the sell off. So I missed the sell setup. Secondly, my OSO orders was rejected when I was trying to short NQ, and, it did not cancel my BUY stop order !?!?(the stop loss order). I was lucky enough to find out that earlier and cancel it manually.
I am going to clean the cache of Tradestation now. I guess, I am not going to trade futures today. I have a couple of FX positions now.
TraderGav dot com now on WordPress 2.1.3
This is a test post after upgrading to WordPress 2.1.3. Everything looks fine.
Week #1 FX trading review
This is the first week of my new Forex trading journey. Well, am I lucky or unlucky? I have encountered almost all of the worst scenarios of my system, Dang! My weekly position was stopped and reverse and stopped again immediately after release of British Interest Rate Statement. The spike and reversal killed my positions.
In addition to my system, I over traded by trying out a couple of currency pairs, and worsen this week’s result. The trial is over, I will stop doing this immediately. Next week, I will follow the system without second thought.
The original system was designed to trade GBP/USD on weekly system and GBP/JPY on daily system. This week is kinda short for daily system, since I started trading the system on Tuesday and not trading on NFP Friday. So far, I did not enter/exit a trade prematurely, and followed position size rules strictly this week.
The actual result of this week for the system is as below, I do not initiate a new position for daily system on Good Friday, taking off on this ‘Combo’ day (Good Friday + NFP day):
Weekly System:
- Long GBP/USD: 1.9729, Stopped: 1.9699 P/L: -30 pips
- Short GBP/USD: 1.9679, Stopped: 19706 P/L: -27 pips (miscalculated stop level)
- Lose from top (the max unrealised profit achieved): 94 pips
- Total P/L: -57 pips
Daily System:
- Short GBP/JPY: 233.07, Stopped: 233.47 P/L: -40pips
- Long GBP/JPY: 233.47, Exit: 234.47 P/L: +100 pips
- Short GBP/JPY: 234.42, Stopped:234.92 P/L: -50 pips
- Long GBP/JPY: 234.92, Stopped:234.42 P/L: -50 pips
- Short GBP/JPY: 234.38, Exit: 233.98 P/L: +40 pips
- Total P/L: 0 pips
Non-system day trades (Currency pairs that are not part of daily system)
- Long GBP/USD: 1.9782, Stopped: 1.9742 P/L:-40 pips
- Short GBP/USD: 1.9742, Stopped: 1.9782 P/L: -40 pips
- Long USD/CHF: 1.223, Stopped: 1.219 P/L: -40 pips
- Total P/L: -120 pips
It was silly. Non-system day trades actually brought into -120 pip loss unnecessarily. Anyways, over all, I am still feeling ok with the system (provided I am not doing silly stuffs like making non-system day trades again). I know over time it will bring me pips.
Have a good rest over the long weekend.
Still, the truth is ,real man trades futures, his son trades Forex, I am trading both, for my wife. 🙂
Dummy day trading #66 04-April-2007 NQ Long trade closed
I saw a dummy setup right before I shut down my Tradestation. This is a small R trade. Long position of NQ futures was established around 1205pm. NQ was moving in my favour, however, it was slow. And subsequently, an ugly big down candle at 1230pm pissed me off. I bailed out with 0.21 R (after commission) gain.
[photopress:nq5min04april07.jpg,full,alignleft]
Lesson 03-April-2007: Monkey around the stop
This series of short notes is to record down thoughts, skills, and any lessons that I have learned from day to day trading. I am not talking about Technical analysis. One can really learn TA by getting a good book, and practice, so nothing much to discuss here.
So, what did I learn recently?
Stop Monkey-ing around with Trailing stops in Forex trading. I know I will attract a number of attacks or debate over this topic. But wait.
I note down this because it suits my trading style. It doesn’t mean trail your stops is wrong. There is no right or wrong in trading, but only what works for you and what’s not.
I start to realize, what I really love to do is to take care about how bad /how much I will lose in a single trade instead of how much I am going to earn in a single trade.
Put in the stop, that’s it. I will either close my position at a profit target (which is pretty far away) or at a predefined time. It hurts me more when watching a huge profit run away from me because I got stopped out prematurely by trailing stop than accepting a predefined amount of loss.
I can’t nor anyone can predict where will the price go and how much space we need to give to the trade to fluctuate before continue gaining. So, it is extremely tough to design the right trailing stop techniques. It can be done, but I am not into that.
OK, that’s the lesson 1. Lesson for myself.
