It was a rough day of trading. Large intraday swings pretty much everywhere. Euro found itself being pummeled, apparently on news that S&P downgraded Greece’s credit rating. I’m not sure why anybody would take rating agencies seriously after the mortgage backed securities debacle, but evidently they still carry some wait. Interestingly enough, Pound is showing some strength. Perhaps it will gain momentum.
Yen crosses remain very choppy and my EUR-JPY trade didn’t do well.
Loss of 86 pips. This was the only JPY pair I tested, so no big deal. Just have to wait for a better set up and keep watching latest highs. Trailing buy orders. Although I’m tempted to just buy NZD-JPY right about now and maybe EUR-JPY. The risks are very small and large potential. I’ll have to give it some thought and decide before sleep. That’s right, sleep. Forex trading is best at night and morning here on the west coast, so my life is upside down.
I’m going to test if the Pound is really getting stronger buy a small trade in GBP-CHF.
Buy is placed at 1.6420 with an objective of 150 pips. AUD-CAD also looks inviting as a buy at 0.8280. It is a difficult trading environment, though, made in heaven for pure scalpers. I’m sure better days will arrive soon.
Mike K.
So I’m not alone in loosing, you are also not immune. Just kidding. One of the things I like about this blog is that you do not hide loosing trades. Of course it is pittance comparing to your gains.
Of course you are not alone. Everybody takes losses. Anybody who claims that has no losses is either a liar or has not been around long enough. Part of the game. With time frames like I use in this blog, it often takes days, even weeks for chart formations to take shape. Just look back at how long I waited for EUR-GBP to reverse. But once it did, pay off was big.
Are you starting to look into EUR-GBP again together with GBP-CHF?
Yes. Only that, at the moment, I’m looking for smaller target trades. Just like the price action dictates. But if levels from last week are retested, larger trades will be in order.
Mike, how come you don’t participate in forums, as written yesterday? Everybody claims they are good learning and ideas exchange tools.
In your question yesterday you made a note of how many different trades are being talked about. This is absolutely confusing as a lot of them will be contradicting. Forums probably are decent to exchange ideas, but this is rather disorganized and also you can suffer information overload. If you find some subject specific threads, by all means follow them. Another thing about forums is that they are mostly dominated by trader wanna be’s and not pros. I guarantee you that extremely small percentage of participants trade full time
Do you trade a lot on small time frames, say 5 minutes or 1 minute, like you sometimes show for GBP-JPY? Or do you always trade intermediate trends? Waiting time can be very long between those trades. Interested what you do in between.
I’m just curious. Money was good when you worked on boats. Can you give me an idea of just what kind of money people were risking their lives over?
Casey, tarding etremely short time frames varies from day to day. Sometimes I’ll take a fair number of them, other days none. Not my primary pursuit. I do a lot of analytical work, creating mechanical trading systems. Most of them fail.
Without getting into details and many variables, on a good boat, above entry level position, could make easily 100K + a year, working 6-7 months. And sometimes the + was very big.
[...] them across few different accounts. I’ll cover briefly the trades remarked on in “Rough day” but positions were established in all JPY crosses and scores of others. GBP-CHF presented a [...]