EUR/JPY Evening Trader

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Quote from TraderGreg:

Had to end this train wreck early. Only traded for an hour and a half, but it was a disaster. Took three trades, which were all losers. I closed two of them simply because a few minutes later the reason why I entered no longer made any sense to me. The last one was just wrong.

Total lost 22.9 pips on the three trades. I don’t even care about the losses, I just see weakness in everything I do. Most of my trades are losers, so how am I supposed to have confidence in anything when it every trade I make is worse than chance? When I see a pattern my entries are late, and the direction is wrong anyway.

I did figure out one thing today. I don’t give a shit about losing money or pips – reducing size changed absolutely nothing. I fear failing. That’s it.
I’m also impatient and clearly don’t know what I’m doing. My longest hold today was fifteen minutes. My entries are based on the 5 and 15 minute charts. I only hit one stop, but I’m just entering trades and then seeing a few minutes later that it wasn’t a good decision.

And I have eleven pairs on my screen now? I don’t know what’s going on with one and now I need eleven?

I saw a few plays I was correct on, but was too indecisive to take any – too expectant of failure. I also don’t seem fit to trade. I ate dinner and was looking to come back because in my mind I had to trade, not because I wanted to; it’s a negative expectation, and so is every new trade. I was taking another not because I was confident that I knew what was going on, but because a profit may return my hope – my hope of succeeding, that hundreds of hours of spare time may be worth something, that maybe I know something about what I clearly don’t understand.

I’m not going to say that I’m oblivious to market movement; I sometimes have very good analyses. I definitely did not feel this way when I was trading London, even though I took many losses. Something is not right with me right now.

I need to take a break from trading. I’m not going to look at a live chart for at least the rest of the week. I’m going to look at a few resources I have on my to do list and some research time. If I feel the same way at the end of the week, I won’t trade next week either. Maybe I will just take a week off. I’ll sleep on it.

I’ll also make a list of things I’m going to do to change my trading. I will surely cut my pairs down to something more manageable, like three.
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Quote from TraderGreg:

I would like to reflect on my trading thus far through a new thing I’ve decided to do, but first I would like to say something about what happened to me yesterday. Basically, it was really ugly. It is hard to get back into the mindset I was in, but I essentially had a lot of bad things that happened to me outside of trading catch up with me, I let repeated losses and crushed hopes fall on me, as well as poor trading setups and discipline (I was not looking for signals well, I was just hoping for a profit as I described).

Most importantly, I believe most of it started with the doubting of my potential as a trader. Although I have already faced this with myself, getting it down in writing won’t hurt. I am noticing my mental weaknesses surface in my trading. I normally have great management skills and decision making, and I wisely keep emotions out of my thinking process. This has not been true in trading. I trade emotionally and make very bad decisions.

So why is this? Honestly, I really don’t know. Perhaps the market simply reveals that I have not crushed my emotional weakness enough. However, I do have a tendency of overlooking things at times when making decisions without extremely open and careful deliberation. This is easy to see in my trading; I see something potentially attractive on the 5 min or 1 min chart, and immediately refute it once I look at the bigger picture. I have noticed this problem, and figured experience would help greatly. My first solution, however, was to move up to the 5 min from the 1 min, and I noticed myself making the same mistake.

That explains my trading downfalls, but not why I am questioning myself as a trader. My shortsightedness is apparent in other aspects of the game. When I was analyzing a rising wedge, for example, I was immediately thinking breakout, and it never occurred to me until a book threw it in my face to short the fifth touch to the top of the channel. Based on the way I think, this kind of innovation should be the first thing I think of! Of course that by itself does not matter, but I have eleven pairs on my screen now. How did I not foresee the complications of keeping track of them all on 5 and 15 min charts? I mean sure I was able to limit them down somewhat and trade a few of them when I saw opportunities developing, but with that much information I couldn’t internalize anything, and my analysis was never profound enough for any pairs. Again, this is a simple learning experience, but there are many other examples, and my lack of vision is really beginning to question my potential for success. I saw it on every trade I took yesterday, and truthfully on most trades I take.

In conclusion, what kind of trader am I? Well, as I scan forums and books and articles I realize that I know far more about the markets and market philosophy than many traders do. Yet, they are profitable. I am not. They have learned from their mistakes very well, yet I have not. They are obviously capable of making good market decisions, and yet I am not.

Why? Likely it is experience, but who can know? My weaknesses are staring at me, and it seems I am far from conquering them. Maybe I will learn, but maybe I won’t – this dark cloud has been building over me for quite a while now.

No, I haven't quit trading lol.
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If your total forex trading experience is 1 year then u have no reason to worry about your losses. Just learn. & read less btw.
 
Quote from SergiPavl:

If your total forex trading experience is 1 year then u have no reason to worry about your losses. Just learn. & read less btw.
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Thanks, Serg. My trading experience with forex is actually since July, coming on six months now.

I am realizing that I should cut down on my research, but that I am really not learning as much as I'd like while I trade. I will be doing more of simply watching, as I describe in today's reflection I'm about to post.

Edit: Btw, when I read I very rarely actually read. Usually I'm just scanning for charts :)
 
Today I spent about 3.5 hours finishing the thread Intraday FX Player, and picked up a few things here and there.

I may do some more work later, but wanted to discuss briefly my thoughts on my plan for paper trading. As I see it, I have a very good understanding of the market in theory and an personal slow learning process to conquer. I am also beginning to find new things sparingly enough to justify only doing it on the weekends.

As a result, I think I will be nearing the time that I begin turning toward market watching. But, there is a problem: I have described this occurrence with me early here, and it is that selecting positions has blocked my vision of the market. I slept on this and deliberated on it while I was going through the thread as well.

The fact is, for me, the difference between a paper order and an idea is immense, and I am very hard on myself. A order with my broker (money or paper, there is no difference with me) is a commitment, while if I wrote the same order on a piece of paper it would be an idea. I need ideas about the market in my learning process, not committing to something I am not confident in nor understand as well as I would like.

As a result, I have no reason to paper trade right now. In reality, I’ve never had a reason to paper trade – I was just awaiting the time when something clicked and my finances were secure for the rest of my life. As I have developed, I realize now that this level is far away, and that making pretend orders was just slowing my learning process.

My tentative plan for winter break – watching the market thirty hours/week, paper trading five, and five of research. I may be able to get more time in per week, but we will see.

My new goal is to be profitable by mid-spring semester. Based on what I know now, and what I am about to go through, I think I can do this as long as I control my patience and be selective.

However, I will also need to get to the point at which I am comfortable enough to trade the markets with an open eye to the action outside my trade. This may be very difficult, as it may just happen that I could be profitable but still have to get a summer job as I may not have the experience to be in complete control of my trading. I will let things play out.
 
Quote from TraderGreg:

Today I spent about 3.5 hours finishing the thread Intraday FX Player, and picked up a few things here and there.

I may do some more work later, but wanted to discuss briefly my thoughts on my plan for paper trading. As I see it, I have a very good understanding of the market in theory and an personal slow learning process to conquer. I am also beginning to find new things sparingly enough to justify only doing it on the weekends.

As a result, I think I will be nearing the time that I begin turning toward market watching. But, there is a problem: I have described this occurrence with me early here, and it is that selecting positions has blocked my vision of the market. I slept on this and deliberated on it while I was going through the thread as well.

The fact is, for me, the difference between a paper order and an idea is immense, and I am very hard on myself. A order with my broker (money or paper, there is no difference with me) is a commitment, while if I wrote the same order on a piece of paper it would be an idea. I need ideas about the market in my learning process, not committing to something I am not confident in nor understand as well as I would like.

As a result, I have no reason to paper trade right now. In reality, I’ve never had a reason to paper trade – I was just awaiting the time when something clicked and my finances were secure for the rest of my life. As I have developed, I realize now that this level is far away, and that making pretend orders was just slowing my learning process.

My tentative plan for winter break – watching the market thirty hours/week, paper trading five, and five of research. I may be able to get more time in per week, but we will see.

My new goal is to be profitable by mid-spring semester. Based on what I know now, and what I am about to go through, I think I can do this as long as I control my patience and be selective.

However, I will also need to get to the point at which I am comfortable enough to trade the markets with an open eye to the action outside my trade. This may be very difficult, as it may just happen that I could be profitable but still have to get a summer job as I may not have the experience to be in complete control of my trading. I will let things play out.
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What were some of the main things you learnt from that thread
 
Quote from quin8670:

What were some of the main things you learnt from that thread
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Simply looking back on it, it is hard to say. A couple things about principles - innovative ways to draw trendlines, reliable patterns such as horns, pin bars, 2Bs, 1-2-3s, others, and certain philosophies such as how to go about transitioning to higher-level trading. Also things like how to correlate differing timeframes, I think I may have first used pivots in forex from listening to that thread (really not sure, been reading it here and there for probably five months), and several other things.

Many of the charts are helpful as well, and I have probably 100 of them saved for my computer's slideshow.

It is a must read in my opinion, and James16 Chart Thread on forexfactory.com is very helpful as well (although only through page 50, and I just scan for charts there pretty much).

Those are the only two threads I've found that I would actually set aside time to read, any others I skim through in spare time.

Good luck.
 
Quote from TraderGreg:

It's the EUR/USD, EUR/JPY, USD/JPY, and GBP/CHF.

Based on spreads, I found less than 0.03% to be most acceptable for sharpshooting. There were seven pairs that fit this: the EUR/USD, EUR/JPY, GBP/USD, USD/CHF, USD/JPY, EUR/CHF, and GBP/CHF.

No others were below .043%. From here, the EUR/USD were the best. I chose the USD/JPY over the USD/CHF for the Asian exposure (very similar spread), as I am still expecting to trade some Asian session. Since that was two USDs, I wanted to diversify - it irritates me when all my pairs have the dollar in them.

The EUR/JPY and GBP/CHF have a similar spread, and again the Asian exposure and my personal experience with it prevailed.

Lastly there was the EUR/CHF and GBP/CHF. I decided not to go with more than two exposures to the same currency, and really wanted a CHF and GBP in one of the top three, so this was four by default. The spread is a bit worse than the EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, but I will see how it goes.
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great answer and very thorough
 
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