If you don't attach a stop loss to your orders, are you sure your account is 100:1?
Given your position sizing... 2 cable lots on $4,000, for a 91:1 leverage @1.82xx... with a 100:1 account you can only survive 17 pips of heat / MAE. At 18 pips, you will get a margin call liquidation, for an instant 50% loss. If your spread on cable is, say, 3 pips, you've only got 17 - 3 = 14 pips of breathing room, to play with (or pray for).
I don't know how you didn't get a 15-pip drawdown over 30 days of paper trading. Even a fake breakout on cable can go 15 pips outside the range. Also, are you taking spreads into account? To make your 5-pip TP, you need, of course, an 8-pip move in your direction every time, assuming 3-pip spread.
You may want to consider reducing your leverage to a much lower level than the account leverage. Still, even then, WarEagle has already done a fine job of explaining some of problems you're bound to run into. Namely, when (not if) you get caught in a breakout, you stand to lose 100, 150, 200 and more pips. We're talking cable here... it just loves taking off on those runs (MAEs from your perspective). Some of them can and do start during the Asian session. A single 100++ pip loss will cancel out scores of those 5-pip gains. That's why I was asking about your expected % wins, to focus on expectancy:
Expectancy = average win x % wins + average loss x % losses
(Here average loss is a negative number; breakeavens are ignored.)
- If your average win = every win = 5 pips, while your average loss is virtually unlimited, up to 50% of the account value, you need close to 100% wins, for positive expectancy.
- If you win, that is, capture your 5 pips, you get 5 x $20 = $100, or 2.5% return (and smaller % on subsequent trades, due to increasing account balance... until you can increase your # of lots traded from 2 to 3)
- To recover to break-even from a single 50% loss due to margin call liquidation, you'd need 100% return. Roughly 40 5-pip, 2.5% wins. So you need at least 40 / 41 = 97.5% win rate. Sorry, not a chance.