Maintaining Self Discipline

Made 12 ticks! 2 winners, 1 partial winner and 1 loser. Really happy to be in profit today.

However, all of the trades have things that need improving.

1st trade: Still not sure how to enter the beginning of a trend. Seems like the Euro can move really fast and not retrace enough to get in or it can turn around and do a complete retest. The trade had a drawdown of 5 ticks. Getting in after that drawdown would have been better, but I'm not sure there is a way to know that will happen. I expected a lot more choppiness and retesting instead of the trend that happened. I was watching the 60 min and 15 min closely and they might have helped recognize the trend potential if I was used to reading them. Also, I'm looking at the April 7th 5 min chart right now, and there was a trend that started right about the same time....oh, and now I see one like it yesterday. Well, this might help a lot with trying to catch a trend like this. I'll check for more trend patterns today.

2nd and 3rd trades: I was expecting price to chop around, like it did yesterday, and the day before at about the same time, and also because it was after a big move. However, I took 2 short trades anyways. 1 didn't work and 1 did. Waiting longer before getting in would have provided safer entries.

4th trade: I know better than to jump into a fast moving candle, especially at the top. Even though this time it worked, many times it won't work and I need to focus on being methodical and careful with my entries.
 

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Although the trades didn't work out so well today, they revealed errors in how I'm reading price action and if I can learn from it, it's not such a bad thing.

I took 5 trades. I think only the 3rd trade should have been taken. The Euro has been nice for slowing down my overtrading, but I think I might need to slow it down even more.

Lost 23 ticks. 2 full losers, 1 partial loser and 2 BE+2 (Using 10 ticks sl and 10 ticks tp, which I'll change after I'm a little better at this.)
 

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There's always the dilemma of risking getting stopped out in a trade or even just losing profits, if you stay in a winning trade. One way to remove some of that agony is to stick with a set number of ticks for the stop loss and the profit target and just let the trade play out...hoping that if it was a good entry, it will work. However, this doesn't allow for capturing much profit if it trends, unless your target is really far away from your stop loss, because by not managing the trade, you have to give it some room to get to the profit (most of the time...depends on what you're trading). So I thought I'd try something a little different. I really didn't want to have any losses today yet I could see that the Euro had the potential to trend. What I wasn't sure about, was each entry....when will the pullback stop pulling back and start trending? So I tried something that I've tried on other things before, unsuccessfully. I moved the stoploss to BE+1 at around 5 ticks or a little more of profit. On the Euro, it seems like that's almost a guarantee that you'll be stopped out....but there's somewhere for every good trade where price will start to trend and not retrace to get you out, so I tried to find that place. Took 3 BE+1 before I finally got a good trade, but that one trade made 26 ticks. And since I really don't want to mess up my nice results from today, I'm stopping early and I'll either watch the charts and mark them up to stay engaged and pretend to trade, or maybe watch some trading videos.
 

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Decided to start posting my trades on a 15 min chart with the hope that this will be one small, practical thing I can do that may help me to remember that I need to be focusing on the larger time frames (15 min, 1 hr and Daily) to get the overall picture of what is going on.

Not trading again until Monday, but I should be able to get some good study time in between now and then.
 

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Today I lost 3 trades in a row.

However, it's not really bothering me because I'm starting to understand how to trade the 6E and I think it's just a matter of spending more time on it until I can trade it. I have some practical things I'm working on, such as how I'm reading the 1 hr chart as well as what I'm going to work on for improving entries and I think it will all come together eventually.

I did a sim replay on Thursdays and Friday's data and came out BE+1 and +17 so I'm feeling hopeful that with some work I'll start improving.
 
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I know I'm not trading well. I think it's just a matter of learning to recognize how the Euro moves. I'm sad I'm not getting the trades right, but at the same time, I think I'm seeing the structure of how it works and I think I'll start making better trades eventually. For example, on the 15 min chart, the tails of the candle were about the only thing thing consistent with each of the candles for that time period, well, they did make higher highs, but the way price moved was up, down, up, down, up, down, and I was lost..... waiting to see if price was going to be rejected from each of those wicks down could have given better entries than what I took. I didn't see that happening until I was done trading. I'm hoping little things like that will start to click and I'll get a better sense of what's going on in the chart.

So today I did a few things differently. I placed my stop loss according to the last low or high, and that was great for all the trades except the last one. I really wanted to be in the trade for just 8 to 10 ticks, but my stop loss was placed at 14 ticks away. I figured I'd close it if it came back....but I don't like relying on myself because I freeze up and don't close stop losses very well. So, other than that, having the right placement rather than a random 10 tick stop loss helped to only have 6 ticks and 7 ticks for my actual stop outs.

I took a lot of trades that were only BE+1 but, unfortunately, the targets were moved to +1 to get out of a trade I didn't want to be in. It's not good to trade when I don't understand what's going on. I finally walked away for a few minutes so I'd stop. The last 2 trades I wasn't sure about either, but I finally traded in the direction the trend was moving. I know that's what I need to be doing all the time but I think it's gonna take a while before I can do this consistently.

Oh, and I did something else right....(have to focus on the tiny good things since there's quite a bit wrong with the trades from today): I stopped before taking 3 losses for the day....and even though I only made 3 ticks, it's still profit! Baby steps are better than backward steps!
 
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