Weekly Review #15
Table of Contents
Forex Trading Review – Week 15
This week was pretty quiet. I only ended up taking 3 trades.
1 Lost, 1 Won, 1 Broke even.
I had a few commitments this week that took up a bit of my time so I wasn’t able to focus on trading as much as I would have liked to.
I did well to avoid sub-optimal setups, but I also failed to take a few high-quality setups due to psychological reasons I’m still trying to work out. Part of it was distractions, but part of it was fear too.
I’ll break down exactly what happened in the reflection section below.
8th April – 12th April
Trade #59
Good trade. Happy about this one.
However I noticed that something funky is going on with Oanda’s price data. When I entered this trade the candle I entered on had closed above the previous candle making it an engulfing candle.
But later when I refreshed my charts, the candle changed. It now appears to have not closed above the previous candle. Which means this was technically not a valid signal for me since it is not a pattern I included in my backtesting.
This is a problem I’ve experienced once before. I contacted TradingView support and they said they would look into the problem, but they never told me whether or not they fixed it.
One of their engineers told me that Oanda’s historical price data is different to their live data which is obviously very concerning. But I haven’t noticed it happen again until now so I assumed the issue was resolved.
That was several months ago, so I guess I’m going to have to open another ticket with them and contact Oanda and find out what the hell is going on.
It’s hard enough to trade profitably as it is without your candles changing patterns whenever you refresh your charts.
Trade #60
This was a setup that met my rules but didn’t play out very well.
I set my entry slightly lower than the setup close so that I could get a 2:1 ATR R:R that was much more likely to get hit.
Unfortunately price stopped me out immediately after entering – and then decided to rocket on to my target later that night. But just like in golf – “close” doesn’t count.
Trade #61
I screwed this trade up pretty badly and I feel shitty about it.
This was my chance to end the week on a positive note, but I sabotaged myself out of fear.
This 1-2-3 trending move meets my rules for trading this timeframe. I had no reason not commit to both of these trades. But the bearish price action to the left had me spooked, and I convinced myself that these trades were going to lose.
That’s probably my recency bias kicking in. Because I have been losing the past two weeks, I subconsciously or perhaps even consciously anticipate losing more. Ironically, it was this anticipation and fear of losing that led me to fail to win.
I had plans on Friday that meant I needed to get up early and so I wanted to try to get a good night’s sleep. I took this trade on Thursday night at 9pm, but price took a while to move in my favor.
By 11:30pm I really wanted to go to bed, but I was still afraid that this trade would lose. So I rolled my stop-loss to break-even prematurely and shut down my charts.
Literally five minutes later, price came down to stop me about by a pip, and then rocketed on to hit my target.
It’s pretty hard not to take these kinds of experiences personally. It honestly feels like the market is specifically trying to mess with me. But really, it’s me messing with myself.
It wouldn’t have killed me to stay up another hour to babysit this one last trade for the week. The problem was that I had no idea how long it would take for this trade to play out, so my impatience got the better of me and I gave in to my tiredness.
It’s not the end of the world, I’ll survive and move on. I’ll do better next week. But I really need to work on my emotional detachment from trades. I shouldn’t let fear or anxiety (or impatience) influence important trading decisions.
Reflection
Grade: C
Last Week’s Goal: Be more selective with my first trade of the week. Do a lot of backtesting.
My first trade of the week was solid, except for the fact that Oanda’s price data was buggy. But I did well to wait for a good starting trade.
I didn’t do as much backtesting as I could have but I’ll make up for it next week.
You know, it’s funny how trading problems can morph from one extreme to the other.
The past few weeks my problem has been taking too many sub-optimal or low-probability setups. This week my problem has been a reluctance to take any trades at all.
The market was 100% cooperative with me this week. It gave me several chances to take profitable trades but for whatever reason I just wasn’t in the right headspace to take advantage.
I feel a lot of pressure to perform now (which I am putting on myself). But it’s not helping. I need to relax, let my system do its thing. All I had to do was put in my orders, press the execute button and walk away. It’s that simple.
But as we all know – that’s a lot easier said than done. Still, I have no excuses. I’m admittedly embarrassed to write all of this, but it’s the reality of trading and definitely my reality at the moment.
I am taking this opportunity of under-performing to demonstrate to my readers and fellow traders what happens when you waver in your self-confidence.
It’s humbling to expose my failures to the internet openly like this. I am used to being able to sweep bad weeks under the rug and move on and forget about it without anybody knowing I screwed up.
But fortunately for my future self, I can’t do that anymore. And so all I have left to do is reflect on practical solutions, implement them incrementally and improve over time.
Trading often feels like we’re building a house of cards. One false step and you can undo significant amounts of work, and it can feel terrible. But with each failure or misstep comes a new lesson and a new insight into what doesn’t work for you.
And I can promise you that no entrepreneur or career professional ever got anywhere without first learning what doesn’t work.
Next Week’s Goals:
Trust in my strategy. Get out of its way.
Let go of my expectations.
Continue backtesting and improving my edge.
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