Weekly Review #16

April 21, 2019

Table of Contents

Forex Trading Review – Week 16

Another fairly quiet week. This will be a short weekly review.

Only 4 trades: 2 break-even, 1 loss, no winners and one still playing out.

15th April – 19th April

Trade #62

Good starting trade for the week.

I love this type of setup. A prolonged period of tight consolidation, followed by a break and close below the lows of that range, followed by a retest of the support zone of that range, followed by a rejection candle at the 50-EMA.

In my experience this setup typically has a greater than 50% chance of playing out profitably. Unfortunately price didn’t want to follow through this time and it turned out to be a little fake-out or stop-loss hunt.

Price chopped around for another day or two before eventually heading lower. These types of price action patterns are great hints at where price might be headed next.

But as always in trading, timing is key, and luck plays a role.

I was correct in my analysis but my timing was off, which was unlucky in this case.

Trade #63

This was another great momentum pullback setup. Unfortunately I missed the setup preceding this one because I was caught in traffic on my way home from a long drive.

I decided to go for this second opportunity given that there was still room to fall. But price decided to pull back a little further before rolling over to test the HTF support zone, so this was a loss.

Still a good trade that met my rules – so nothing to feel bad about.

Trade #64

This trade stung a little. It was so close to being a winner, but no dice.

I decided to pull my take-profit target back to the 1.34 even-handle on this one to give it a greater chance of being hit.

Price did spike to 1.34 but not quite far enough to fill my take-profit, so this ended up being a break-even trade. Not much could be done about this according to my rules.

Reflection

*Line = Equity Curve, Bars = Pips Per Trade*

Grade: A

Last Week’s Goals: Trust in my strategy. Get out of its way. Let go of my expectations. Continue backtesting and improving my edge.

Monthly Return: -1.58%

First of all I should note that I have decided to stop using my Google sheets equity curve chart for these reflections. I am going to use the Myfxbook version for better consistency instead as it is 100% accurate.

Even though my Google sheets version is easier to read it, has a tendency to get out of sync with my current actual growth because it doesn’t account for commissions and slippage etc.

On the Myfxbook chart the line is my equity growth/decline and the colored columns represent my pips per trade.

As I trade multiple timeframes with various stop-loss sizes but consistent 1% risk capital per trade, my pip return is mostly irrelevant, so it’s best to ignore the bars.

Anyway, this week was rather boring. Not much was really going on in the markets which is not surprising considering we are now into the Easter period.

I am happy with my performance despite losing 1 trade and not winning any trades this week, because the trades I took met my rules 100% and if I could live the week over again I wouldn’t change a thing.

Hopefully next week will be a better week to end the month on, but that’s mostly out of my control. All I can do is continue to execute my plan as best I can and wait for the market to cooperate.

I spent a lot of time backtesting last week and modifying small parts of my 15-Minute timeframe strategy. Now it has become more of an intraday swing-trading momentum strategy.

I have uncapped my profit targets for day-trades from 2:1 ATR moves. Now I exit the trade once price has passed a 2:1 ATR move from my entry and then puts in two lower-low lower-closes in a row (or higher-high higher-closes for short exits).

I really like this strategy and according to my testing, this small change will increase my average reward without increasing my average drawdown or loss rate noticeably.

And the best part is this pattern is easy to identify using PineScript, so I have created alerts for my exit signal which means I don’t need to babysit the charts any more than I used to either.

That means I don’t need to change anything about my executions, but by optimizing my exits I can increase my expected return for my current strategy.

Unfortunately I did not get a chance to demonstrate this new flavor of my strategy this week but perhaps next week will offer better opportunities.

I also have one ongoing short EUR/USD trade that is still open. It looks as though it will be stopped out on Monday but since it has not hit targets or my stop yet I will leave that for next week’s review.