Forex Trading Review – Week 36

This week was another slow one for me. I had a lot of appointments so I ended up spending about 7 or 8 hours in the car all up, which meant that I missed a few trading opportunities and only ended up taking 4 trades which ended up making this a barely profitable week for me.

Unfortunately I missed a couple of very large winning trades which is always painful. But this time there was nothing that could be done about it, so I’ve already pushed it out of my mind and I’m ready for a better trading week next week.

2nd September – 6th September

Trade #174

Reflection:

This was my first trade for the week – an intraday setup on EUR/JPY.

This is when my pullback strategy seems to perform best. All timeframes were bearish, and the Daily chart had just taken out a key support level.

I am working on backtesting the addition of higher-timeframe filters to my strategies, but it’s taking me a while to decide exactly how I want to go about it.

I have a few ideas that show a lot of promise and should have something to show for them soon. But in the meantime… this was a Good Trade that met my rules and a nice multiple R target winner.

Trade #175

Reflection:

These trades always hurt to witness.

Price stopped me out literally by the spread before reversing into what would have been a multiple-target winner. But as I’m fond of saying – you can’t win them all, and a losing trade is a losing trade. Close doesn’t count.

Still, this was a Good Trade that met my rules, so nothing to see here. The only way I could have avoided this loss was to move my stop loss wider, which is against my rules for a reason – it does not increase my long-term expectancy. And that is what I’m focused on most of all.

Trade #176

Reflection:

This was my second-last trade for the week.

Price had just put in a move on the 15M and 1-Hour chart that indicated to me that the trend on these lower timeframes might be reversing, and when price consolidated above the 50-EMA into a flag pattern and gave me a valid entry reason I decided to take it.

Unfortunately, in a similar situation to the previous trade, price came within a pip of my break-even target before reversing to stop me out. It was hard to sit on my hands and watch this trade turn into a loser after coming so close to being a risk-free trade, but rules are rules and if I don’t follow them then I won’t ever improve as a trader.

So this was a Good Trade that met my rules and I managed it perfectly, so nothing can be done about this losing trade. I’m still in a pretty rough drawdown, but I can’t force winning trades to come – all I can do is follow my rules, be consistent and wait for my strategy to capture some big moves again which will happen eventually.

Anyway, I took one last trade for the week on AUD/JPY which is still playing out, so I won’t go into detail about that here except to post a screenshot of how the trade looks as of this weekend:

I don’t like its chances for a 2nd-target win next week because price is already pretty heavily over-extended on this timeframe, but you never know what might happen. That’s why I like to use trailing stops with this particular 1-Hour strategy.

Weekly Reflection

Annual Return: +9.31% | Drawdown: -14.99%

Last Week’s Goal: Execute my plan flawlessly.

Overall Grade: B

I had a bunch of commitments this week that interfered with my trading performance, but they were important commitments that had to be honored so I can’t beat myself up about that too much.

It’s hard to maintain a healthy work/life balance as a full-time retail trader, but I’m getting better at it as each month and each year goes by.

I did not do anything wrong as far as my rules go, so despite the fact that I under-performed my strategy by missing some valuable winning trades, I did technically perform my main duties as a systematic trader and so I should feel good about this week.

Every week that I follow my rules and don’t lose money due to stupid trading mistakes or self-sabotage and self-discipline issues is a great trading week as far as I’m concerned. If you knew how badly disciplined I was when I first began as a trader then you’d be as impressed as I am at that feat!

Next Week’s Goal

Execute my plan flawlessly.

Previous Week’s Review
This Week’s Review
Myfxbook Stats

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