I don’t normally trade the London session, which starts at 2:00 AM my time, and I don’t normally trade on Fridays. But I’m way down for the month, and there’s only a few sessions left next week, plus I woke up at 2:00 and my mind was too active to go back to sleep, so I decided if I was awake anyway, I might as well get up and take a look anyway.

When I went through the trade planning drill, I found that all the USD pairs were in CDM’s showing dollar weakness, while the YEN crosses were mostly in ranges. So I started to set pending orders for Range breakouts, and started setting up yellow line pending orders on the CDM’s.

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, the early CDM’s dried up and moved into mostly sideways chop. I took an early RBO on EURJPY, but it didn’t follow through, and eventually stopped me out. I had early YL trades on USDJPY, AUDUSD, NZDUSD, and USDCAD, but they all meandered, not moving up enough to take a reasonable profit or down enough to stop out.

And I failed abysmally in not keeping track of the time and the pending news events – GBP had preliminary GDP at 3:30 my time, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I had a pending RBO on EURGBP triggered by it and moved down to within the spread of my take profit, but it didn’t hit, and I wasn’t aware of what was going on, so I didn’t take it off. And I wasn’t prepared for trading the GBPUSD or the GBPJPY, both of which had great moves.

Finally it was getting late in the London session, I was down 27 pips, with a bunch of trades that weren’t going anywhere. I ended up getting the sum of them up to enough to break even, and punched out of everything. It was basically a break even day (up 1.2 pips). But I did learn some lessons. This was the second day in a row that I have missed being prepared for news events. From now on, at the start of the session, I’m setting alarms on my iPhone for 5 minutes before any pending news event.