… and not a good bang.

As I write this (4:45 am CDT), I’m down <74.4>, with one trade (AUDUSD) still open.

I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep, and then heard an alert on my computer (I usually turn the speakers off at night so the alerts don’t bother me, but I forgot last night), so I got up and looked at the market.  I found the EUR and GBP pairs in significant clear directional moves, so I decided to trade them since I couldn’t sleep anyway. My first 4 trades (GBPJPY, EURJPY, GBPUSD, and EURUSD) were all stopped out, leaving me down <42>.  But I set re-entries on them, and also pending orders on AUDUSD and AUDJPY.  Soon, the AUD orders it, and my re-entries on GBPUSD and GBPJPY hit as well.

So now I’m sitting there down <42> with 4 open orders, and they pretty much moved sideways with a slight downward bias.  And at one point they were up enough that I could have closed them out at BE (or very close to it) for the session.  But they appeared to be moving, and the GBP pairs were getting close to my TP levels.  So I hung on.

And then everything turned around.  One after another, the pulled back up and then stopped out.  Leaving me in my present position.

Kevin (Hunt, @uk2asia) posted his results.  He had taken very similar trades to my opening round, but ended with +70 in less than an hour of trading.  Looking at the differences, I see some mistakes I made. One was that I entered my initial trades before the London open.  Kim is always saying that entering before the open with no news or other factors to move the market adds unnecessary risk.  In this case, my entry points were lower than Kevin’s, resulting in my getting stopped out when prices continued their pullback, while he was able to hold on.  After being stopped out, then I had to wait for the re-entry level, resulting in giving up a good part of the profit that would have been there.

The other thing is being aware of the time of day (within the session), and the general market environment.  I should have recognized that it was getting late in the session when the yen pairs turned around, and I should have gotten out rather than blindly holding on. I wouldn’t have gotten back to break-even that way, but I would have been a whole lot better than the <74> I’m at now.

Okay, I finally closed out the AUDUSD for +4.2, leaving me at <70.2> (-3.19%).  This is my final trading day of the week and month. So I finished the week with 4 out of 4 losing days for <221.6>, and <547.2> for the month. I may take some additional trades yet this morning to exercise the PATI Trading Assistant, but I won’t consider criteria or count them in my totals. I’ll start afresh next week.