The Forex holiday fund

[candles]

cool. Am quite content as my target as you know is about £40 or so per week, and im already up £65 since my account on Fridays closing bell.

Was stopped out near the low on a long, but re-entered to catch a nice chunk of that rally a minute ago. Good day

That was a 15p per point bet!! Big boy stakes now

 

[hwsteele]

That was a 15p per point bet!! Big boy stakes now

Our Candles is growing up! That a boy make us proud!!:clap:

 

[candles]

Our Candles is growing up! That a boy make us proud!!:clap:

lol

 

[candles]

bit of a mess but bought last night and was closed out at my profit target (green dot) whilst I was at work this morning for 60 pips profit. Am over £70 for the week so just trying to keep hold of it now.
The £400 i started with is over £2100 now. Might bump up the stakes to 15p per point after christmas!

 

[candles]

managed to scalp a few more points on the news but the spreads began to open up making trading pointless.

 

[candles]

went very short last night (25 p per point!! ) and closed some at near the very low this moring just before leaving for work so was already a good day.

Took a few trades this evening for another 80 pips profit on spx as can be seen.
Lost 15 ticks on oil and 12 on a cable trade. Up about 180 pips today.

 

[JRP2891]

Hi i was just curious, do you trade another account of greater equity or is this your only one? Very good trading by the way.

 

[candles]

hiya.
This is my only trading account.

 

[JRP2891]

Do you have any plans to make this full-time? Your current results would suggest you could. If you want to, there's a danger that if you spend too much time trading small stakes, you'll find it difficult to progress to a size where larger returns are possible.

 

[candles]

Thanks for your input JRP. Obviously I would love to one day trade fulltime at proper stakes, but I have all kinds of doubts in my mind.
Im not sure im emotionally ready yet, for one. The idea of being stopped out but at big stakes frightens me to tears! I also imagine its best to have a much greater deal of money than I have if one was to persue trading as a sole income (we cant all go from rags to richs like spanish89!)

Another worry is that even though as you can see my stops are generally fairly tight, I also operate an eod SYSTEM that has provided me with about 50% of my gains thus far, but does require quite large stops. If I was trading more realistic stakes throughout this last few months, the times i got stopped out would have made me go mad!

I guess my current plan is to increase stakes slightly (probably after Christmas) and hopefully grow my account at a faster rate. If I ever get it to say 5K, ill reassess my sistuation.

Cheers mate.

 

[Kappa]

Hi candles,

As I'm just getting my head around Forex and i'm looking to get into it to do in the mornings before work, your thread has really inspired me, i've been scalping (i hear thats a bad thing?) and I made around 150 pips today (i'm guessing as on oanda i've made about ~£15 with 10p per pip, im on a play account before I go into it in the new year).

This is my first day at it, I made some BIG mistakes in the morning which I will learn from, I thought things were gonna go long big time on cable so set it at about 8am, then left it, i put a large stop loss as I didnt want to get stopped out. i did this on cable and EURGBP, made a loss of about £28

Clearly I still need to analyse and learn more! I just had a feeling which was obviously wrong!

So i'm still down about £13, but I hope I can make it back. I'm playing as if I had put in about £150 in the account, forgetting about the other £99850 in there!

Thank you again, and if you have any swift advice that would be appreciated

Kapil

Glad that it was a play account! But i'm finding i'm doing ok by scalping (am I using the right terminology?) and have left it for the day.

Thanks for the insight this has provided me, you make it look so simple!

EDIT - looking back I think i did very well today, however, we dont know what will happen tomorrow!

 

[JRP2891]

Well you seem to be very honest with yourself, which is a prerequisite if you're going to trade profitably. If you do give full time a go eventually, try and just think in terms of account % risked, don't think about the real cash, easier said than done i know. This was mentioned earlier in the thread and i think the sooner you start doing this the easier you'll find the size transition. Risk a constant 3% on all trades for example, and if the stops are too large for this figure then you simply pass up on the trade (Sometimes i still break this rule to my cost!). Good luck.

 

[BSD]

JRP I totally agree with that. (Well ok maybe not the 3% as that's a tad high for my own personal preference but that's obviously up to the individual to determine.)

;-)

But otherwise completely spot on.

Candles, they way you're minting pips here is pretty amazing, so I really would go down the route of employing fixed fraction position sizing.

Wrote this piece for you basically hehe.

http://www.trade2win.com/boards/gen...ompounding-keys-magic-kingdom.html#post604832

Good trading mate !!!

 

[candles]

lol...the one day my journal gets a bit of traffic, ive got nothing to show really! One trade since got back from work. Short on the SPX for a small gain of 33 pips or so.

Thanks for all your input and for that thread you made, BSD.
Im not particularly worthy though! Im just looking to make some extra pocket money and happen to have had a good run in the last few months.

Ive been 'involved ' in the markets for about 8 years. Initially spent hours after college each night looking at charts. Then opened my first CMC account with £1000 which took ALOT of graft to earn. Barely got it off the ground and lost the lot. Went back to demo trading, learnt some more, saved up wages again, and tried again with CMC. £1000 in the account. Managed to get that one to about £1900 and then slowly lost it all. Spent alot more time practicing, studying and demo trading, which more or less brings me to now.

This account started with about £400 and as of this moment is about £2100.(at stakes of about 10-20 pence per point, original blowouts were at £1 per point)...guess thats partly why im overly cautious and desperate not to give it away again.

I was reading TradeDantes thread earlier about getting a job in trading, and how having a great enthusiasm for trading and the market, aswell as having trading records can help you get in. Maybe if I do good with this account ill send my statements with my covering letter to any firms looking for traders?

Thanks for all you input. I will seriously look into fixed fraction position sizing.

Well done Kappa. Despite the praise i seem to be recieving, im not the person to give anyone advice. I trust you've looked at threads by TraderDante? There's lots to learn there. I dont mean to 'make it look simple' lol. When I start having some losing days, ill be 'making it look so hard'! The market seems to have suited me recently. I try to have a number of 'methods' all working at the same time (for example a breakout method / retracement method / EOD system etc) just to TRY and always have something working when the market goes through a different phase. I dont know if it actually works like that but that's what im doiing until i prove myself wrong!

Heres that scalp i mentioned for what its worth. Shorted it and closed in 2 stages for 33 pips i think/

 

[Kappa]

hehe thanks Candles, im definitely reading as much as I can, pretty much spent half my day at work reading stuff on these forums and about 5 hours last night! will carry on! Trade Dante certainly has some good advice!

I've had another blast just now this evening but couldnt call anything and went up £2 and then back down £2 so i think i'll walk away for today. Im going on holiday for 2 weeks on sunday so after that I'll go for a couple more weeks then think about putting a couple of hundred into the Oanda account (would you recommend that broker? pretty sure the spreads get horribly after 8 or 9am!) and have a go.

there is SO much to learn, I dont even know where to start! trying to read everything at once! charting, systems, methods, which broker is the best, what times to trade etc etc, scalping, 1 hr trades aaaaagghghhh¬¬¬, my brain got frazzled regarding charting and indicators, at the moment im using a simple candle chart on metatrader!

 

[candles]

cool. I been waiting for this drop for a while. I went short again and closed it in 2 parts again for about 100 profit on average. I think we're going a good few hundred lower in the medium term, but am waiting for a bounce to get short on. That's my current plan. It might go without me or i could be compltely wrong. In fact, as I write this, its gone down further than my exit already, We'll see

 

[candles]

just to show its not all roses. Took a long a second ago looking for the bounce. Stopped out for -17 (i hope it was a genuine stop out. Quite a few times now i get stopped out and then check it with ninjatrader and the market wouldn't have taken me out)

edit: Hmmm....stopped out at the low tick and then got my expected rally. Cest la vie. Im gonna go check the market actually traded there!!

 

[candles]

looks to be real. Stopped me out and then went up! Never mind. Had enough for today now. Thanks for the input all.

 

[montmorencyt2w]

"stopped me out and then went up" - something similar happened to me on my last big loss (it happened to be in the opposite direction, but same principle). It actually went to 3 pips over my stop, before coming back, almost as though "someone was out to get me...". Could have been that the pros knew that's where all the stops were hiding, and took them all out....who knows. However, I blame myself on at least two counts, which I won't bore you with. Curiously enough, although the loss was financially painful, I didn't feel at all emotional about it. I've felt much worse about much smaller losses. I reckoned I deserved to lose. Onward and upward....

Reading about how you blew accounts in the early days ... I've made mistakes that even though they are water long under the bridge, I'd be too embarrassed to confess to here.
Annoyingly enough, they often were not bad calls, just bad executions of trades.
Enough said...

 

[candles]

i have no problem with getting stopped out on the low pip and then it going in my direction. I only care when I get stopped out when i wouldn't have got stopped out if I were trading using direct access....however, none of that is relevant here as I checked and it was a genuine stopout. Whatever. Ive already forgotten about it, lol.

Hopefully ive got a bit better and learnt some things since my days of blowing them accounts. In fact, I forgot to mention the other little part to my trading life (which actually prompted this journal) which was a little forex account with oanda. Again trading at tiny stakes, to pay for my holiday. That was also somewhat successful.

Got them pips back anyway a minute ago. Took a short just after the close and just took profit of 30 pips.

Gonna take it quite easy tomorrow. My wekly target is about £40 and im up about £100 so far so doubt ill do too much