The Skint-International Trading Journal

[skint-international]

Trying the same strategy, placing a buy order just above resistance and a sell order just below support on the EUR/USD

 

[Geofract]

Decided to put these trades on last night, may have jumped the gun as it's not looking too good this morning, European markets haven't opened yet and there''s a lot of news to be factored in so I will see how things develop.

Date Transaction Pair Price Take Profit
October 9 16:07:43 EDT Buy EUR/AUD 1.37202 1.3954
October 9 15:49:01 EDT Sell EUR/USD 1.33547 1.3149
October 9 15:55:47 EDT Sell AUD/USD 0.97348 0.9400

Hi Skint,

What was your rationale for entering the AUD/USD trade - was it the bar formation on the daily - ie Pin Bar?

Juts a thought, but what time do your daily bars close? Is it at 10pm UK time - NY close? If not, then I would recommend getting a feed where the bars close when NY closes. There's plenty of free MT4 demos acc's available with bars closing at 10pm.

FWIW, my AUD/USD daily bar looked as per attached. IMHO, if I was trading the daily bar, I'd want to see price break below the low of the 7th, which didn't happen on my charts.

HTH

 

[skint-international]

Hi GeoFract,

Thanks for the feedback, yes it was the pin bar that I went for on that trade.

I'll take a look at the settings on my charting software and change the settings, thanks for the tip!

I don't use MetaTrader at the moment as I run Linux rather than windows, however people seem to like it so I'm thinking of getting a Windows machine set up so I can try it.

Thanks again for the feedback!

 

[skint-international]

Yesterday the sell order kicked in and was doing well mid-day, however got home and the Euro was moving up, moved the stop to ensure a break even but got stopped out.

Didn't lose anything though which is good, but if I'd used a take profit or trailing stop from the start might have made something.

Placed a buy order just above current resistance which kicked in pretty quickly, managed it with a trailing stop and made a profit of just over £3.00 before getting stopped.

Note: The amounts don't sound very impressive as I am using a demo account with very small stakes as I'm still learning, will switch to posting results in pips from now on.

 

[skint-international]

Placed a limit order to buy the Euro/GBP, just above resistance at 0.87920 hoping to pick up on a breakout.

Currently experimenting with different stops/take profit orders.

For this one have placed the stop around the previous day's high around 10 pips below the limit order.

I've also placed a trailing stop at 20 pips, twice the risk and a take profit order at three times the risk.

 

[skint-international]

Need to revise my strategy. I've mainly been trading breakouts but have just been getting small gains or losses due to false breakouts or corrections.

Plan to develop the strategy to try and deal with this, and also look into pin bar reversals.

 

[skint-international]

Trading this pin bar reversal on the EUR/USD. Seems to be backed up by fundamentals as there's a lot of bad news coming out about the Euro bailout.

Disagreements between France and Germany on the bail out plan.

Short Order placed at 1.37040, stop placed at 1.38680, TP placed at 1.33900

Graphics look slightly different in Oanada and ProRealtime, assuming this is due to differing end of day used by the charts, need to look into this.

 

[skint-international]

Got stopped out again on that one.

Staying out of the market for a few days and focusing on study and strategy. Looking at using a combination of candlestick patterns, support and resistance and fib retracements.

Any book/article recommendations on this subject welcomed, current reading Edwards and Magee on TA and Steve Nilson on Candlesticks.

 

[skint-international]

Spent the day studying the ProRealTime back testing and ProScreener modules.



Assume most people already know of it, but if not ProRealTime is a very powerful charting package, which is free with end of day data.



ProRealTime : Real Time Technical Analysis Software



It's written in Java so will run on Linux, MAC or Windows.



I was mainly using strategies that were either already included or were available for download on the website, although it's pretty easy to create your own either using a wizard or a simple programming language,



I plan to develop this approach and write my own backtesters and screeners as my knowledge of trading increases.



Two strategies that back tested quite well today were the Breakout Range System and the MACD crossover.



Ran the ProScreener across the major Forex pairs using the strategies, the Breakout Range System didn't return anything but the MACD Cross over returned a long on EUR/HUF and a short on EUR/DKK.



I haven't traded these pairs or this strategies before but this is just an experiment to see how using ProRealtime can be used to develop strategies so lets give it a go.



Placed stop losses around support areas but will aim to use the same signals to close the trade.

 

[skint-international]

Next plan is to write a number of back tests of various combinations of indicators etc. run them over historic EOD data and see which combos perform the best. Then write screeners with the winners to scan the major pairs on a daily basis to look for trading opportunities.