Manually or Automated Forex News Trades

I've received numerous emails from traders using FX Engines who are discouraged by the past weeks results.  I am not discouraged for several reasons.

I don't think trading the news manually is better than automating it.   I also want to stress that trading either way requires a certain amount of discretion.  Just because your trades are automated doesn't mean that you don't have any options available to you.  For instance, you can automate your trades by using a Conservative, Moderate, or Aggressive method.  This week might have been a great week to use the conservative or moderate engine which I have mostly.  If you use the aggressive method day in and day out, you have to expect a greater level of risk where you may be entered into a trade on the first price tick.

The results this week are going to happen whether you trade manually or automatically but you might have lost more trading manually.  Last week was an absolutely terrible week for trading the news manually the Rob Booker way but profitable trading automatically.

I think the biggest thing is the risk reward.  I've traded the news manually using Rob Booker's stategy and I can tell you that he trades the news commonly with a 30 pip target and 30 pip stop loss.  That's a 1:1 risk/reward as you all know.  Not good.  In addition, I also believe that it is difficult if not impossible to use a 10 pip stop trading manually. 

In the previous 3 weeks of trading the news, I'm up 41 pips on 10 trades with a win % of 40.  If you trade 3 lots in a standard account, that's $1230.00 in 3 weeks.  In addition, the stress factor is much less. 

I'm not saying that automated news trading is the holy grail in Forex because there isn't one. I'm also not ready to say that this method cannot provide consistent returns.  I've said this before but this is not the only thing on my toolbelt.  It's just another "trading system" that if proves to be profitable can be used in concert with your other methods.

Durable Orders is released at 8:30 today.  I'll be using the moderate engine as I have mostly used this in the past.  Hopefully we will get some price spikes with no reversal.

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