Week 11 Forex Trading Performance
by Trader Rich
With Week 11 trading complete, I managed to pull off a profit of 71 total pips or $742.10. I made a total of 8 trades this week, losing my first 3 on Tuesday and Wednesday. This put me in a bit of a hole, down almost $1300 going into the Asian trading session on Wednesday. I turned things around with a small profit of $50 on the EUR/JPY Wednesday night and then 4 more profitable trades of $960, $450, $273, and $270.
As always, my total performance can be viewed at http://www.forexproject.com/My_Forex_Goal/ and the actual trades I’ve made since week #1 can be found at http://www.forexproject.com/My_Trade_History/
I’ve had my third straight profitable week in which I’ve amassed close to $5000 in profits. I’ve been profitable 7 out of 11 weeks and after 11 total weeks, I have a profit of 890 pips or $7645.48. That’s an average of about $700 a week.
It’s taken a lot to get this far. For one, I’m getting less sleep and losing trades still affect me longer than they should. Some more random thoughts after trading this week:
1. I’m convinced that if you want to make any money doing this, it’s not going to be with 10K lots (mini-trading account) or even single 100K lots.
2. The reality is that when you are a new trader, there is a huge learning curve and to compensate for that, you have to work longer and harder than everyone else. Even if you do work longer and harder, sometimes this still isn’t enough.
3. You need to build experience and do it before you blow through your capital. I’ve been lucky to some extent.
4. There have been some weeks where I just felt totally out of sync with the market like the beginning of this week. I got the feeling early in the week that I can’t express totally in words but you just feel like you don’t belong. I felt like I got back on track with a $50 profitable trade. Sometimes I need this to build my confidence and to sync myself with the market.
I started trading 3 lots at a time this week and may consider scaling that down if I’m trading against the trend. Going into week 12, I’ll continue to trade 3 lots if trading with the trend.
Monday is a U.S. holiday so we may not see much volatity until Tuesday. Have a great weekend.
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re your comment:
1. I’m convinced that if you want to make
any money doing this, it’s not going to be
with 10K lots (mini-trading account) or even
single 100K lots.
Of course, the larger the trade, the larger the potential profit. The risk/reward ratio for a small account is just too great IMHO, though, to trade multiple full size lots. Often people talk of limiting risk per trade at 2%, I think 3-4% is OK, if the confidence in the trade is great (some set-ups are more likely than others).
It seems to me that the proper approach to a trade should be to plan it out, including stops and limits without considering the size of the trade at all. THEN use the knowledge of the stop to plan the size of the trade (now that the maximum loss is known) based on te maximum percentage loss acceptable and considering the confidence in the trade. Static figures of 1 lot or 3 lots don’t seem to take into account the actual amount at risk as the stops on each trade are at different intervals, and it’s the stop size which reresents the actual amount of capital at risk.
Have a great week!!
BTW, obviously implied by the trading size strategy I mentioned above is the need for a broker that will let you precisely size trades to exactly meet your desired size of trade as a percentage of capital. OANDA.com lets you size trades in any unit you want, and you aren’t fixed to 10,000 (a mini-lot) or 100,000 (standard lot) multiples. If you want to trade 16,853 or 173,861 then that is exactly what you can trade.