I Like The Numbers On My Account. Most When They Show A Profit.

 Thanks for reading more of my blog! I was going to write lots about how I feel about trading, then realised that nobody really cares how my emotions are, it's all about dollars, cents, pips and trends. So I've written a tiny bit on that and tried to keep it interesting for the most part. So there's blah about feelings to do with trading first and then I actually explain what has happened over the past couple of weeks to my fund and what I expect over the next couple of weeks.
 
 When I started trading back in September last year and began to experience what I considered to be almost run away success with my small fund, I had a feeling of invincibility - as if I was talented and could beat the market at whatever game it wanted to play. Since the start of the New Year, that has changed quite substantially and I have been woken up to the fact that being able to hack it for a couple of months simply isn't good enough.
 As a result I have had to restart my trading, change my rules, suffer for not sticking to them time and time again, as well as re-evaluate what I thought about the market and how it behaves, essentially how I behave. It has been a rollercoaster six or seven months but now I am giving up trading... NO! I'm joking, giving up when I haven't really been beaten would be an awful move. I really enjoy trading, even though it seems like I am losing money, it isn't the end of the world - every cent I lose is a more valuable lesson than the ones I gain from when I make money. I have unfortunately been set back to a point where I am $20 behind where my most recent attempt started.

 Enough profound stuff, I'm talking numbers now. I was out of the market for basically the whole of February and some of March. I jumped back in after my ~$900 drawdown of January/early Feb with a mere $200 on Monday 18th March. That means I have been trading for about three weeks and three days. In that time I've gone from $216, down to $208 due to some stop/loss experimentation that didn't go my way and then over the next two weeks shot to $300. Unfortunately that's where I stopped as some of my positions got slighty ahead of me. ANYWAY you can imagine how it happened that I drew down some pennies last Friday and hit $180. I know, far from impressive. Far from satisfactory too!
 I have decided to alter my strategy once again, so that while I can now incorporate stop losses, I do so at a loss level that I don't mind taking on every so often but that won't be every other trade as it was a couple of weeks ago. I made around eighteen trades, only five of which hit their profit limits before hitting their stop limits (that's five profitable trades out of eighteen) - those trades totalled a profit of $4.43 - average of +$0.886 per trade. The loss positions, of which there were twelve, totalled -$15.14!! An average of -$1.26 per position. Obviously that's a pretty awful ratio to have unless you're trying to lose money.
 After I saw this, I threw stop/losses out the window and traded how I used to again - the problem being that because I am working at the moment I am unable to devote even a quarter of the time I used to, to watching the markets and adjusting my positions etc. Here's the maths before last Friday. I had ~107 trades. 103 profitable at an average of $1.01 each. Four negative, at an average of a -$1.58 loss per trade. The ratio there is just one bad trade for every twenty-five good trades that I made. Up to a point.
 Unfortunately, not using stop losses or being willing to take a hit ever, like an idiot, I had three other positions open that on the Friday, netted around about a $100-120 loss. That wasn't fun.

 I am using stop losses again now but am putting them further away so rather than a $1-2 hit, it will be $3-4 but hopefully much more rare. It should also put an end to ridiculous losses and if I can maintain my ratio of 25:1 then that would be even better.
 I have definitely noticed the impact that my last margin call had on me - as well as the impact of working full time and not being able to watch the market very much apart from some evenings. I think around December I worked out my win:loss ratio and it was something like 75:1 - a ratio that I wish I could attain again.

 Another problem I am having at the moment is reading the market - I assume I am struggling to trade on short time scales because this worked so well when it had 100% of my attention. So paying it less attention I should really work on longer time scales? In my eyes, the US is coming out of recession at a faster rate than the UK - so I would expect the $ to increase in strength and the £ to drop and the exchange rate to drop with it. I have been predominantly shorting GBPUSD over the past few weeks because that's what I see it most likely to do, yet sometimes when it seems most likely it does the opposite and jumps - I am confused by it at the moment and while I know it is stupid to try and "understand the market" I would at least like to remember how I was doing it before!
  As for the next couple of weeks, I am expecting the exchange rate to bounce off the 1.524 mark and ultimately head towards 1.55. I have been reading a lot about it retracing what it did at the start of the year and frankly have had no success shorting it so far! Going LONG! I'll see in a couple weeks if I still have any money ;)


 Anyway I have written a lot and am very grateful to you if you read to this point! I hope you enjoyed it and if you want me to give my opinion on anything then let me know, or if you just want to chat more then definitely tweet at me! Follow @fxamateurtrader and if you're on LinkdIn then get me on there too http://www.linkedin.com/pub/toby-golledge/5a/76a/24a?trk=shareFB
 Thank you all so much -- your support is REALLY appreciated!!!! I'll go easy on the feelings stuff at the start next time!