Tuesday 31st January - Psychological Warfare

by Liam 22:33 3 comments

I lost another game of psychological warfare today.

Well, I made a small profit, but that was due to closing early and once again breaking my strategy.

I've attached the chart below;

EUR/USD 5min

A shows a high volume up bar with some weakness coming into the market.  I entered on the first ND marked on the chart with my stop just above A. Entry was 1.3194, stop at 1.3215. My target for 1:1 was 1.3173 as shown on the chart. It missed this target by 3 pips on the first visit to this area. If we look along this level I thought it was acting as support so I decided to close for a small profit as it retraced from point B.

It was during this phase that my emotions were once again getting the better of me and completely clouding my judgement. We printed a series of ND on the low of what was the highest 15min volume at the time. I completely overlooked this fact. It's as clear as day now, of course, but all I saw at the time was  what was healthy profit, dwindling away. 

So i panicked. 

I'll make an admission to myself and to the blogosphere. I've been lazy working on the confidence and psychology side of my trading. I reached out on here and was put on to two books. I've read hardly any of them. 

I don't know if it's just me but I think i'm getting quite good at reading a chart and for the most part my entries are pretty good. Now it's time to move on to the next step. Blogging about psychology isn't actually improving my psychology.

Time to read those books.