Finished off a great week with two trades today. Both sells on EU. As the 5min chart was largely moving sideways for the start of the day (the calm before the storm) I moved to the 15min to find an entry and cut out some of the noise.
The first entry was on a 15min ND. I'm calling it a No Demand even though it is a down bar. For the vast majority of the bar it was an up bar on low volume and it pushed down a little in the last few seconds, I was happy enough with it and placed my order. I got taken in and pushed further sideways, bouncing around between -5 and +5 pips. Eventually after what looked to be a bit of support building I closed the trade for a small loss. The market wasn't ready yet.
We pushed up a little more and printed another ND, this was my second entry and ultimately the one that came good. We eventually pushed out of the range and I hit 1:1 on the first half of the trade. I closed this one and trailed the rest. It wasn't long before the NFP announcement that the profit was hit. Usually I wouldn't trade just before or during NFP but I was toying with the idea of leaving the trade open this time around as I wasn't risking anything with the second half of my trade at BE+1. Eventually I chickened out and closed the trade wanting to guarantee myself a decent profit. As you can see, it went a lot further but I was happy to make a good profit.
EUR/USD 15min
EUR/USD 5min
Having lost 4.44% the week before this was also playing on my mind. Closing the trade brought in 2.43% for the day and overall 4.35% for the week. So I made back nearly all of what I lost the week before. Which i'm absolutely delighted with! I really put the work in this week and kept my concentration levels at a high.
I kept my concentration levels high but having said that, I was an emotional wreck today watching those two trades travel sideways. I had a legitimate reason in my mind to close the first trade but If i'd left the first trade open it wouldn't have hit my stop and would have avoided that loss. At times I was agonising over being down a couple of pips. I was really tracking my emotions today, the relief seeing it go back into positive, the despair watching it tick back into negative. At one stage I was sitting there reading Trading in the Zone (Solfest - you'll be pleased to know it was the book version and not on a cold, hard device!) which helped quite a bit. There was a lot of self talk going on, eventually I won through, forcing myself to stick with the trade, knowing that my initial analysis was as correct as it could have been. I'd used my edge, the rest was up to the market.
I'm going to do some work with my Dad over the weekend, using some techniques that i've spoken about in the past, EFT and NLP. A further step towards getting on top of my emotions.
Happy weekend all!
Liam
Nice work on sticking to your plan and not letting emotions sidetrack you.
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