Seeking Clarity

by 15:18 0 comments
It's the day after Paddy's day. My head is a little foggy to say the least. How very Irish of me. Despite not having a great deal of clarity up there, i'm trying to find some clarity in my trading.

Last week was ok. I stopped the rot at least. I took one trade on Kiwi which ended up as break even, well, a slight profit but we won't be too pedantic. The point i'm trying to make, in my usual round about way is that it should have been a lot more.


NZD/USD 1hr PnF

I entered short on the triple bottom with the secondary downside target (in pink) in mind and in keeping with the trend. I wasn't too worried about the two previous lows as there had been no follow through on the second reaction to this area. Anywho, got in short, was nearly stopped but then some Kiwi news kicked in and drove the market down. At best I was up around 60 pips. We had two three box reversals at the low and this is normally where I would have trailed my stop and placed it above the reversal of three X. This would have locked in 20 pips. I decided instead to move to BE and give it some breathing space. I eventually got stopped as it pushed back up towards my entry. I'm not too bothered that I went with the BE stop instead of the +20. I made that decision and was happy to go with it. 

What does bother me is my track record so far this year.

I decided to do some sums and look at all of my trades this year. I wanted to get some averages and so on. So far, including the above entry, I have taken 22 trades. I looked at the maximum amount of pips that each trade reached before hitting an opposite signal. So in the trade above, it got to a maximum of 60 pips before hitting the simple buy signal on the retrace. For the 22 trades the maximum amount of pips comes to 1370. My net gain is -33.3.

Have a look.

Now, before you criticise my amateurish and naive maths. I'm completely, 100% aware that i'm never going to get the maximum out of any trade. As we all know, it's just not possible to get out at the exact moment. Only sheer dumb luck will get you that.

Ok, i'm glad I cleared that up. So, back to the maths. 1370. I'm not entirely sure what to take from these figures but what it does tell me is that i'm perhaps leaving my trades run for too long. That's a lot of pips left unclaimed. Even half of that would be a great return so far.

Taking out one of the trades which was a particularly big runner leaves me with 1060 pips from 21 trades. An average of 50.47 pips per trade.

So what now? Do I aim for my average on each trade? In a lot of cases this wouldn't even be a 1:1 return on my position. Should I just aim for 1:1? Do I change my stop placement? This would probably mean wider. Which again has an effect on R:R.

I'm at a bit of a loss for how to tackle this.

Liam

Author

28. Forex. Trading. Music. Beer. Food. Travel.

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