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.

For those of you that have Twitter accounts and are following me you may have recently noticed a new follow and a few tweets from an account called Trading Breakthrough.

On a couple of occasions in the past i've mentioned the work that my Dad has done in helping me to manage myself and my emotions whilst i'm trading. Through using many of these tools I have come a long way and am improving all the time from where I was when I started trading.

Over the past ten years or so my Dad has become interested in personal development and psychology and this has culminated in qualifications in NLP, EFT and more recently IEMT. He has now decided to pursue a new venture called Trading Breakthrough.

He has been blogging regularly at http://tradingbreakthrough.com since the start of the year. I took my time making this post to ensure there was some content on the site and so that we could get the logo design and layout finalised. Both of which were completed today. (Wordpress is infinitely easier than Blogger!)

I'd really like if some (or even all!) of you could head over to the blog and have a read through, see if anything resonates with you and your experiences in trading to date. Comments and follows would also be appreciated as there is plenty more information to come. I'm sure all of you will find something of merit on the site as it talks about all the emotions and pitfalls that we go through as traders. More importantly it gives you the tools and methods for managing these emotions.

The logos and banners are by a good friend of mine - Niamh. We bugged her for a solid few weeks with changes and ideas and she came out on top with these logos! Please check out her site as well if you get the chance.

Many thanks,

Liam

Didn't get a chance to blog over the weekend and as you can probably see i've made a few changes to the site so i'm going to wrap it all up in this post.

Last week wasn't much better to be honest. Two losses to add to the current run. Simply not good enough at the moment. As always, i'll endeavour to improve upon this, I already have some thoughts and ideas.

On to the two trades. Both of which were sell positions on EUR/USD. One chart for both of the trades, all the information annotated on the chart.

Trade 1 & 2 - EUR/USD 1hr PnF

The below chart shows an alternate view based on the cumulative volume, two high volume zones below us. There's also a further projected price target of 1.2860. We've had two 1hr targets hit already at 1.3250 and 1.3230. The 4hr target was hit during NFP and the next target is another 1hr. The more targets you take the less likely they become. The last projected target from a trend will always be missed as the trend changes. The question is, is it this one?

 Alternative view - EUR/USD Cumulative Volume Zones

As all of you reading can see, i've decided to change the layout again. Yes, I know, I do this a lot. I can hear you groaning from here! But I quite like this one. Considerably more simple than the last one and it loads a lot faster. I've also created my own domain name. I thought it was about time, plus it makes it look slightly more professional!

So, welcome to KinsaleForexTrading.com!

Progress charts up to this point in time.

The Smart Money are in control.

Never forget this.

Two trades this week, unfortunately both of which were losses. Coupled with last weeks losses as well, i'm pretty much back where I started the year. A little frustrating but i'm still positive. I just need to a little more control and not to push the trades so much, as I felt I did this week.

The two trades I took were longs on Kiwi and Swissy. The Kiwi trade was opened and stopped on Monday. The Swissy trade was opened on Tuesday and stopped on Thursday. As usual there were better opportunities and two trades on Friday that were the best entries for the week.

Kiwi Trade

NZD/USD 1hr PnF

After the sell position failed last week I figured I'd try the triple top long on Monday. This was quickly stopped by the high volume zone immediately above and knocked back down very quickly. Interestingly it moved straight through a good sell signal as well but due to the support at the lows I didn't think it would go. Once again, PnF targets hold (very nearly!) true.

Swissy Trade

USDCHF 1hr HLC

USDCHF 1hr PnF 1

USDCHF 1hr PnF 2

A couple of charts for the Swissy trade, the first shows the two zones that played a part this week. The two highest volume bars on the chart. On Monday we had a sell signal swiftly followed by a reversal off the high of the lower volume zone. This brought us back into the highest volume zone and me being whipped back and forth for two days before being stopped out. We have three staggered triple tops in the row with two sell signals in between. Indecision all over. The reason I took a long position was because of the upside target - learning my lesson from the Kiwi trade earlier in the week.

Still, it wasn't quite ready to go and I got stopped at the next simple sell signal. The third signal filled and went straight for the target. We didn't get a reversal until the target was hit. I love these price projections on PnF. They're scarily accurate.

Anyway, moving on from those trades and looking to what next week is going to bring. I'll post updated progress charts in another blog later on.

Cheers,

Liam