We are conditioned to lose.  Every aspect of our lives since we were children has been based on lack and not having enough and losing. Well for the majority of us anyway.

Let me explain.  We have two emotions that screw up our trading when we are active in the markets.  Hope and fear.  You can substitute hope with greed.

The way it works as as follows:

When we enter a position that goes against us we hope that it will come back so we can at least get our money back.

When we enter a position that goes in our favor we fear that we will lose what we have in profit.

What does this mean?  Well when we lose and hope it will come back we give the opportunity for the position to get a really big loss which eventually occurs.

On the other hand when we have a position that has made us money our belief systems of lack tell us to take our profits as soon as we have them.

What does this lead to ultimately?  Losing.

We let out losers get out of hand and take our small profits because we are afraid of losing it.

Over the long term this spells disaster.  Our human minds are conditioned to trade this way.  This is why most people lose their money investing.

So we need to switch our psychology, we need to fear when our positions go against us and get rid of them as quickly as possible and we need to hope that when our positions are in our favor they will get bigger and bigger ( all the while adding to the positions to offset the losses we have to incur.)

This in itself is the secret to trading coupled with your system of trading.   This is what they mean when they say money management.

It’s just a ridding of the ego and a switching of thinking but those of us who can do it will succeed in trading.  I believe it to be absolutely true.

So today with my short of GBP/USD I entered three days ago my account is up 9%.  Last week was the last week of convincing evidence not to trade outside of my system.  Now trading is very boring.  I think I will only be entering positions maybe once per week going forward then building on them as they go in my favor.

Since November 2011 the two most important things I have learned about trading FOREX or any market for that matter is that psychology is number 1 followed by money management (keeping losses micro and letting your winners run and press them by adding several positions to them.)

The single most important thing I have learned about being a small trader in FOREX is that I don’t trade news, I don’t trade circumstances in the world, I don’t trade interest rates or anything else in the outer world that most would determine effect the pricing.  I trade investor psychology because it’s not what happens in the world that dictates the price of anything being traded………it’s the participants that dictate the pricing of anything being traded.  The psychology moves in waves, you can see the rhythm in the market and on the charts.  You begin to know when things are not going to move, you begin to see where prices are most likely to turn around.

I honestly expect to continue growing my account balance from this point forward,  I believe I have worked out all of my mental and technical issues over the past 3 months and I am ready to grow into what I have been obsessing about all of this time.  A winning trader.

I’ve been trading all along, I guess just developing my style and learning the lessons that every great trader needs to learn.  Discipline, patience, strategy, psychology and a whole other host of things to add to the toolbox are all in this great rainbow of awakening of trading.  Every week it’s another mistake, another problem that needs to be addressed.

One week it was discipline, the next week it was how I thought about money and on and on.  I actually have learned a lot about myself in the process.  Past issues from childhood and current beliefs that need to be changed.  Last week was my last lesson I think.  It was about patience.

A sniper goes to a location where his intelligence tells him his enemy is going to be and hides himself to sit and wait.  Wait for his target, and there may be only one shot.  This one shot is the result of months of planning and weeks of training plus hours or days of waiting in the bush for the opportune time to take the shot.   And if you miss it, well you just have to start all over again.  This says a lot about trading.

Last week I learned about patience.  You see the week before I had an incredible week, I was picking tops and selling currencies and commodities.  One day alone I had an increase of 50% in my account.  After I closed those trades I thought I could keep doing it.  This was a breeze I thought.  I must have lost 20 trades in a row after that.

My initial system is still in tact.  I am using my original moving average system however not on the 15 minute chart anymore but on the daily.  It’s much more reliable and I can view a handful of pairs and wait for each signal day by day.

The mind is the important factor for me in this game,  this craft.  I have come a long way in the last 6 months and I will continue to learn and master the forex trading craft now that I know it is all in the mind and has nothing to do with the outside world.

LOSS 41+%

Day 46.  Like many forums and times I have put capital into my FOREX account it is down almost 50%.  I guess I am supposed to be depressed about this but the learning that has taken place has been considerable, I have really learned a lot.  46 days trading is the most I have ever traded in one single block of time and I still have over 50% of my account balance.  I’m actually feeling quite good surprisingly.  Not to mention the account really does not have any real money in it which  probably helps.

I started trading the Euro with three principal things in mind for my strategy.

• Identify an occurrence that takes place several times per day on a chart and trade it when it occurs.
• Disregard all news, fundamentals, or events that move the market.
• Do not trade during news or even when important people talk.

The thing to note is that it is EXTREMELY difficult to maintain discipline, well for me it has been and I have traded longer than I have in my history of trading FOREX with the same amount of capital and I have ignored all news events and tried to stay away from times when the currency prices were extremely volitile.

This week I feel as if the last 46 days have been a long learning period with discipline being the top discovery on the list, I have just gotten to the point where I think I have discipline under control for the most part.  One other very important thing that I believe has been losing a fair amount of trades is the fact that FOREX charts do not look the same after the fact.  I trade a moving average and Bollinger bands along with short term trend and I have noticed when I have been trying to be very precise about entry points on the eur usd they never really occur as much as they look like they do when looking at a chart of history.

What this means to me? Looking at a chart of history on a currency pair does not give a true depiction of moving averages and entry points as they actually may happen.   Of course this may be more enhanced when trading short term like I am doing.

You can say that you are going to enter the market when the price touches or bounces off of the ema at the low or high of a candle then you find it never does.  It only appears as though it did because the moving average will move after that candle has long closed and price has moved in the same direction so you never had your opportunity to enter the trade but later it looks like you would have.

So it’s Sunday and the market is set to open soon.  I expect this week to be very productive.  I’ve also lowered my target to gain per day to 10% which may make it a little less stressful as I trade.

Time will tell….

email: blacksash9@gmail.com

As in most other cases this person came to me due to the slow response in updates she was currently getting from her website manager.  I haven’t been really involved in the website design industry in Puerto Vallarta until recently but I can tell there’s a lot of work to go around because everyone is either really busy or on vacation that works on websites for customers in town.

I went to the restaurant last night for a meeting with her and soon I’ll be trying the place out.

This is the website I’ll be managing, they do quite a few updates and have monthly specials so if you haven’t tried them out you should.

So it’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been taking on new clients for web management and busy with the kids and on and on. Really not focusing as much as I should on the currency trading.

It has been an amazing couple of weeks, up and down and still figuring out my single trade that I managed to locate. I do believe it still exists however the last two weeks has been a real lesson. Things that I never identified with my original identification on the charts I have been consuming and learning about. The charts don’t even look the same after the action has already been over with as they do when it’s actually happening.

Like a treasure hunter I know I will produce the answer to my trade, I feel I am getting closer with every trade I make.

LOSS 1.4%

In one trading day I managed to wipe out all gains from over 20% to a loss of 1%.  I believe I have targeted a time period where my trading plan does not work very well.  During the week the markets have conviction but during the off times it’s like watching a world without gravity.  There’s no news and prices wander slowly up and down and up and down with no real direction.

So I’m taking it that this now means that my 20% per day plan is going to be extended, how displeasing, I already have to sit out on Friday eves and Saturdays and now we’re going to take Sunday out of the plan and afternoons as well because there are not major markets open until later in the evening after the New York session during the week.  I’m not happy!

Yes I am still working on the final step of my first days trading plan and we’re closing out day 6.  Unfortunately I have to sleep so trading the European sessions are out of the question.

I was able to make it through the first 4 steps of the plan in under 11 trades per step and gain more than was necessary for the plan and here I am trading step 5 and I have more than 50 trades logged.

I have one hell of a hole to dig myself out of.

Gain 22.5%

Still trading on this Friday,  4 days after I started with my FOREX account balance and revised trading plan.   With my original plan set out to be an increase of 25% per day I can say I’m a little frustrated that it took me all week just to gain 22%.

I was able however to recover from some very stupid trades and I think I have all of my discipline issues worked out with this particular FOREX trading plan.  I made a lot of trades this week, so far 53 to be exact.

I’ve also learned a lot about my trading plan and have been able to work some of the kinks out.  I still am going to shoot next week for a 25% gain per day after working through the last 4 days I am certain it should be fairly easy to do with this trading plan.