Ferrowolf's Trading Den

Not a high probability trade, but I decided to go for it anyway.
Rather distracted today, later I was a little too focused on going short and didn’t look to getting in long.
But it was good that I was waiting for more conviction and supports to get broken before attempting another short.

Trend for these few days seems to be down, so short bias, saw sellers coming in around london, took things short.
Still holding part of my position, looking to swing till the end of the week or 2900.

Descriptions on the chart

Not very good trading today, I didn’t trade my planned entry because I was already in a trade in the opposite direction, HOPING for it to continue moving.
Again I took TP1 too quickly, must remind myself to wait just half a minute more, give price a lil time to move further to my planned TP1.
At the key resistance, I wanted to close out or take more of the position off the table, but I was afraid of missing the move for the day.
The irony is the move for the day was downside. lol
Also, must write trade plan down so I don’t forget it when I’m in the middle of a trade or something.
Perhaps every morning I’ll add alerts to my platform with comments, so I’ll be reminded of my plans.
Must take the planned trade if it triggers.
Either square off the open position, or just open the new one anyway.

Gotta admit, these 2 days of trading hasn’t been very good, I’m not trading my plans.
But everyday is a learning experience. In fact, sometimes I’m relearning stuff I learnt before but forgot, or didn’t practice.
Wrote some pretty long comments for the trades in my journal, so best refer to that when I do the review in future.
I’ll let the charts speak for themselves.

Price is playing at the bottom end of the range. Could this be the retracement move of the large bullish move we had over the past few weeks?
I recently implemented a few more statistical measurements into my trading.
Found out that 60% of my profitable trades never ran more than 13 pips against me. The profitable ones which did go more than 13 pips against my entry, didn’t make up for the losses beyond 15 pips for other losing trades.
Of course, there are other factors such as whether I would make another entry after getting stopped out on the first one, and whether the 2nd trade would have worked out profitably.
So I’ve decided to experiment with a 15 pips stoploss.
Did a chase entry on my first trade. Not so good, must prepare myself earlier next time.
I think I need to stick to my exit rules. I didn’t cloes out at a major level of support when price stalled there. Was hoping for a move lower, no good.
Later on price made a very fast move down to this same support level, I should have exited after such a quick move as well, rather than wait for it to come all the way back and hit me out for BE  on my 2nd half. Good that I TP1 quickly on that move though.
So exit at:
1) major levels
2) very fast and large moves stall. (this one is hard to define, but generally an very very fast move like 15-20 pips in a few seconds. then stalls)

It’s the 2nd of Feb, didn’t get to trade today since I was out.
But I was still holding on to yesterday’s long trade.
Last night before bed I decided to move my stoploss down to 3116 level instead because a deep retracement looked likely.
True enough, price would have taken me out in the middle of the night had I not moved my stoploss.
But the correct thing to do, was to take profits at major S&R level.
I need to be less greedy and take profits at appropriate levels. I must learn to get in again later if the opportunity arises.
Actively trading around a core position is not easy.
I shall endeavour to start with just 1 re-entry on a profitable position.
Anyway, I’ve exited the long position in this evening.

Had a decent day, but I had to stop trading earlier today, which may have led me to not maximizing the day’s trend.
There was a tame consolidation perfect for piling in more positions.
Adding to winners is a key aspect of trend trading or even short term swing trading, this is something I’ve yet to gain much experience with since such days are usually outlier days. But when they happen, we have to capitalize on them.

Most descriptions on the charts.
But today made me think about a lot of things which I’ll share another time, I need to get to bed!

Combination of factors resulted in a monkey day for me.
1) Was very restless all day going into London, was not in the zone for trading, yet I traded anyway.

2) Improper stoploss placement.
I think there was some overconfidence there, thinking that I would very likely be right and the trade was unlikely to go against me that far.  So I put the stops tighter than where they were supposed to be.

3)  Reactionary trading.
Was not in the zone, rather jumpy, the restlessness had me flipping my position a few times. Some had bad stoploss levels and even if they were good, I didn’t stick to my stoploss, I just kept flipping prematurely.

4)  I did not “ration” my maximum number of trades/day properly.
I set myself a maximum of 6 trades a day, this prevents me from overtrading on monkey days or losing too much on days where the market just isn’t suited for my trading style. True, it does remove the chance that I’ll make back my losses, but if I’m having a monkey brain on a monkey day, what’s to stop me from making more monkey trades? So having a big red stop button helps traders to collect themselves. It’s like the limit up or limit down in the equities and futures markets.
I exceeded my maximum number of trades before price even got out of the range. The play to chase 3100 breakdown was risky and not ideal, yet I spent so much effort trying to trade it. This left me sitting on the sidelines while price gave profitable opportunity to trade what I had initially planned in the morning. (short off the 3135 resistance)

5) My morning plan in the previous post had a blindspot, I didn’t plan for price launching off the 3100 level. Must put more effort into trade planning so such blindspots don’t happen again. So that was another trade opportunity lost even if I didn’t have a monkey day.