Forex Trading Journal - Calendar Week 46, 2020

This was my worst week yet, in terms of winners/losers - I lost all of my trades, 100%. I only took 5 trades the whole week, 3 on Monday, 2 on Thursday. While things were still somewhat erratic and unpredictable due to the continued uncertainty of the US presidential election spilling over from the previous week, that wasn't really the reason for my results.

I wasn't necessarily just plain wrong on what I thought would happen, compared to what did actually happen. Sometimes of course I was just plain wrong. However, what often tends to make me lose is the timing of entering my trades. I will observe, wait and analyze to gain confidence. By the time I decide to enter the trade, I might have assessed the current situation correctly but the market has already moved on.

Here is a good example, the first trade of the week, going short on USDCHF.

First, looking at Bollinger Bands on the 30 minute chart, USDCHF was getting to a place where it appeared heavily overbought.

My thoughts at this point were that there was either going to be a short retracement, or potentially a trend reversal. Either way, it seemed like a good opportunity to go short. Looking at some trend lines on the 1 minute chart seemed to confirm this.

It did indeed turn out to be a short retracement. Sadly - and, of course - by the time I had built enough confidence to actually enter the trade, the retracement was just about ending and the overall uptrend of the USD continued.

This isn't the first time something like this happened.

Now I am thinking that maybe I should experiment with trades on longer time frames, with different lot sizes and different ranges for my stop loss and take profit targets. This week, I have also learned that my broker Global Prime has a Discord server with mentor rooms to help new traders like myself. While I have a tendency and preference to figure things out by myself, that is something I might explore in the coming weeks.

On a more technical side of things, there were some good news though! I was made aware that Global Prime is now integrated with TradingView.

This is excellent, since it allows me to use the same data source for my trading as well as my charting. Global Prime even has plans for the future to enable trading directly through TradingView, which would make entering trades while charting super convenient.