I have been thinking about trading and athletes. The best in both fields have trained themselves to the highest standards… with athletes, this obviously means regularly training intervals and lots of lots of repetition through working their bodies through motions to help their mind and body connect.

Trading is the same.. you need to have experienced and trained yourself. I mention training oneself since I am a self taught trader, I am not an institutional trader.

This means that when I’m competing (in competing, I mean trading).. I need to ensure that to end up as a winner I need to be completely focused, trained and ready for the experience. If you take the 100 metre sprint..  that could be the equivalent of a trading session. You watch these athletes and they are physically in tip top condition.. their psychology allows them to visualise themselves winning.. it’s about setting a goal.

I write this today as I am trading today.. I am committing myself to a day every couple of weeks to trading. I want to experience the feeling of being trader, to see if I can do it.. to see if I can deal with sitting here on my own looking at the markets and making money from it.

Today, I’ve not started that well.. my mind is on other things. You know what it’s like.. if someone tells you that your next shot at a round of golf is going to determine whether you win or lose..  that added pressure doesn’t help you… you invariably end up screwing up.

Yes, so today I had two trades open in the market.. a short on both the EURUSD and the GBPUSD. I shorted the EURUSD but as it went up, I closed it for a 3 pip win. I then entered another short at a few prices worse than the previous one and then got out when I couldn’t deal with more than a 25 pip loss so I took it. The markets have since reversed and I would be in a 10 pip and counting win so far.

The GBPUSD was a good entry… however, I took profit way too early and have left a 30 pip profit on the table.

So my psychology wasn’t good today.. even though I ended up in positive (it was only +2 when it could be +60 and still counting)

(click to enlarge)

Tags: eurusd, gbpusd, trading psychology

I thought I’d dabble again today and get back into the swing of doing some trading. It’s been a while since I updated this blog but I do want to get back into it and start updating the blog as religiously as I used to.

Anyway, some nice technicals on the DOW today. You could see that there was a clear downtrend channel (where I have wrote ‘resistance line here’), I drew the line to see how the chart would react to this line.. obviously, the idea is that if you are looking to sell, sell when it gets near this resistance, if you are looking to buy then buy when it pulls back to this line.

This is exactly what happened.. the price action broke through the resistance line and then fell.. when it did, it penetrated the line (now support) before bouncing up.. this was the time to enter so we’re in at 10285. I felt confident with this entry as the ADX line also has the green uptrend line cross the red downtrend line.

The first area of resistance would be the 10300 mark but the market didn’t even seem to notice this level so I left it. The next level was 10330 or so which was form from a previous peak (which we can extrapolate back from the original resistance line.. sorry, it wouldn’t fit on our chart).

It was at this point I took profit ..  a nice 45 point day!

(click picture for larger image)

I shorted the DOW when it broke the trendline at 9740 or so.. however, it wasn’t the perfect entry as the market bounced from this area of support to go north… I had a stop at 9780 which was the previous high but nonetheless, my short wasn’t ideal as short trades should be entered on a long countertrend.

I had to watch the market go against me 30 points or so before it tanked.. it went past my entry point and I took profits at the round number 9700 for 40 points which wasn’t bad. However, the market is still going down, as I write, it’s at 9672 meaning that I left another 30 odd points on the table… nevermind!

The market just dropped further and hit 9660….. double nevermind!

Tags: day trade, daytrading, dow, intraday trading, shorting the dow, Spreadbetting