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

There was a huge drop with the EURUSD and my system had indicated a short entry at 1.4270.. this would have been a lovely entry and very profitable.. however, as you know, I work a 9-to-5 job so was unable to enter.

However, my long at 1.4241 last night with an exit price of 1.4290 yield a nice 49 pips.

I have just entered long 1.4175 now with a stop at 1.4135.. let’s see how it goes…

Tags: eurusd, forex, spreadbet, Spreadbetting

When I started to learn you trade, you naturally seek out what other people say.. unfortunately, when it comes down to what peole do say to start with, it’s mainly share tips.. this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people who come into trading are looking for a fast way to make a quick buck… unfortunately, trading does not work this way…

Trading actually made me learn a hell of a lot about myself, I learnt about controlling my emotions and also learnt about myself as a person… a lot of the learning is done through how you behaved through a situation and believe me, emotions come into play when you’re trading with your real money in the market.

Although I’ve been looking at the market now for years, I still make the same mistakes.. just less often and I get frustrated in myself.. I should know better!

Anyway, last night I made the trading mistake of reading into some fundamental analysis and allowing that to make my decision for my trading entry.

I went short with the EURUSD last night after reading an interesting article about how the bullrun with the Euro may finally be over. I got excited over this thinking that this is going to be big.. when a big trend reverses, there’s a lot of excitement (and money) to be made. Of course, this may well be true but the question is WHEN!?

I didn’t think about this last night and went short on a pullback of an uptrend in the 4 hour charts… this was stupid… the 4 hour charts show a clear uptrend and I stupidly went short. The technicals should have stopped me from entering short here but I went and did it and lost out.

I went short at 1.2860 and got stopped out at 1.2901 for -41 points.

Tags: day trade, daytrade, eurusd, forex, forex blog, Forex trading, fundamental analysis, shorting eurusd, technical analysis, technical vs fundamental