What's been going on...

intro

Wow it's has been a long time since I last posted. In all honesty I've been having a rough time with my trading and I sort of fell out of the habit of keeping up with the blog. This was partly due to the "bad time" but also because I'm a member of a private group on facebook run by my coach which has in some ways replaced my blogging.

what happened

Well I had 14 losses in a row and that really sapped my energy and enthusiasm. They were okay trades, my coach had a look at them and basically said they were just bad luck. But in all honesty that didn't really help. I managed to reduce my risk on all of them so despite risking 1% per trade I was probably down around 8% by the end, this however triggered my 8% drawdown rule to stop and take stock. Which is what I did.

What I found was that I was often getting in at the end of moves, selling low and buying high. The reason for this was partly to do with the method I have been taught, it's all about getting alignment over multiple time frames but obviously by the time that happens the market can be quite overextended. I also found I was missing great moves because the filter method was a little twitchy. Id' often find a nice trend experiencing a deep pullback but would then be unable to trade it because the filter indicated the multiple timeframes were no longer in alignment. These often worked as predicted which was quite frustrating.

going forward

This is absolutely not blaming someone else for my errors, I wasn't trading the method as well as the person who created it. For example there were certain trades I should have avoided due to geopolitical reasons which I missed. This however pointed out that I'm actually not very good at predicting geopolitical events, ha! And so the dreaded change of method felt necessary so that I could avoid needing to rely on skills I don't really have, while also cutting out the frustrating trades of selling low/buying high, or simply missing moves that I thought were valid because the method discounted them.

In fact when it came down to it I haven't really changed the method, instead I've made it longer term to filter out some the geopolitical noise and keep me in on the deep pullbacks. My plan is to try and improve this skill over the course of the year, but I need my trading to provide an income now so filtering it out for the time being seemed the only viable option.

If you got through to the end of the post, thanks reading! I've got a couple trades/orders in the market at the moment and I will try put these up sometime soon.