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USD/CAD +38.1 pips

Hi everyone, thanks to Jason and Domenic for the invite to contribute to their trading blog.  Best of luck this month in reaching your financial goals!

Most posts of mine will simply be a brief breakdown of my previous trade and accompanying chart.  But first let me talk about what I am trading and how.

I have been trading FOREX off and on as a personal trader for over 5 years with mediocre success - normally just breaking even.  I have always stuck with trading technicals and basing my positions on price movement with very few indicators.  I am aware that big financial announcements affect currencies (Monthly non-farm payrolls, interest rate changes, etc.) but I decided about 3 years ago to stay away from attempting to "trade the news".  Since I got back into trading FOREX seriously in March, I have still been having little success so I decided that joining this blog would help me to stay true to my trading plan.  I'm continuing to learn lots about the mental and emotional discipline needed to achieve some form of consistent profits in this market.  If I can get to the point where I can start paying my apartment rent from my monthly FOREX profits, I will accept a victory towards my eventual goal of being a successful and profitable currency trader.

For the month of June I think I have made a substantial change to my trading strategy.  For the past 6 months I have been trading exclusively from 5m and 1m charts.  I was doing this mainly because I felt impatience in waiting for any of my positions to develop and I felt that I could be successful in trading from these shorter timeframes.  Well I haven't been anywhere near as profitable as I thought I would be by June 1, so after taking a look at other scenarios that may work I have figured that trading a 1 hr timeframe actually displays a much better trend than on the shorter scales.  It's all such a learning experience, right?  Anyway, here's my strategy that I would like to commit to trading for June.

TREND ALPHA JUNE
  • 1 hr timeframes on 8 major currency pairs.
  • Trade in direction of trend as indicated by 100 & 200 EMA indicators.
  • Open trade when price retraces to a level of resistance.
  • Close trade when price reaches a profitable level of resistance/makes a substantial gain (like a price spike) OR the trend reverses.
  • Allow one additional trade to be opened on same currency pair to cover, if initial trade isn't looking profitable.
  • Small leverage per trade, one currency traded at one time.
Pretty straightforward, but all the successful action takes place in executing properly.  My hope is that this blog will assist me in being honest with myself about obeying my rules and trading my plan.


This was trade # 1 for June and I picked up a modest 38 pips on the downward movement.  My entry was perfect and my exit was decent as well.  Not a big move, but I took profits and made a positive step in the right direction for a new month and a new strategy.  My starting balance for June is small money = $50.  My broker is FXCM and the charts are from their trading platform, Marketscope 2.0.

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