Forex Is Crazy

http://screencast.com/t/Ya15kQVwu

http://screencast.com/t/Jqf01Sr9u Link to original RMBS trades: http://inthemoneytrades.blogspot.com/2011/04/rmbs-update.html

Background: For those of you that haven’t followed this blog or don’t know my history , in mid November 2010 I started out on a 6-month journey to attempt to trade my own capital for a living. With the expiration of May options on 5/20/11 my six months is up and the results are contained within this post. Prior to this time the previous three months had been spent in Chicago trying to find an entry-level job in the options/futures industry, and the previous 18-months to that was spent as a full time MBA student. I didn’t think I was prepared to head out on my own just yet, although that was always the long-term goal. Ironically, most of the feedback I received was to do just keep doing what I’m doing. More than one person asked why I was looking for a job if I had my own capital and a positive track record. But I will be honest and say that after two failed interviews and lots of dead ends it was out of default that I chose to give this a shot. I applied to plenty of finance related j...

This is not the month I feel good about total transparency on the blog as it is a little embarrassing, but the bottom line numbers are that I have realized losses of (-$4,675), and head in to JUN expiration with MTM losses of (-$5,965). While last month was my best ever at $11,357, this was my worst ever and these results are directly related, and now I'm basically a complete wash for the last three months. Here is a shortened explanation of this month's results. I got myself in trouble on two separate trades on bond futures (ZB), and (RMBS). I got too comfortable with my past gains over the last few months in these names, which led to a false sense of security that enabled me to use larger size without having the appropriate associated risk management in place. For the last five months on ZB I've been trading one contract at a time, this month I used two and three contracts at times, and when a particular OTM call trade ran against me I started trying to trade ...

This past week was one of those where I felt like the ping-pong ball and not the paddle. The pictures pretty much tell the story. The trades below were all similar in that I used OCO orders to set my entry, exit, and stop loss points. It's frustrating to see your stop loss trigger literally be the high or low tick of the day. When it happened three different times in 24 hours it started feeling conspiratorial in nature. The only person making money this week was my broker. The total money lost on these trades isn't large, that's the purpose of using stop losses, but the net result is I had a serious of small losses and no wins. I don't mind being wrong, but for some reason if I'm wrong I would rather be really wrong and not just barely. The first thing that goes through my mind after wondering why the market hates me is if my stop losses are too tight, then I question why I use them at all, for clearly on these trades they would have all made money had I not used a ...

E-mail: JasonAndrewHaas@aol.com