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Only signal I subscribed to was the COINTHL at rentasignal, as it was stated earlier in my journal. It is a bitter pill to swallow.
If I had been just trading on my own, my accounts would have been at all time highs, and I would be well on my way to what I wanted to achieve.
I was attracted to the idea of cointegration from the description of that signal, and it gave consistent results for a few weeks. However, when I was caught in a prolonged drawdown, I knew I was in deep trouble. I saw the flaw in his strategy. Basically, he had 2 sets of trade. One is a short term trade with 1/10 of the trade size. The other is a long term trade with full trade size. When the short term trades were in trouble, the long term trades would always come in, and save it because of its size. However, the fatal flaw was when the long term trades were in trouble, he didn't have a backup plan. This is why the strategy failed miserably when the long term trades got caught the wrong way.
Also, his short term trades took on a different personality, he started using straddles on the same pair, and would get caught on at least 1 side of the trade with drawdown which needed further hedging to stop the bleeding. This hedge costed margin to put on, and basically locked us into a loss.
Overall, the strategy was doomed to fail because any sustainable strategy requires to cut losers short, even if it means taking a 20% hit to the account every once in awhile. Instead, he added more to the losers in an attempt to bring the strategy back, and that was the nail in the coffin. I was furious and saw the writing on the wall, when the signal provider added another long term trade on top of the existing long term trades...which just killed the margins even further...because at that stage...we should looking at ways to preserve margin...not use it more. At that point, I knew it was the last bet to see if we can either double down to make a comeback or go completely bust. It was the latter.
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
Last edited by Kenny Rogers; 05-26-2009 at 09:41 PM.
Well, after a month of soul searching, I'm ready to pick up the pieces.
With the trading debacle recently, I've been really demotivated with trading. I still believe that I can build my account back up, but I've decided to heed my own advice and take a long term approach. At the beginning of this year, I said I was going to higher timeframe to do my trading...then I got sucked into the whole "follow the signals" game...and didn't follow my own gameplan. Instead I got onto someone else's gameplan, and that is a big mistake. Something I intend to correct going forward.
I will continue to run my own strategy on my main account. Trading on longer timeframe allows me a great deal of time to do nothing, which is not really productive. So with my science and engineering background, I've decided to take a position with a steady paycheck. I will usually check the charts 1-2 times a day, and just ride the higher timeframe trends.
Each day, I will look on the daily movement at 2-5 PM EST of each day, and place a order at that time if there is a trend. If there isn't a trend, I just don't trade. This gives me plenty of time unless I'm traveling for business, which this position requires quite frequently.
Until then, I'll remain in my own corner trying to not sabotage my own trading with more other people's distractions.
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
The itunes, iphone, and my firewall are not playing well together.
It is locking up my internet connection, and I think I finally have it solved after spending the whole day trying to figure it out.
The good news is that since I'm an early adopter for this phone, my loaded software has a software bug from Apple...which will probably be fixed by the next update. It is a good news because it is a loophole for something later to use. Right now, I'm rebooting my phone, and itunes is downloading the whole 3.0 software update.
My firewall needs to be adjusted to allow the itunes to talk to my iphone...a normal non-techy consumer would not be able to do all of these fixes to get it to work. I'm still waiting for the firewall customer service to respond, it should work once they do.
Just to show you that nothing is easy nowadays. In trading...or in getting a smartphone that syncs with your computer. There is always something that can go wrong. Ce la vie!
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
Thanks for the comments, it's good to be back. Makes me feel useful again, somewhat.
I had written a long piece about trading, but my internet connection had locked up (because of my phone), and it was all lost. So I'll write a shorter version.
Basically, when I started trading, the claim of the 24 hr nonstop Forex trading was very exciting to me. I thought it really allowed me to trade whenever I wanted to. However, once you get more seasoned, you start to understand that this is simply not true.
Strategies do not work for all the times in a day, the real forex trading hours are really from the London Open to the New York Close. The institutional and professional traders (who really move the market) need to sleep too. So the "off" hours are the wild wild West in my opinion. This is the main reason why I use the New York closing time to evaluate the price movement of the day. If there is a trend, I go with the flow. If there isn't a trend, I simply step aside, and wait for the trend. I've stopped trying to fight the trend because it was far too difficult to be consistently profitable doing it. A trend is fairly easy to spot, it consists of higher high and higher lows for an uptrend. And lower highs and lower lows for a downtrend.
Hope this will find the new trader's mind, and they can take some of my experience to become profitable.
Don't make trading difficult. It literally takes no more than 30 minutes of your day to look at a chart to be profitable if you trade at a higher time frame.
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
Last edited by Kenny Rogers; 06-29-2009 at 03:14 AM.
I think, forex trading is not just gambling. forex trading requires planning and strategy.
and... may be, gambler strategies may be suitable only for you
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods. Typically, the outcome of the wager is evident within a short period.
^ That's the definition of gambling, so which part of trading is not gambling.
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
To continue what I had stated before, I am mostly a trend trader (I also scalp, but don't like it because it is a piker's game). If prices are going higher, I'm going to buy. And vice versa. I will buy breakouts on sustained prices. I will scalp on minor pullbacks within the longer term trend. I also use stops when I trade to get out when I'm wrong. And I'm wrong quite often because the market decides it wants to reverse, and it will do whatever it wants to do to cause the most damage to the traders. I can take hundreds of pips in losses on a single trade because I have large stops. If you think you can predict the market with any kind of certainty, then you should be a millionaire by now. The market will show you signs of a trend when the herd is moving in one direction consistently, and it is your job to look at those signs, and place a bet to ride it with a positive reward to risk ratio to remain profitable. The key is to have this positive RR ratio, it is not enough to only pick up the signs.
On the GBPJPY pair, when I had done analysis in manually backtesting my trend breakout strategy, from November 08 to January 09...I would be close to breakeven if I had used some kind of trailing stop with no target profit. However, my returns varied greatly depending when I added a target profit on top of the trailing stop. For 200 pip TP, I had a 170 pip return for that time period. For 300 TP, I had an almost 300 pip return. For 400 TP, I had 500 pip return. For 450 TP, I had a 700 pip return. For 500 TP, I think it dropped back down to 400 pip return. So there is definitely some luck to making a good return. And the most important aspect is that one needs to take every trade, there were trades that was -460 pip and +500 pip, so if you had taken the -460 and not taken the +500 pip trade, you would be down in the hole no matter what TP or trailing stop you use. There is no way of knowing beforehand which trade was going to sustain a monster trend or fizzle into a quick reversal.
I have to do more analysis on the various pairs to find a range where it is profitable on each pair. I think the more analysis that I do, the more confidence I will apply it. Also, that is only the breakout results, I will need to implement the pullback buying strategy, I think it will help add to the results.
__________________
Life is a Gamble. You win some. You lose some. And life goes on.
I'm still waiting for the firewall customer service to respond, it should work once they do.
