Why:
I have been very lazy logging my trades and thoughts and am going to make the effort to change that. In all honesty I am not very fond of doing it in public but I am going to try and see what comes out of it.
I am currently at a place where I should be profitable. I have discipline issues though and hope to correct them.
I used to trade futures (not profitably) but have moved to forex and cfd's since that allows me to trade smaller size and scale (have been profitable since).
The goal of 2016 is to prove to myself that I am finally at a place where I am consistently profitable and then I will pump my size up in 2017.
What
The trades I will log here are real trades not sim. The size does not matter though (it's small) but how I use it.
I will trade six instruments: EUR and AUD against the USD and cfd's of SP, Crude, Bund and Gold.
I have mostly traded EUR and AUD but would like to add instruments representing stocks, rates, energy and metals as a way to diversify and practice trading those asset classes and hopefully help me understand or at least notice how correlation between them might work.
How
I will trade swings and intraday. I have a full time job so intraday trading has been frustrating to me because I can not trade the way I would like timewise. Also I would like to compare the results from those two approaches to determine if maybe one suits my better than the other.
I will mostly focus on EUR and AUD intraday.
My method is technical and discretionary. I use two moving averages on all my charts and sometimes Keltner channels or some other way to measure likely levels where price might react.
I want to use two approaches in my swing trading. With trend and mean reversion. I want to be active and in the market as much as I can. If not with a position then at least with an order to get me in. I want to get out rather quickly and book my profits. I want to work on holding my trend trades longer and maybe trail or use some other method to exit instead of a fixed target.
In my intraday trading I will follow the momentum of price as I see it on a Daily, 60 or 30 min charts. I preferably want to pick a side and trade that way and not switch back and forth.
My goal is to make 5-10% on my account per month. Some drawdown is OK but I have found that if I get stuck with a relatively large losing position my mind starts to focus just on that and I miss other opportunities. So cutting losers rather quickly is what I will aim at. Using leverage in the 3-5x my account is OK and some times 10x if I have to bully myself back into the green (or blow myself up).