Welcome to my journal, I'll start off with a bit about my journey to this point, followed by my goals for this journal and my trading plan.
My path to this point can best be summarized as follows:
Have always had a keen interest in the markets and decided to learn more about forex trading about 4 years ago
As I studied trading I knew that this is what I want to be doing
Read many books, blogs, and articles and tried to find my niche
Looked into a developing a mechanical system as well as systematic trading but these didn't fit with my view of the market or my psychological makeup
Started to study pure price action and finally had something that I felt I could do and that also made a lot of sense to me
I traded on sim for just over a year and showed some improvement but knew that in order to truly learn the psychological aspect of trading that I would have to shift to real money
Started trading real money with very small size about a year ago and have shown flashes of success but am not profitable on a consistent basis. I realized part way through this that I was spending too much time focusing on setups and not viewing the overall context of the market
Found FIO and joined elite to be with a community of like-minded people who hopefully can help me along in my journey and who I can also hopefully help by documenting my journey and sharing whatever I can in other posts as well
My goal with this journal:
Force accountability on myself by making my thought process public
Forward test a series of setups (important to note that I dont view these setups as a black and white trade or dont trade holy grail, rather I view them as a graphical representation of the current market action and that the context that these setups are occurring in is more important and relevant than the setups themselves)
Receive feedback from the FIO community and share my ideas and market philosophy with the community
My goal in the first four weeks of this journal is not to focus on profitability, rather it is to get myself in the habit of formally defining context and a plan of attack at the beginning of each day and then formally reviewing my results at the end of each day. I am also focused on following my trading plan and not over-trading. I will measure my success at the end of these four weeks by how well I was able to maintain this schedule as well as how well I was able to follow my plan. After these initial four weeks I will review and set additional goals for the next four weeks.
I intend to trade real money risking no more than 0.1% of my equity per trade. I do not plan on increasing risk until I have a positive expectancy on my last 10, 20, 50, & 100 trades.
I am able to trade daily from around 7:30 10:00AM EDT. My plan is to view and attempt to interpret the price action during the first half an hour or so of this time. I will post a daily context log which I will use to define areas of support and resistance gleaned from both a 5 minute chart as well as an hourly chart. I will also make note of any significant news scheduled during my trade session and whether I believe that I should be preparing for a trend session, a range session, or if I need to be patient and wait for the market to make up it's mind. In the evenings I will review and post the days results along with a marked-up chart and whether or not I followed my plan with regards to the trades I took. At the end of each week I will review these daily posts and identify what I have done well and what I need to focus on in the coming week. I will trade my plan without any changes or second-guessing for 3 weeks straight at which point I will look at the stats to see if there are certain setups that are not performing well and if I should be dropping these, or if there are additional setups that I should be including.