Hi Traders,
We had an enjoyable session on Saturday at the Online Traders Forum.

The theme for the session was about planning for the year ahead.
I spoke about elements to consider when creating an intra-day trading plan.
Martin Walker talked about Planning for Profit and how to create an overall Trading plan for your trading business.

Kevin Barry provided his ever fascinating big picture analysis on the state of the global markets, and always it was worth attending just to hear his views.

There were plenty of useful ideas and content shared.

The Qnline Traders Forum – Q1 2019

Purchase access to the slides and recordings of the sessions from the Q1 2019 Online Traders Forum

£22.00

You can access the slides and recordings upon completion of the PayPal request.
The next Online Traders Forum will be on Saturday 6th April and we will be looking to focus on Trading Strategies – keep your eyes posted for details!
Trade well,
Paul

Hello traders,

So we’re into the back end of April and the Easter holidays (certainly here in Europe) are behind us and allows us to now focus on our trading for Q2. Which leaves us some topics to discuss:

1. How was your Q1? We are now into Q2 so it’s important to look back and reflect upon your performance for Q1. It provided us with some interesting opportunities. I’m a great fan of Quarterly benchmarking and reviews. If you had a poor Q1 then you still have the opportunity to learn from it, amend your approach and refocus your efforts to get you back on track for 2019. If you had a great Q1 then what can you learn from your successes to help maintain such performance? Avoid the temptation to rest on your laurels…or be overwhelmed by euphoria. The ticker has re-set for this Quarter so lets works on making Q2 a great one. If you need help with conducting such a review, or you need an educated sounding board to work off then you can engage with myself for a Trader Development Session to help ensure you’re making progress in the right direction.

2. Trading Strategies Session. As always Traders love to learn about new trading strategies. This Saturday morning, 27th April from 0900-1200 we are running the Q2 Online Traders Forum which is focusing solely on Trading Strategies for you to take away and utilise in your own trading. It’s an online event and you can get a ticket here: Q2 Online Traders Forum. The event is being recorded so even if you cant attend the actual day your ticket will get you access to the slides and the recordings of the session. Kevin’s session on intra-day trading with pivots is always worth the entrance fee.

3. Next Social Event – will be Wednesday May 15th – usual time and place – look forward to seeing you there!

4. Website – my team are slowly building my new website – I’ll be adding more trading material to it over the summer months: www.tradingbeliefs.com

Trade well!

Paul

Paul Wallace
FXIC Trader
Trader Evolution Consultant
Tradingbeliefs

Happy New Year to you all traders!

I trust you enjoyed the Christmas break and are all ready and primed for what will be an eventful 2019 in markets.

I thought Id start 2019 with a great piece of insight courtesy of one of my VTP clients. Ee Lyn is a promising trader who is progressing nicely towards consistently profitable  trading success. She is already managing funds and chipping away nicely.  I received an email from her last week updating me on her trading performance for December:

“Here are my trade results for the 2 weeks to year-end. I have kept my Gold trade open over the holiday period as it was in profit and I have been trailing the SL with the swing lows. Should have kept the last CADJPY trade going as well (I closed the trade manually) as my original target was W1 support at 80.50 (8R profit) and SL had been moved into profit prior to Christmas. The first CADJPY trade was entered on D1 chart, and the rest were adding to the position (entering on H1) when the SL for each subsequent position had already been moved to either break even or profit. I now see what you mean about adding to positions!!

CADJPY short +5R
CADJPY short +7R
Gold long still open
USDCHF short break even
US30 short +2.1R
AUDJPY short +5R
CADJPY short +5.4R
CADJPY short +3.7R
US30 short break even

I hope youd agree that’s a strong end to 2018. She’s posted a fine set of trading results and can take some personal and professional satisfaction in her performance.

I have for many years being mentoring folks that the way to make step-change in their equity curves is to look at riding their winning positions by adding to them. I call it “The Brasso Trade”.  As your man George Soros says:

I teach traders a very simple mechanical way to add to their position that also includes risk and trade management.  Now of course it’s much easier to talk about adding to your position than actually to do it so what I suggest is that people start by adding at the smallest amount possible – to get themselves into the habit of adding to their winning trades. Remember that is also very important – we are adding to winning trades. That is a very different proposition from averaging down on a losing trade!

Ee Lyn has very kindly provided me with some screen shots of one of her positions in CADJPY and has allowed me to share them with you all.

I hope it gives you some insight into the power of building a position and how adding to your winning trades is the way forward.  Perhaps you could make it part of your goals and objectives for 2019 to build an adding-on tactic to your trading plan?  I’ll be covering a small element of this in our Q1 Online Traders Forum on Saturday 12th January.

Ee Lyn has demonstrated some fine trading here and it bodes well for her continued success and development as a trader in 2019. I believe she’ll become a truly world-class trader and money manager.

Fellow Traders,

Over this last summer I re-read the trading classic Pitbull by Market Wizard Marty Schwartz. I originally read it about 12 years ago and so it was a pleasant re-read.  After all these years I was able to take some different messages from Marty’s journey.

I can heartily recommend the book as a good read for traders of all levels. Marty is pretty open about his experiences and the roller-coaster ride he went through.

I was reminded that on the last few pages he references a Pogo cartoon which I myself have used many times: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Newbie traders may see that cartoon and be wondering what on earth that has to do with trading?  Experienced traders nod their head wisely and know instinctively how wise the cartoon is!

The longer you trade the more you realise that it is not the market which is your enemy, it is you.  The market is just a mirror the reflects your own strengths, weakness, biases and darker elements of your character!

New traders like to think that they trade in a silo, that all they need is a fool-proof trading strategy that will make money for themselves.  However with time and experience you realise that it becomes about understanding yourself better and subsequently managing yourself better than before.

That’s why every year I run a two-day workshop based on helping traders raise their self-awareness about managing themselves as traders. The idea is to start to show them their blind spots so they can start to mitigate the risks to themselves.

It’s also about helping you spot the signs of a possible performance slump, and more importantly what you can do to recover when you’re in one (and trust me, everyone has performance slumps as a trader – if they tell you that they don’t then they’re lying!)

On Managing Self and becoming a Money Manager is aimed at helping you evolve in your trading towards professional status, whilst building your own trading business.
It will consist of:
– 2 x full days on 22nd & 23rd November in Central London
– 1 x follow-up online session
For a total of 18  hours working together
It’ll will be split into 2 sections namely: Half on managing self and the other half on managing money – namely other people’s. You may or may not have dreams of becoming a money-manager, however acting as if you are a fund manager is never a bad thing in your own trading business. It holds you to a higher standard in your own behaviour. This whole stage will be focused on what you need to do to build your own trading business that will put you in the right space to be able to seek funding (if that is your long-term aim).

So as always there’s a cost implication: the cost for this stage will be £397.  However for viewers of this blog or members of the London or Dublin Traders Network I will be offering a  reduced price of £347 for the 2 days.

There are 4 slots left and as always it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. If you’re interested or want to know more then drop me a line.
Trade well,
Paul
@FXTraderPaul

Hello trader,

Well yesterday I was provided the alert below from my Facebook feed (this post isn’t about FB – but wasn’t that a beauty move last night?)

FB was politely reminding me of a post from 10 years ago – 25th July 2008. It made me smile – because I knew exactly what trade it was reminding me of. Fancy that – after 10 years and thousands of trades – I still remembered the exact trade that my post was about. Is that a) weird, or b) superb or c) a sign I need to get a life and a wife? (Maybe it’s all three.)

So what was my post about?  It was about a short in the Dow Jones that I had been running for several weeks from back in May – throughout July price was grinding north, and I was getting a little nervous that I had overstayed my welcome and that the trade was about to be profit-stopped out.

So lets take a look at a chart and I will share my successes and failures from that trade.

Behold this is the Daily chart of the Dow Jones from the summer of 2008. Lets add some context.  The Summer of 2007 was when the credit crunch began. How do I remember? Because I was in Verona to watch the Opera Carmen and L’Arena (yes, you’re right, I am much classier than I look.) It was whilst there that the credit crunch began – there was a couple of weeks of volatility and then the market calmed down. In fact people forget that after the credit crunch began the Dow actually climbed to new all-time-highs reaching its peak in October 2007 just a sliver under 14,200. After that it was all downhill, of a sorts. (Take a look at the weekly chart of that time – it set-up as a nice head and shoulders pattern)

If I’m honest I cant really remember anything major about trading during the early part of 2008. A quick look of my notes shows trading UK Equities, FX, Indices and Commodities (basically Gold). I would intra-day trade FX, but trade all the others off the Daily Chart. I don’t recall any sense of foreboding or imminent doom in the first half of 2008.  But I’ve learnt with time that market collapses are a bit like geo-political collapses and Arsenal Premier league challenges. Things happen slowly at first, and then things unravel really, really quickly!

What got me interested was end of April and start of May 2008 the price on the Daily Chart rallied upto the Daily 200 MA and printed a Double Top / M pattern / 123 – call it what you will. This was my short trigger. It was also back up towards the area of the weekly neckline. Nice easy trade. I shorted the second pin bar off the 200 MA and then also an additional trade when it broke point 2.

Price moved down nicely and I was happy when it broke the support area in the region of 11750. When price came back north form the 11000 area in mid July I was worried that the move was over and I was going to give a lot back (my stop was about 25 ticks above 12000 at that time). It was after it came back and touched that line in mid-to-late July that I posted that FB entry. For the remainder of July and August I watched price grind north.  For most of August it knocked about a range of 11250 – 11750 but as September took hold the daily ranges started to get larger and the swings wider.  We also started to have bad news seeping out. This is when I ended up closing the trade around the 11,250 mark. To be honest – I think I got spooked out – the news through September was getting worse and worse – and the markets reaction were becoming more volatile. At that time I was also trading money for other people and it just seemed a good move to lock in a healthy profit for me and clients.

So I traded down from approx. 12960 (1st trade) to 11250. That was a fine trade. However within 4-5 weeks of my exit the Dow was trading down at 8000!  Woulda, coulda, shoulda!!

The blue arrow is pointing to Monday 29th September, an interesting day. However Ive written enough for this piece so will save that for another day.

Hindsight Super Trader

What I did do also was when re-taking a look at the charts I started adding all the add-on trades that I missed. There were plenty…….but then there always are in hindsight! God its so easy to trade in hindsight. 😉

But its no bad exercise to look at past trades and see what can be learnt from the experience. It’s 10 years on since that trade. I believe myself to be a far wiser, smarter trader now than back then (I truly believe that experience counts massively for private traders – its just that most people don’t last long enough to learn that.)

I scribbled on some additional add-ons here.

So was I a good trader for my initial position? ( I think it was a lovely, and very natural, trade set-up for myself.)  Or was I a terrible trader for being spooked out of my position and not riding it through the great crash?

Trade well,

Paul