Friday 19th March – Finishing the week with a couple of cheeky pips + 28

So final day of the week and my final couple of trades.  There were a few setups for me to take and I decided upon GBPUSD and GBPCHF for my early morning breakouts.  These two trades are described below.

GBPUSD.

1.    I’m short at 1.5215 with a target of 1.5170, price moves down strongly, there is a real collapse in sterling across the board.

2.   Price hits my 1^st target and my stop is moved to entry.  I’m now in a risk free trade after only a few minutes.

3.   Price collapses further and gets to within 7-8 pips of my target before reversing strongly. You can see that it prints a low-test reversal bar, a strong indicator that the next likely move is up.  Furthermore it prints these bars across, GBPUSD, GBPJPY and GBPCHF.  It’s my general rule that I tighten my stop when such bars are printed and today was no different.  Price does reverse and heads back and hits my new stop profit level of 5209 for 6 points of profit.  More on this later.

 GBPCHF.

1.  Like GBPUSD I am looking to go short and my order is triggered at 1.6092 and it drops strongly.
2. Price reaches my 1^st tgt….but does not take me out due to the 5 point spread (more on this later) before hurtling back past my entry.  I do consider closing my trade but my fears are soothed by the fact that the other sterling crosses are showing weakness and CHF is showing strength.  I hold on.
3. Price resumes its downward trajectory and hits my 1^st tgt so I move stop to entry as per my plan.  Price continues falling nicely towards my overall target of 1.6047.  Once again price goes past my target but I am not taken out because of the spread! Grrrrr.  As per the other crosses GBP bounces strongly and also prints a low test reversal bar.  As per Cable I tighten my stop to just above the reversal bar.  So convinced am I that I will be stopped out on both positions that I take myself off to have some breakfast.  I return to find that yes both positions are taken out and I have collected +22 points from my GBPCHF trade.

 So overall I’m taken out for a total of +28 points of profit.  Anyone who knows what happened on Friday will realise that Sterling  kept falling all day and there were some great profits to be had.  I could complain about only taking +28 points, but what good would it do?  At the end of the day I’m grateful that I was able to trade and walk away with just over a 1% profit for my days efforts.  When put in that perspective I would happily take those results every single day for the rest of my trading career!  Perspective is a powerful tool to a trader!

 What was interesting was that had I not tightened my stops after the large low-test reversal bars I would have been stopped out for 0 points on GBPUSD but would have eventually hit my +45 target on GBPCHF.  But that falls into the realms of woulda / coulda / shoulda hindsight trading (read more about that here).  Today sterling decided to continue dropping after printing low test reversal bars across the board.  Another day that would not have happened.  You have to have a plan in mind and follow it.  So I’ll accept the results with good grace and reflect on the fact that it’s still left one account up 6% on the week and another account up 1.5% on the week. As I said perspective is a powerful tool for a trader!

 Trade Well

 FXTrader Paul