Trading your Plan

Many of you, by now, should be having a trading plan or system. If you dont,then you must be pretty new to trading. So you better get a system for yourself as soon as you can. If you dont, the law of averages would soon catch up with you and you will soon start losing money. Your system or plan can be anything but the biggest thing here is sticking to your plan.

You have developed a great trading system which you find that works 70% of the time. It is on a 1H timeframe and you usually get signals every day. So now what happens? You get a signal. You either take it or leave it. Assuming that you take it, and you get a profit of say 50 pips and then you close out the trade. The pair continues to move in your direction and keeps going on for 2-3 days in the same way. You are out of the trade and slowly you get frustated. What do you do? You try to generate signals in your mind. You open your chart, have a long hard look at it and try to see things which actually do not exist.

Why do you do that? Cos you are out of the market and you want to get into the action. You see people and traders around you making money out of the move but you are left behind. So you want to do something to get back to it. The charts do not show signals for you to get into the action but somehow you want to do it. So you start seeing signals which do not exist. One of the biggest mistakes made by traders is to see things in charts which do not exist and try and take trades just cos you want to be in the thick of things. Signals in good trading systems should jump out of the charts and stare at you in the face. They should not be hiding inside the charts that you have to go in search of it. If they are like that, then either it is not a good system or it is not a good signal. So dont take those signals.

Wait for the signals to jump out from the charts. You need patience. Lots of it. That is the key. Dont try to generate signals and dont try to look hard to see things which are not there. Sit back, enjoy your trading. Enjoy the times that you are out of the market and wait for the right signal. Signals, if they arise, would be good and bright enough for you to see even when you are half asleep. You need not put your reading glasses on to see where the signals are. They will come to you eventually. It might take hours or even days but they will come. Make sure you take them when they come and only when they come.

So getting a good trading system is only part of the job. The biggest and most important thing is sticking to your trading system at all times and all costs.

Where to re-establish longs in EURUSD ?

Attached is the hourly chart for EURUSD. It is easy to locate the control bar in this chart. I have marked off the top of the control bar and this should act as a good support. I would be looking for new longs at around 1.4330 and this aligns with the top of the control bar and is also a good area of previous support/resistance. Keep it simple.

Control Bar for EURUSD

Attached is the hourly chart of EURUSD. A control bar has formed and i have marked the high and low of the bar. This is a very big bar and hence easy to identify. We can see how the low of the bar acted as good support and has caused a bounce of about 40 pips now. The top of the bar comes in around 4230 and this area should act as a very good resistance now.

This area of resistance will be further supported by the previous resistance in the same price range as can be seen on the left of this bar. I believe this should set us into a good range for the next few hrs. Rest will depend on what outcome the euro summit, that is currently going on, comes out with.

Price Action vs. Indicators

I started out trading blindly like many other traders. I did not know what to buy, what to sell. All i understood was to buy pairs which went up and sell pairs which went down. This worked for sometime but later on the law of averages caught up with me and i started losing. Then slowly i started learning system trading. I went around forums and other parts of the net and tried to find trading systems which worked for me and which made money for me.

I found many systems, some which worked, some which did not. But there was something wrong in all the systems that i tried out. They refused to work under some circumstances. There was no system which said that if this happens, price would rise or if this happens, price would fall.There was something in there which led to whipsaws, wrong calls etc. which made me lose money and also which made implementation of the system difficult as well as subjective.
Also, many trading systems looked very complicated to me. There are systems which ask to use 10 ema, 15 ema, 39 ema, wait till one crosses another, wait till red becomes blue and black becomes yellow or whatever. But does a country's economy (on which currency is based on) depend on indicators? Do they depend on a indicator turning blue from red? Does Bernanke say 'ok 10 ema has crossed 15 ema, lets make a statement to make it cross back again'. No...So things cannot be so complex or cumbersome. There must be something straightforward.
And that straightforward stuff is price action. Everything that happens in the market is based on price action. Indicators are based on price action. All the indicators, colors etc. are merely a reflection of the price action.

And price action is a reflection of history. It is based on history. Why do trading systems stop working under some situations? Its because of the price action. Once we understand price action and how it relates to history and how to interpret all these, then we should be able to make money consistently. Indicators tell you what has happened. No indicator will tell you what is going to happen. Indicators tell you that when lot of people buy something and the price goes up, it tells you that it is overbought. It does not tell you why it is overbought nor does it tell you where and when it will stop.

If EURJPY goes from 165 to 170 without any rectracement, its obvious that its overbought. You dont need an indicator to tell you that. What concerns you at that point is whether the rise will stop, if yes, when and where. Not that the price has risen very much which is something that you can see from the chart itself and is common sense.

Where and when it will stop will be given by price action. The speed of rise will slow down, price action and history will tell you probable points of resistance and support which in turn give points where price will reverse. These tell you when and where the rise will stop. No indicator or systems based on indicators can tell you that. They always tell you what has happened and not what is going to happen. Only price action and history can tell you those. Fibos and elliot are based on price action and history and that is why they succeed so much. They are simple and straightforward. They are based on price action and that is why they are so effective.
So learn to analyse price action. This is the best way to make money in trading.

Control Bar on GBPJPY

Attached is the 15M chart of GBPJPY with the control bar marked. You can see that even though it is only the small timeframe, the top and low of the bar has contained the price very well. If you could trade the range, you might have made some nice pips already !!

Importance of leverage

Most small traders use what is known as a mini account where 1 lot is of 10K units and each pip is worth 1 unit. These mini accounts can be opened with as little money as $250. At the outset, this looks like a boon to small traders as people can get exposed and also make money with as little as $250. If you get a call right, you can make 10-20% of your investment in a single day. Now where else can you get such returns. This mini account with $250 should surely be a boon, we might think. But…Think Again..

Here is where the concept of leverage is very important. Leverage is the ability to control a large amount of something using a small amount of the same thing. Here in a mini account, you control 10K unit using just $250. Here in this case, the leverage is 10,000/250 = 400:1. That is your leverage. It looks great on paper as long as you only think about the profits that such a leverage can bring in. Assume that you bought 1 lot of EURUSD using this money. Lets assume EURUSD was 1.0000 when you bought it. It goes in your favor and rises by 1% and becomes 1.0100. So you make a cool (10000 x 1.0100) – (10000 x 1.0000) = $100 on your trade. This means that you made 40% of your investment in your trade. That sounds fantastic. Absolutely!!

But now consider this. The same trade goes against you and the price falls by 1%. So you lose the same $100. This wipes off your account by 40% while EURUSD has moved just 1 % !! So you lost 40% of your account in a single trade leaving you with next to nothing for your next trade. If your trading and your account is worth only for one trade, then it will not be a very good trading career that you are going to have.

Now consider this. You have $1000 in your mini account and as above, you buy 1 lot of EURUSD. This time the leverage would be 10000/1000 = 10:1. Now if EURUSD falls by 1%, you will lose $100 again but this time, it will be just 1% of your account. You lose 1% of your account when EURUSD moves by 1% which is fair enough and this gives you a lot of leeway for EURUSD to move even further against you. Even if it moves further against you, you still have money in your account to sustain that move. If you chose to close it, again you are left with $900 using which you still survive in the trading business.

Of course, a rise of 1% would fetch only 1% return but the aim of trading is not to become rich overnight but to remain in the game for as long as possible and to make slow, steady and consistent profits.

Always remember to have as low a leverage as possible. Trading 1 mini lot using a $250 account can be done only in dreams. Don’t even think of it. Try and have a minimum of $1000 for a mini account (many professional traders will say that even this is very less). I am sure that there are few success stories around of people who made a lot with just $250 but remember, we are not here in trading to be exceptions and to be a smart ass. We are here to make money against a lot of odds. So be as much leveraged and have as much margin as possible. If you don’t have enough money, just wait till you get the required money as it would be no point starting off with $250 because you are going to lose it anyway.

Control Bars for GBPJPY

Attached is the hourly chart for GBPJPY as requested by one of our beloved readers. We have 2 control bars on the hourly chart with basically similar highs and lows. So, consdering both the bars , i have marked off the high and low. You can see clearly that so far, despite deveral attempts, there has not been an hourly close above the high of the control bars and it has acted as good resistance.

The pound is proving to be a stubborn customer in all its crosses and has been pretty range. I expect GBPJPY to go down and so would be looking to short with a SL above 127.9. Why 127.90? Thats where the high of the daily control bar resides. As you know, the daily is usually more powerful than the hourly and thats why the SL is above 127.90.