Diary of a Novice Forex Trader

After getting a hang of trading, I was feeling pretty confident to trade. In fact, I became over confident. After closing my initial trade and made some profits, I saw EURUSD kept climbing up, and without really thinking, I said, “This guy must be coming back down soon … “

So, I went on short, against the uptrend thinking I could be making a quick profit.

I was wrong. It kept going up, almost vertically, breaching the 1.2780 mark. I lost all the profits I made this morning. Instead of holding on to the trade, and wait for it to eventually come down to recover my position, I lost them again to the stop loss I set up.

The price did eventually come down, over 6 hours later, to be as low as 1.2720. I could have made some profits had I hold on to my sold position, but …

So, all in all, I’ve lost USD47 for the day, bringing my equity down to USD453.

Some lessons I learned, the hard way that is:

1) Never jump into a trade without analyzing the situation. Have some discipline to plan out your moves and have a clear justification why you trade in a certain direction.

2) Never go against the trend in the hope for a quick profit. Prices can move very quickly in either directions, but at the end of the day, the longer trend would stamp its mark.

3) Never put the stop loss less than 50 pips from your position. Prices can spike against you pretty bad. In fact you don't need a stop loss unless you are leaving your trading station with open positions.

4) For a short-term trading, hold on to your position as long as you could. Prices go up and down in a big way, and you could eventually gain back your investments.

5) Trust your long term indicators. What the heck have you got them graphs set up for if you ain't gonna follow them?

6) And relax, will ya? Always have confidence that everything is working out. And don't forget to feel grateful, always! :)

Alhamdulillah, after around 4 and a half hours, I exited the trade with a profit of USD27. I was playing with my stop loss settings, and I had set it up a bit too close to the current price, and there was a spike down which stopped my trade.

Nevertheless, I am grateful. The gain was not big, but it was sufficient to build my confidence up. I've increased my equity by 5.4%, and I'd feel more comfortable to throw in a few more trades.

Most importantly, I know that there's more where that came from. My goal this month is to double my capital, so I have another USD473 make. I'll wait for the price to go down a bit more before entering the trade again for another ride up.

It has been fun.

Managed to muster enough courage to buy for mini-lots of EURUSD at 1.2725 this morning. Actually, it just sank to me over the weekend that there's no need to be fearful as 1-pip in a mini account is only USD1.

Currently watching the price hovering over 1.2731 giving me a 6-pip gain or USD24 profit if I were to close the transaction.

Judging from the previous pattern for the past several days, and several news sources that USD is still weak, I'm confident that EURUSD would breach the 1.2740 mark.

I've set the take profit (TP) point at 1.2749 for a 24-pip gain. Let's see how it goes in the next couple of hours. Wish me lots of luck! I surely need them for my first real trade. Thanks!

I've got my real account set up with InterbankFX. I submitted the application on Wednesday, got it approved, and deposited the initial fund on Thursday through online banking. The internet makes it very convenient these days to do business globally.

This morning I received the password to my account. I logged in and saw the deposited money in the account sitting idle. This is the real money now, not paper anymore. And almost immediately I felt rather overwhelmed with the sense of fear. God knows where did that feeling come from, but it's a whole different experience I'm going through.

I've been talking about mastering fear, and here I am looking at it in the face. So first I've got to calm myself down and look at everything in perspective. This is just a game. A game of life I am playing. It's gonna be fun and I'm going to enjoy it. I'm gonna keep my head clear and put all the focus in the precious now. And let everything flow as they have been intended. Full acceptance and zero resistance to the forces that are taking place. I am in total control of my being.

There you go. I'm feeling a lot better. Sorry about that, but I needed to psyche myself up. Now, before I go back to trading, let me finish some of the work piling up in the office.

I saw a buy indicator on the AUDNZD on both the 4-hour and 30-minute charts. Bought it at 1.1964 and immediately lost 14 pips from the broker's spread. I just learned that some currency pairs have huge spreads. EURUSD, being heavily traded, have only 2-pip spread.

Anyhow, as AUDNZD was on an upward trend, I managed to sell it off at 1.1998 for a 34-pip gain or a cool USD218 profit.

With a real account starting with only USD500, I'll be trading on a mini-account and the profit per lot will be 10 times smaller. To increase the profit, I'll be throwing in 10 lots per trade. I guess that the spread cost would increase 10 times also. I need to check this out on the demo account.

I continued to paper trade on the MetaTrader 4 software and made USD180 on EURUSD and and also USD300 by going short on USDJPY.



So far I've increased my equity by 29% after only a day. Yet to see any major trading lost. The EMA89 and 144 indicators on the 4-hour chart have been very helpful in giving me the direction to trade and the confidence to stay on a winning trade.

My strategy for now is to continuously scan for any buy or sell indicators on the two sets of EMA's across all major currency pairs using the 4-hour charts.

My next step is to complete my application with InterbankFX to open a live account. Work is mounting up at the moment, I hope I could find some time to start trading for real.

I've finally installed MetaTrader 4 for my PDA. It's definitely the best piece of software my PDA has ever seen. I'm getting live streaming prices and charts with all the indicators that I need. I'm currently trying it out for 7 days before I need to purchase the license for it which is about USD45. I believe the price is really worth it.

I opened a demo account with InterbankFX today just to get the hang of mobile forex trading. It's really fun. Starting with USD3k, I bought 1 lot of EURUSD at 1.2575 and sold it off an hour later at 1.2586 for a USD110 profit.

I set up two sets of EMA 89 and 144 indicators, and saw a sell signal for USDJPY, which I did at 113.78 and closed it an hour later at 113.46 for a cool USD282 gain.

With a couple of other smaller gains, I've made over USD500 for a few hours of trading. Wow! Is this for real? I just need to trade for several days a week to make more than what I currently earn from my 9-to-5 job.

Abg Hashim has started his real account with Rich-Lam's office in KL as his broker. I believe he has made over USD4k from his USD10k account. From what he explained, his broker has a way of minimizing loss to the point that every trade is guaranteed to be a winner. I don't much about it yet to be able to explain how it's done, but it does sound wonderful. Real easy money.

I was just checking the USDJPY which I went short at 113.55 earlier on. It has further dipped to 113.23 for another USD282 gain. I'm just gonna let it slip further down and set the profit taking at 112.87. Let's see that comes through while I am asleep tonite.