It was another basically boring week because I am STILL without my comp. I got a call yesterday and there is yet another problem with the BIOS not reading something properly. I have now...

I forgot to post to this blog on tuesday....so once I get done talking about this week that is closing up, I will paste in that post, complete with a few daytrading vids. The week continued along the lines of which pair to trade in the key spots, GBPUSD or EURUSD. We trade both everyday, actively, and you obviously first want to identify which is the stronger one for that day given the price action overnight in the London session. Sounds easy right? Well it's not, and it hasn't been. I have ben struggling the past few days, and am without my main computer, which makes it even more difficult on this stupid laptop. The charts are so tiny, I don't have the ability to use the 6 time frame profiles that I like to use, and lots of other excuses I will give for sucking this week lol.

I am just going to say F it and start fresh when I get my computer back I think. My pickup date was originally LAST thursday. Then it became mid this week, and STILL no call, so I called today, and they said something along the lines of it is not our fault, your new hard drive just hasn't arrived yet. So I said what do you have in stock, just put in the biggest one you can because I need my freaking comp. They said MAYBE I can get it back before close on Friday, but if not it will be until Monday. I mean WTF, not open on Saturdays? Can you really not afford a tech to work on Saturdays for 30 bucks an hour when you charge like 100 bucks an hour for work? I mean come on. This is a top rated shop in St Louis too, and I can't get a damn call back. If I have to wait until Monday I will seriously be pissed because I can't get a lot of shit done right now without it. I haven't played any poker this week, and am in serious need of some docs on that comp.

Anyways, my 100 trade daytrading experiment is just going to have to be started back up again Monday. I learned alot through the 60 or so trades I have taken, and I want to alter the experiment a bit, and get some more concrete rules and trading plan in place before I embark. I think I can do this...given the skills I have fom my position trading, but it's a matter of putting in the time to seriously everyday follow my rules and plan even though its just demo. I will make a post over the weekend on the modifications I am making, and then I will start fresh on a new 100k demo. The old one is going to expire anyways, since I had to basically miss out on 7 trading days, that would make it hard to get to 100 trades before expiration.

Here is the post I had on my other blog, and some vids, posted Tuesday I think. So enjoy.

A lot of people may be a bit confused in terms of why all the action I post is in the GBP and the Euro. I just wanted to make a post about why...and also give some live examples from the past few days of what I am TRYING to mimic and do in my demo account. I also wanted to illustrate how relative weakness and strength comes into play each day between these two highly correlated pairs.

The reason we trade mainly in the GBP/USD and EUR/USD is volatility. Throw up a simple 1 hour chart of the six majors in a metatrader demo account and add an Average True Range indicator to each chart. You will see that MOST of the time the pairs with the most price movement or volatility are the GBP and the EUR. They are also the most liquid pairs, so moving in and out of positions with any sort of size is easiest in these pairs. It is not like we have millions of dollars in our positions, but many people who DO are interested in the most liquid pairs. If your goal is to find a few spots to grab a dozen pips or so per day, it's gonna be hard to do that if that pair only moves 60 pips a day on average. But if the pair moves 150 pips a day, well finding a good spot for a dozen pips becomes much more possible and ideal.

First we have a 15 minute chart of the GBP/USD covering all of this week's action so far. You can see the clear trend... it's up, atleast on THIS time frame. If you look at the Daily and other higher time frames, that is not the case, hence our SHORT bias for this week. Now, let's also consider another aspect in the next picture....

Here we have the Euro, and it is a similar story, but structurally this pair is much stronger. The price action is also much stronger. You can also look to the moving averages for a simple visual representation of strength of trends. Clearly the GBP above is slightly weaker, despite being in a general uptrend SO FAR this week. That is what we expected from our analysis over the weekend....so we like to short the laggard, the GBP, whenever we can, and avoid the leader, the EUR, as much as we can.

In terms of HOW we trade them....I have attached a few videos below. All three videos exemplify the quick grabs our lead instructor is able to do, over and over again, and all during an UP WEEK. If you can make money on up days while shorting the market, you are ahead of the game in my opinion. This is something I struggle with.

I have had a lot of action on the Pound today...along with a bit of similar Euro action. Basically fading some moves up into previous resistance from last week, and also some nice gap fill trade ideas. I can't make any videos, which sucks, but I posted a pic above of the 3 spots I had today in the GBP.

It is now confirmed that I will be without my work comp until Wednesday or so due to a faulty hard drive. Total bill now exceeds 600 bucks on a computer I only spent $1300 or so to build. There's really not much I can do though, I could not take the computer back with the old hard drive in it that was failing, or beginning to fail. So after ordering a new one, some labor, installation of Windows, new drivers, and yada yada it's gonna be about 300 bucks on top of the 288 I spent already. Sweet. This thing better be like new when I get it back, and it better last me another 2 years or so with no problems.

I am still without my work computer. I can't make videos without Camtasia, and I can't really trade or play poker well without the proper set up. I am making due the best I can. I talked to the shop today and it sounds like my hard drive is ok and I SHOULD get all my data backed up and safe. That's a relief, but they did push my pickup date from today until as late as Monday. No phone call no nothing. I had to inquire. For a company that is a dime a dozen (computer repair techs are pretty plentiful these days, and comp repair isn't actually rocket science like it USED to be) I would think they need to be a little more focused on their service. If they give a customer a pick up time and date, they need to come through, and if they can't, they MUST alert that customer before to let them know the delay and why. They did nothing, and then gave a bullshit answer when I HAD to call. Needless to say I probably won't go back whether they do a good job on my computer or not. There are plenty of shops out there charging outrageous prices for data recovery and such, so why would I go back to this one?

As for trading, I am in a position trade and in the red on it on AUD/USD. I have attached a picture though to show the pattern I am watching. If this pattern plays out, and is indeed marking a short term reversal, I should get a great trade out of this. This could be a head and shoulders pattern forming, which if we break the necklines, is a great sign for my counter trend long.

So I woke up Monday and my computer was frozen. I tried everything I could, but with no luck. I must have rebooted, powered on and off, worked in the BIOS, etc. for 3 hours or so, along with talking with guys on Skype and couldn't get back to Windows. I powered off for an hour to let it cool down, came back, and waaa lahhh, got back into Windows. The problem was, I was STILL not able to move a mouse, nor get any reaction from the keyboard. From what people were telling me, it was most likely a hard drive failure, so I had to take it to a shop. 300 bucks or so later, I am still without a comp. That comp has ALL of my important stuff, which I have not backed up ever, like an idiot. I am praying to be back up and running by tomorrow morning.

I made a post a few days back on my other blog, but just couldn't really get it over to this one following the computer crash. I will just paste it in below. I also have some videos of my trading over the past few days. It has been a wild ride since starting to daytrade again, but I am liking it. I suck at it right now, but I am learning alot. I want to eventually be able to position, swing, AND daytrade, so I can exploit all markets, slow, ranging, trending, volatile, etc. This is just another experiment to push myself, and it has started off with about 8 very tough trading days. When you have a short bias on something, and you are daytrading it, AND that something decides to put in a wide range bullish daily bar, you are going to get hurt unless you are the best of the best traders. I wish I had my other comp because I have some videos of my trades, etc. but for now the best I can do is just post my old post, and wait for some new material.

Here's my latest post from my other blog:

These next couple weeks I am just going to fire away on a demo, track everything I do, and just kinda get some experience and a sample daytrading again. It has been 10 months or so since I daytraded each day, and that was equities. The same principles apply to this Forex stuff, but I feel I have a lot more skills to put into play than I did nearly a year ago. It will take a few weeks I think to get adjusted, but hopefully then I can begin taking a small amount of pips out of the market each day consistently. I want to get this down on paper...in terms of my plan...so here it goes....

Most of my week has been spent watching and learning from our lead instructor as he daytrades our live company account. The goal for this company account is to trade a 5k starter account, similar to what most guys would start with. They can see the position sizing, the variance, the types of trades he takes, and much more. It basically lets you look over the shoulder of a professional trader for 3-5 hours each day. It's been a good week so far, even though the trading has pretty much been garbage. We knew coming into the week this week to not expect much. Our sunday analysis did not give us much to work with, but there are always spots to daytrade so why not whack away right?

It was a nice long weekend, but back to work this week and pretty busy experimenting with what the best way to do our "live trading" is. We did about 1.5 hours of live interaction between members and our lead instructor today, and I think it went well even though the trade sucked and didn't work out. It's a major relief to be set up with our broker now, have a company account we can show to prove a trading record, and also just "broadcast" live to members and trial guys. We don't have to putz around in shitty demo accounts or anything. The goal will be each morning to record 1-2 hours of this action, with commentary and questions from members, then post all of these in the video vault. I think it should work out, but we obviously need to work some kinks out.