ForexSpirit

The past week has been hectic and varied; there has been both enjoyable times and not so enjoyable. I even managed to squeeze in a bit of trading too.

Last Tuesday I flew out to San Francisco. I had a day long meeting on Wednesday with Sony’s PlayStation Developer Support team as part of their very helpful on-going search for feedback from video game developers on how to improve their tools and practices.

I’ve been to San Francisco once before. This was about a decade ago and I did as much touristy stuff as possible in the single day I was in town. I remember it being a very interesting place but it sure did cool down when the fog blew in from the bay. I don’t think I was properly prepared in my t-shirt and shorts that had stood me in such good steed in the rest of California that I had visited up till that point.

Unfortunately I didn’t get much chance to expand my exploration of the city this time around as I was on the red-eye flight back home Wednesday night.

I brought my tablet PC along on the trip so as to keep an eye on my trading positions. Unfortunately I forgot to pack my power supply and so had to be judicious in when I checked my trades as I only had a limited amount of power for the trip. Before my meeting started on Wednesday morning I had a stop and limit in place on my one open trade.

I had elected to take the red-eye flight back home instead of getting an extra good night’s sleep in San Francisco as my good friend Bram was arriving into Baltimore airport on Thursday afternoon after flying all the way from Holland.

My wife and I had asked Bram to be our daughter’s godfather. He was flying in to meet Sasha for the first time.

Melissa, my wife, works at the Maryland Renaissance Faire, so she was busy all weekend acting all royal and snooty as the courtly Lady Stanhope. Sasha, Bram and I paid a visit to Rebel Grove, the grounds of the Renaissance Faire, on Saturday and Sasha got to she her mommy in her element, although it did take a little bit longer than normal to recognise her in the courtly garb!

On Sunday I was knocked for six by a nasty virus. I felt nauseous and dizzy all day and restricted myself to drinking water. Bram didn’t get to see any of the other wonderful sites in Maryland but did get to spend lots of quality time with his god daughter that day.

After having a good, long night’s sleep I felt almost human again on Monday and was able to make the most of Labor Day. With my appetite reawakened we went in search of food at the Cheesecake Factory and it was good. Our waitress thought that Sasha was just adorable and wanted to know how much cheesecake it would take to trade for her. Although I am partial to the odd slice of cheesecake I had to kindly decline

While my week has been pretty eventful my trades haven’t been quite as exciting. What they were was profitable, which is just the way I like it!

I had a bread and butter trade take place on EUR-USD. The entry price of 1.3622 was a limit order hit while I was getting on the plane out to San Francisco. The exit price of 1.3657 was hit the following morning.

My USD-JPY trade which I had opened the previous week finally hit its profit target at 114.22 Tuesday afternoon while I was probably asleep on the plane.

I had no real desire to open any new positions after these two trades hit their profit targets for two reasons. The first was due to my rapidly dwindling battery reserves for my tablet PC. I wasn’t going to be able to pay proper attention to the markets until I got back home so it was prudent to just wait. Secondly, I had been waiting for my trading position to become all square so that some account upgrades that I had requested on my new Gain account could be performed. Specifically, I was looking to switch over to the institutional price feed and rollover rates.

The changeover request took a few days to process but was completed this afternoon so I am back in business.

So how did I do overall in the month of August?

Earlier in the month I was down 8% after cutting all my positions in EUR-USD as the credit crunch first reared its ugly head. I was unable to avail of the unfolding volatility and large moves, especially in the carry trade currencies, due to my ill-timed moment to change brokers.

All was not lost. Since I have been able to trade my new account I’ve returned a very satisfying 10.92%.

Taking into account all the niggly decimal points my overall return for the month of August was 2.05%. Considering that I was out-of-action for about two weeks and taking into account all the changes and turmoil in both the markets and my own trading setup I am pretty content with that return. Being able to return a positive figure in a month when all the brainiacs, algo traders and black box systems on Wall Street were seeing red in nothing to be sniffed at.