ForexSpirit

The US equity markets were upbeat today. In tandem with the excitement surrounding today’s US Presidential elections perhaps?

Given the current market dynamics a positive DOW meant that the dollar got sold. EUR/USD surged just over 500 pips to return to the 1.30 handle. All the main moves happened in the Asian and London sessions. By lunchtime in New York there was the beginnings of moves off the high.

The interesting thing I’m trying to decipher is why I decided to go short on trades 6 and 7.

On the EUR/USD I think the entry point at 1.2975 was poor. If I was going to go short it would have been better to do that if price got back up to 1.30 (which it did and bounced nicely from). In hindsight a long entry at 1.2950 would have also worked out well, but at the hard right hand edge before that bounce there were no real solid reasons to view 1.2950 as a support area from the prior price action.

While the entry point might have been poor what was a mistake was entered a trade on GBP/USD around the same time. There was no real need for this and it only doubled my exposure.

When price broke back above 1.30 and the euro move seemed to be back on I got itchy feet. After last week’s poor performance on managing my losing trades I think I swung too far the other way today and closed both trades out at once.

Of course, if I’d held on another 15 minutes I could have closed out both dodgy trades at break even. Such is the will of the markets sometimes.

In a do-over, I would still have wanted to do something so as to act on my view that I’d got my entries wrong. I would close out one of the trades and booked a loss. It would then be easier to manage the remaining trade.

A single managed loss would have resulted in a breakeven day. The benefits of proactively managing my losses is clear when compared to last week’s performance. I have to pay more attention to the spacing of my trades across the multiple pairs. I don’t want them to come into play simultaneously as that only compounds things when the trades go against me.

Trade 1
Short EUR/USD
Entry: 1.2760
Exit: 1.2750
Pips: +10

Trade 2
Short GBP/USD
Entry: 1.5906
Exit: 1.5896
Pips: +10

Trade 3
Short EUR/USD
Entry: 1.2891
Exit: 1.2881
Pips: +10

Trade 4
Short EUR/JPY
Entry: 130.04
Exit: 129.94
Pips: +10

Trade 5
Long GBP/USD
Entry: 1.6048
Exit: 1.6058
Pips: +10

Trade 6
Short EUR/USD
Entry: 1.2975
Exit: 1.3047
Pips: -72

Trade 7
Short GBP/USD
Entry: 1.5950
Exit: 1.6021
Pips: -71

Trade 8
Long EUR/USD
Entry: 1.3004
Exit: 1.3017
Pips: +13

Trade 9
Long EUR/JPY
Entry: 129.546
Exit: 129.653
Pips: +10.7

Total daily pips: -69.3