ForexSpirit

My trading for the year is starting out in a slightly more rag tag fashion than I envisioned before the Xmas holiday break.

I feel that I made decent progress on the modest goals I had set myself for over the holiday period. This mainly involved working on some mental deficiencies and developing a stronger and more positive mindset in being able to correctly handle losing trades. Both in accepting that losses are inevitable but also strengthening the belief that I can minimise losses while also not envisioning every loss putting me on the slippery slope to being wiped out.

On the flip side, an unforeseen event has meant that I’ve had to dip into my trading account to shore up some expenses. I have only been trading demo recently and was originally only going to slowly return to trading live. It now makes sense to push any thoughts of returning to live trading back further. If nothing else this will give me an opportunity to refill my account back to its prior balance.

While I could view this incident as a setback I prefer to look at it as an opportunity to further develop my skills without the possibility of actually harming my remaining stake. I can take demo trading just as seriously as live trading, having had extensive experience live trading I have no problems in accepting a demo trade win or loss just the same way as I would a live trade. It’s all about the way you frame it and the responsibility you place on the individual trades. If you see the demo account as containing nothing more than monopoly money then that’s the way you’ll end up treating it. If you view it as a serious test of your trading skill and ability to follow your trading plan then the results should be close to identical.

I am going to demo trade the fti method for the next few weeks (probably until the end of February) to gain enough exposure and experience to be able to form useful conclusions as to its merit and personal compatibility.

I have returned to using MB Trading as broker for this test phase, using Ninja Trader charts, as this method is best employed with a broker who aggregates all trades in a single pair together.

For example, if I buy 10k EUR/USD at 1.3500 and then buy another 10k a short while later at 1.3550, with MB Trading your current position is the average of the two trades: 20k at 1.3525.

Most other brokers list the two trades independently and allow separate stop losses and profit taking orders to be tagged with each entry. This is the mindset I have employed to date and the way I have managed all my trades.

This trading method eschews that approach and is much more centred around the current average price of all open trades. Having a trade on engages you in a campaign where the front line skirmish revolves around the average price. Entering new trades allows you to shift that front line, while taking off part of your position reduces your exposure and risk profile.

My only real bugbear with using MB Trading for demo trading is that there is no record keeping available. You are unable to recall trades from previous sessions on their website like you can with a regular live account. This means that results have to be manually recorded each and every day, which is generally fine until you want to find out some piece of information about a session that you don’t normally record.