I couldn’t do anything right today! Just a string of losing trades. And the price was trending down for most of the day!
Something is going wrong if on a downward trending day all my sell trades are losing.
The first problem is just choosing the wrong time to enter, it always seemed to take the reverse of what I needed just after I’d pressed the submit button.
Secondly, not wanting to lose too much, I had the stop loss set to just a few points and I was getting stopped out.
In the end I marked out the downward channel, this showed the likely range of movement, about 12 points max.
So I decided to use a larger stop loss (10) with a smaller (0.5) trade size. The price would have to change its character completely to stop me out.
It’s 16:57 as I write, let’s see how the trade (in the image) goes, I’ll update this post later.
17:36 Update: Yay, finally!
So it worked, I exited at the bottom of the last red candle in the image above, for a nice little win. Need a few more of those though.
And Then…
I waited for the price to get back near the top of the channel:
Did it head back down? Hell no! Like I said, I couldn’t do anything right!
Actually, when I increased the channel to include all the days trading that excursion was contained within it (with a height of about 15 points):
Perhaps the lesson is to wait for a signal candle, one that has turned in the desired direction and on the right side of the moving average.