My Forex Trading
May 6th, 2008I am actively learning and trading the Forex World Currency market. I started learning from mentors and instructional tools back in March of ‘06. I heard it takes an average of two years to learn enough to start trading profitably.
Why am I living in Japan? I quit my career as a Mechanical Engineer after studying at the UW for 4 years and working a job for 5 years. I needed to learn how to make money more flexibly than spending all my time making other people money. I quit my job in August ‘06 after cashing out my 401(k), and selling one of my two houses. My plan was to live off the savings while learning how to generate income with Forex trading. I decided to reduce my expenditures by moving to Tokyo, where my wife’s parents were more than willing to let us live with them since they wanted to spend time with our 2 young kids. So we moved to downtown Tokyo in Sept ‘06. That’s the living situation.
Now onto trading. Trading has been difficult to learn. One needs to refine their personal method of trading in order to make it work. I have found this to be true with all successful traders. They all found their own way of trading. I started out learning other people’s methods, but in the end, I had to take the time to learn my own. And I think I have. I want to use my blog here to show you my progress. I have learned a lot of the past couple years and I hope you can learn something from my results and explanations.
My goal is to make at least $5000 per month before I move back to the US in two years. I am planning on making at least a 10% ROI, (return on investment) monthly. This means I need at least $50,000. I actually think I need between 50-75k for my trading account. I started out with $2000. I will track my progress here and give insights on what went right or wrong. I trade small sizes of 1% of equity for each trade on the EUR/USD only. I look for places where price action reveals that price is exhausted and ready to reverse. Price action tells me where to take trades based on times its tested and failed to break a level or amount of pips its traveled in a single trading day.
Initial capital : $2000
Goal: $50,000
Monthly goal: 20% ROI from beginning of month
Daily goal: 1% ROI from beginning of month
March Results: -$270 Balance = $1730
April Results: +$1495 Balance = $3225
Daily goal = $20 Daily average = $75
March started out rough. I decided to take losses on trades that I thought were in the wrong direction in addition to having too many trades open, overleveraged.
April was much better with a huge 86% return with a much higher daily average than expected. I know these results will vary but the technique and situation was repeatable. I was on the right side of the trades more often and able to let trades go farther intraday to bag more profits.
Goal $50,000
Currently $3225
I am currently working to close some outstanding trades that were buys because I thought price would retest the 1.6000 level and then make a big downward move. I was off on my timing so far. It didn’t retest the top as in the prior new all-time highs. But I am not closing them for a loss because the EUR/USD usually always comes back and retests the area again so I will have a chance to exit those in profit. I have a bunch of sells after the NFP report that were hedges since price had a high chance to continue testing lows starting Monday. I will hold those and close in profit as well, but I will have to be patient.
I have to credit the Team and FXI for helping me trade profitably. Check them out and learn how to for yourself.
More to come soon.
