Hello and welcome to this week’s ‘real’ adventures in the Forex Jungle. The last three months have been an exercise in patience. I had been trialling a forex system that previous to Christmas 2010 had given me a little success, but as Christmas was knocking on the door I had to take the money I had made out of the trading account.
Being out of work, having no income to speak of, I had no choice but to be patient. I thought I would trial the system further, just to make sure that the decent run I’d had previously with it wasn’t just luck.
I set up a virtual account with a spread betting firm. As usual the account was set up with £10’000. However, there was no way that I would get near a ‘real’ starting bank with them figures, so I moved the decimal point a few places, and made out that my starting figure would be a more realistic £100.
The trial period went really well, better than I expected, and the virtual account ended March on £925. Now I’m realistic enough to know that in reality I wouldn’t have made that much. The charts on demo accounts are on totally different feeds for one. Plus I made trades that I would probably have not made had I been on a live account. Taking that into account, I reckon I would still have pulled in between £6/700. That is not a bad return in 9/10 weeks from a start of £100.
So then – we move onto this week and the start of real live trading. I had furnished my spread betting account with £100, which had taken me 3 months to save! It couldn’t have got off to a worse start. Basically, the last week in March, the market seemed to head off on a tangent, as it can do, and it started this week in the same vein. Basically I was down to £32.00 by end of play Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I hit a really good streak, getting the account back up to £115 at one point, but finishing the day on £78. The market seemed to have stabilised, and the system was once again picking up winning trades.
By close of business on Thursday, I was busted! So what went wrong? All the components were in place. The system still picked up winning trades. There were no technical issues with the trading platform I use, and the PC wasn’t playing up. After spending a couple of hours analysing the previous 4 days, I came to the conclusion that the problem was the organic component that sits in front of the screen – me! I kept interfering when I shouldn’t have, throwing away potentially winning trades in the process.
I had basically broken most of the 7 Golden Rules I had worked on for trading forex. What made me do that? Was it greed? There probably was an element of greed in there, but in my defence, I would say that was brought on by desperation. There was definitely a lack of patience involved; again this was probably prompted by desperation. I’ve no work, no income and a 6 year old daughter to provide for, let alone support.
Having had some time to think it through, I’m certainly not giving up on forex trading as a way of making an income. Going back through my actions this week, I figured if I stuck to my rules, I could well have finished this week over £50 up, even taking into account the bad start to the week.
So my plan is to pick up again at the end of this month or the beginning of May; again starting with £100. This time though, I have my rules stuck to the wall above the computer screen. Once I set up my trade, I will be putting my coat on and going out. If I’m not there, I can’t interfere can I. Until next time, stay happy folks. I still am.
