Welcome to my investing blog! This is where I share my trading journal — my thoughts on various currency pairs before I get into trades, and the analysis of my trades themselves. Today, I took a long trade in the Euro-Yen currency pair. Read on to see how this trade played out.
EUR/JPY Long
Expected Entry – 160.31 Stop Level – 160.15 Target – 160.63 R:R – 2
If I’m playing probabilities, it means I need to get my trading numbers up. And to get my numbers up, I need to continue looking at charts, even after my initial view/analysis; which is what I did today. I thought about putting in an OCO order here earlier, but couldn’t quite get the numbers ironed out. Upon returning, though, I see that long was the way to play this today.
Entry – 160.314
There was a strong spike shortly after I came across the trade, and when I came back to it just now, there was a minor pause happening. Maybe the start of a base on the hourly chart, and a pretty clear pullback on the 15 minute chart. I set an entry around that base/pullback and the trade triggered pretty immediately. Now we just wait to see what happens.
Exit – 160.15
Nope. I was completely wrong. Shorts was the way to play this after all. Once again, less than an hour later, price reversed enough to stop me out of this trade. And, after triggering my long entry, price dropped X pips over the next X hours. In retrospect, this was actually a pretty clean continuation setup on the 4 hour chart. Price had gotten up to the 20 MA and failed there.
I called this in my pre-trade analysis, too. I knew/know that EUR and GBP are correlated and I shouldn’t have had opposite outlooks on them, but I did so anyway. The correlations aren’t perfect and they can move against each other, but the odds aren’t typically in my favor that they will. If I’m trying to make the best decisions, I need to be better.
On the other hand, though, I was playing price action and anything can happen. But I should be better about considering all of the context surrounding the trade in order to be in the best positions to make (and not lose) money as possible.
Looking today (I’m actually journaling this on 2/2), price ultimately pushed down about 75% of the way to my take profit. But that was after another rally that took price back up to the 20 MA near my stop level. I’m not sure how I would’ve managed this trade better to catch those pips — It would have probably had to have been a new trade.
Overall, I was just straight up wrong on this one. That’ll happen. I still need to figure out how to adjust my decision making process, and I’m moving in the right direction. Shake it off and move on with confidence.
Thanks for reading! Were you able to catch some of my pips on this drop? Let me know in the comments! If you’ve got any questions or feedback, feel free to use the comments section for that as well. Happy trading, and stay tuned for more trades and analysis!