End-of-Year-Review Year One 2020

Many Things Learned – Many More Things to Learn

It has been a great ride, costly, but informative, instructive, and I’m optimistic for what is ahead for me on this wonderful journey.

In total, I made 1700 trades last year, way too many. I did a lot of experimenting, from April until September, but I also way overtraded. Ideally, I’d like to take no more than 20 trades a week, and that is probably too many.

Either way, a goal for next year is reducing the number of trades to no more than 20 a week. I actually started that goal over the past couple of months and have been doing well with it, less is definitely more.

I’m down -$2431 on the year, which isn’t awful, at this rate it will take about 5 1/2 years to burn through my account. I have 100% confidence in myself that I won’t be a losing trader still in 5 1/2 years.

While I like shorting more than not, I averaged about a 34% win rate on both my short and long positions. And a 35% win rate on my total number of trades.

But, none of that really matters, what ultimately mattered most in this first year was coming to grips with 4 key realities, 1.) process trumps p&l 2.) being honest, disciplined, committed, well studied, and passionate trumps being intelligent, being right, and being a winning trader (percentage-wise) 3.) risk management allows me to quell my ego, remove the fear, and ultimately keep my greed in check. 4.) with my current account size, I can’t be the position trader I want to be and produce the results I’m looking to produce at this time.

Also, finding who you are as a trader is more important than having a good strategy in my opinion. You can have a fantastic system/strategy but if you aren’t aligned with it you’ll muck it up and turn it into a losing system/strategy.

In this area, I struggled to find my identity. I know who I want to be, and who I wish I was as a trader, but who I am isn’t aligned. The coaching call I took part in this last Tuesday was great, it helped to just realize it takes time to find who you are and where you are most effective as a trader. I’m just not there yet but have some fantastic avenues to explore while I get there.

Being able to take so many trades, experimenting with so many indicators, tactics, strategies, attempting to learn price action, price patterns, price waves, price theories, etc…and implementing them into various experiments have given me some really good data on who I am, and what I need to do in order to get to who I want to be as a trader.

Using a simple strategy with a great trading plan that I can remain completely disciplined with, and on a time-frame that allows for 1-2 set-ups a week, with controlled risk, and potential for great profits once size is increased – was the best takeaway from that first year of trading, and something I feel very confident in building off of moving forward.

With that being said, I still need to turn this negative equity curve around. I will remain committed to my latest strategies, exploring what could be my intraday edge, while developing my ultimate goal of position trading with super small sizes for now when entering position trades.

I also worked with a coder to create a number of mechanical trading systems for the various Forex pairings I trade that I’m currently testing now, will update you all on how that goes. I sometimes find being able to completely detach and allow the strategy to be run without my input has a calming effect on me, keeps me from overtrading and/or mucking up trades.

I also wanted to share some data over the past two ½ months of trades I made, and the percentages involved in trades I take going ahead by 10 pips, 20 pips, 30 pips, 50 pips, 100 pips, on the 30-minute charts.

Obviously, this is all very personal to one’s trading strategy, time frames, take profit goals, etc…but it may provide some insights for other Forex traders on figuring out when to move to B/E. I’m only sharing the pairings that I have at least six trades or more with, along with a total overview of the last 95 trades I took over the past two ½ months on the 30-minute charts.

GBP/USD: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 100%, 30 pips 83%, 40 pips 50%, 50 pips 33%, 70 pips 33%, 100 pips 16%

EUR/USD: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 100%, 30 pips 83%, 40 pips 50%, 50 pips 50%

USD/CHF: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 83%, 30 pips 66%, 40 pips 33%, 50 pips 33%, 70 pips 16%, 100 pips 16%

NZD/USD: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 77%, 30 pips 77%, 40 pips 55%, 50 pips 55%, 70 pips 11%

USD/CAD: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 100%, 30 pips 86%, 40 pips 53%, 50 pips 40%, 70 pips 20%, 100 pips 13%, 120+ pips 6%

AUD/USD: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 100% , 30 pips 100%, 40 pips 50%

On my last 95 trades: 10 pips 100%, 20 pips 94%, 30 pips 86%, 40 pips 64%, 50 pips 35%, 70 pips 16%, 100 pips 9%, 120+ pips 4%


From that data, I have a high probability chance of my winning trades making it to 30-39 pips, an 86% probability. With that in mind, I’m going to reformulate my expectations, my S/L, and see if I can just build off that while working on my position trading with super small lot sizes as I attempt to win more trades than I lose over this second year of trading.