My other job update 1

If you have no desire to read through what I would say is about as exciting as Macro Econ 101, then you should stop reading now.

I decided that the best way for me to improve and refine my forex trading strategy was to write it down. I thought that doing so in a public forum even if no one is reading it would be best as it will be more likely for me to be honest and disciplined in my approach.

Moving forward I am going to break up my time between now and the real go-live date (the May-June-July time that I will be measuring success for the year by) into 2 week goals. Each 2 weeks I will have some outcome that I am hoping to get. I will then hopefully figure out what worked, what didnt, and make refinements.

So now that I am in my first 2 week period I figured that I would come up with a basic strategy, make a few trades against that strategy, and hopefully finish reading my first forex book.

The trading strategy is to break each day into 1 of 3 categories; Major news event, mid news events, minor news events. On Major news events, its just go with the flow. I am looking for a sustained trend in a particular direction. For mid news event days, I will look to stay out of the market and just watch and learn. On minor news days, I am looking for range based trading and markets to respect strength boundaries which I will define as the MACD line and Bollinger bands. I will look to do market + 10pip trailing stops. In this first session, I am just going to be looking at the EUR/USD pair and doing 1-10 mini lot trades.

My next job?

Recently we went through (another) round of layoffs at my work. I think that unless something dramatic changes, which can happen, the writing is on the wall and layoffs will continue. That being said, its now time to come up with plan b.

I need my plan b to:
1) pay the bills
2) be in san diego

would be nice if it also:
1) allowed me to work for myself
2) flexible schedule
3) do much more than just pay the bills
4) is fun and engaging

For a while now my bro and I have been talking about doing more day trader stuff in the ForEx market. Its funny, I get almost the same reaction from people when I tell them this as I do when I tell them I ride a motorcycle. Its always "I had a friend who was doing great until the crash".

I started out exploring ForEx by just jumping in. I got a free 30 day paper trade account. My intent was to determine how viable this is in making money in a short time, if i like it and if it meets the other requirements. I started this beginning in June and thought that I would evaluate how to move forward while on vacation. During my little 2 week stint, I started with $2000 in monopoly money, never leveraged more than $800 at any point in time, and finished with ~$2,700. That included a ton of mistakes like clicking the short button instead of long, or entering back into a trade with a currency pair that I just got out of. Stoopid

Now that I am back from vacation, I have a plan.
1) Write down the plan on the blog so I keep myself honest with it.
2) Give it the college try for 1 year. This means learn as much as possible and be ready to sink some money into it for the sake of learning.
3) Fund a real account with money we can afford to lose.
4) Use the next 9 months to develop a trading strategy that can be executed part-time (since I am still employed).
5) Demonstrate month over month positive earnings in April, May, and June.
6) Figure out a way to stop making stupid mistakes, gain some maturity (yeah right).

There it is, that is the plan. Im interested in feedback and success or fail stories. If you have them, let me know.