Food. Music. Sex. Work. Family. The important things in life, all in one delirious, mad, funny film. Turkish director Fatih Akin tells a story about the Greek-Germans of Hamburg. Terrific actors, astonishing soundtrack. This is precisely the kind of little films we can still view in Europe. In 10-20 years all theaters will be showing american popcorn like Avatar...
A friend commented in a previous post : "Most of the time you trade EJ sometimes you trade EU. Do you watch both pair at the same time? When you trade EU how is that experience different from trading EJ? Isn't it that EU is very slow, unpredictable and spikes too much?".png)
Smooth movement on eurusd this afternoon. One trade closed prematurely and a scared exit on the next one.
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Lazy trades, waiting for Christmas vacation. As a result, entries and handling become approximative and risk increases.
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Terrific Frankfurt opening, with sharp movement. One fault on the chart, an unnecessary contra trade, not closed at once. Respect the trend!..
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Spent the evening with this non-sense, waiting for the range to break. At the end I was very bored and entered inside the range and had a loser, of course.
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Price got a steady pace going up and gave decent pips. The last trade, a contra-trend one, was entered at the break of local minor support.
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(upd) Our brilliant (just kidding) Prime Minister spoke finaly yesterday and said nothing concrete about the greek debt and his recovery plan. As a result, today, shortly after the european markets opening, traders shorted firmly the euro against dollar. 80 easy pips in one hour time. The fundamentals guys made easy and predictable gains. I wasn't there to trade this, my mistake. In the last few days, little Greece smashed the euro by 4%, almost 600 pips..
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Trying to grab some in a completely flat session.. Euro and the crosses wait for the rescue measures for Greece' economy, to be announced at 20:00 my time (18:00 London), by our supreme Prime Minister. Humanity in the hands of Mr. Bean...
Splendid return of Woody Allen to his beloved New York, after several films in Europe. A clever and nice movie. It made my day. Superb dialogue as always, full of ideas and perfect actors. Happy Hannukah!..
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Today I had what I call a perfect day : fast gains with four trades only. And then getting out of this. After some days of overtrading and addiction feelings again.
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I took a risky contra trade at the fibo 50% retracement (15M chart). Nobody can ignore Fibonacci!..
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Insisting on a contra trend, with very tight stop, is not very wise.. The two reversal trades were just premature, the reversal came later and in a natural way.
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First trade was lucky, then it took some time to get a price direction on the chart. This is precisely the moment I look for. But the trades inside the unbroken rectangle can be painful.
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Allways monitoring 2 pairs and choosing the one with the bigger volatility. Today and post-NFP, it was the euro/dollar.
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I was in very bad shape today. Risked a LOT on the first, then I closed trade precisely when previous high was taken.. Smart guy!...
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Playing safe again with bigger lots. But first trade was of late entry, therefore risky.
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xiting a trade and re-entering on the same price movement increases risk and makes trades shorter and less profitable. On this chart i had to exit many times, under minimal signs of reversal. As a consequence, a drop of 40 pips gave me minimal gains, because my first priority is to avoid a loss. Last trade was more natural.
The new hot name in jazz/blues singing. She is perfect, she is sublime. Just 24 years old and she sings like the big ladies of jazz. She started writing music and singing to aid her recovery from a serious car accident. Her interesting story is here and a sample here. All the songs on the cd are little gems. But it would take a heart of stone to remain unmoved by the poignant title track "My One And Only Thrill". One of the best albums for 2009.
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Missed the nice first movement on this but I took the second. There are allways moves to catch.3.png)
Tried the NY stock market opening (16:30 my time) and the repercussions on euro/yen. Going with the flow.
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Should I trade in the night?.. Pre-Tokyo was awesome, the poor euro was crashed..
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Stopped for the day after this, with a 48 pips total gain. Payed back 12p in commissions (too many trades).
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Turmoil on a Thanksgiving day...I planned to stay away from trading today because of the holiday, but the pair started to move vividly after the beginning of sharp decline on European markets. On situations like this ,the drop is linear and very important but I insisted to trade my method, takind on slice of bread each time and re-entering with tight stops always.
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A series of little positive trades, besides the first risky (late) one and the shy last.
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Some trades today, after several days of inactivity (family problems). More potential up but i must leave my post now.
IB price feed was lost just after the close of the third trade. I allways use hard stops, at -4, -5 pips (with 1 or 2 exceptions per month, which inevitably become the mistake of the month, Murphy's law!). So I am not afraid of connection drops and freezes anymore. A friend who likes "mental stops", lost 3000 euros in one trade. He lost connection while open and then price went 100 pips against him...
Several shy trades in a row, then a trusted local breakout. I call shy the trades with very conservative exits, when the effort to avoid to have a loss comes first. I experiment this recently, with highest lots. The bars are perfect to control such trades.
The night the Wall fell down -9/11/89- i was there, a young photographer covering the event for greek media. I will never forget some images, the East Berliners walking in the West with the eyes of children in a toy store. The happiness of freedom on the faces. The gazes of some in KaDeWe store, admiring the 1200 ham varieties. The chilled people in the night of the next day, after 12 hours walking in West Berlin with temperature around zero, with a Red Cross pot of soup in the hand..
on Wall's history. You learn a lot about post-war Germany, the Cold War and the fall of communism, all in 500 pages. Fascinating.
SUBLIME recording! From the great ECM label, the biggest oud player today, Tunisian Anouar Brahem, together with French pianist Francois Couturier and accordeonist Jean-Luis Matinier. Like oriental reminiscenes coming out from a smokey Parisian bal-musette, hand in hand with Erik Satie.. Unforgettable.. A sample here, just to make your Sunday!...
The price on this topped with two red bars on same level, then started to drop. I was distracted and super-confident, so i didn't close, even when price gave a second chance to do this. The important loss was the natural consequence.
A few pips on the London opening, going with the stream (up). New York session is more volatile than London recenlty, so i don't trade in the morning anymore. Today was an exception.
The sparrow is 2 years old! This blog was started on October 31, 2007. The very first trade analysis i did is here. The purpose was to keep a record while scalping the euro pairs, inspired from M. Weinstein's conception (see the motto on the left). Two years and 570 posts later, a lot of things have changed, my style and tools, my attitude towards the market. Back in 2007, although I had allready 2 and half years of forex trading experience on my back, I was still hooked on indicators, "systems" and methodologies found on technical books and the internet. It took me another two years to emancipate myself from all this stuff and to evolve towards simplicity : all I need now is to feel the price movement. Nothing more, nothing less. No indicators, no systems, no trading teachers or gurus. I still have indicators on my charts but I don't pay much attention to them anymore. Trading, scalping especially, is pure geometry. You need time to get your master degree on trading geometry. You only have to study the price movement on (thousands of) charts, for some (long or shorter) time.
It is written somewhere (in Bhagavat-Gita I suppose), that only flowers and children are pure on earth. A humble price movement can also be pure and beautiful, like the one of my last trade. So evident and simple, like an euclidean theorem, or a perfect circle. 75 pips for today.
Same mistake as on the previous post : not trusting the trend, closing the trades and missing most of the pips.
Missed the first move down on this, then i managed to follow the price and get some pips. Two problems here : First, I don't trust the trend much, so I close early and re-enter, missing a substancial part of the move. Second, I try to anticipate the reversal point and that is very risky on a strong trend like this one of today.
Back to my base and trading. Starting with these 3 trades, the third one should be closed earlier.
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