How I trade my currency pairs for success and money
Let’s talk size. Position size, that is.
I trade like a baby! This is how I do it…
I trade .05 lots when confidence is low.
When I feel really confident I go to .10 lots.
When I am madly in love I will shoot a .20 lot bullet. This is per pair.
So I might scalp USDCAD all day for .05 lots per bullet attempting to go for something like 5 to 15 pips for my “take”.
At the same time, I could be scalping oil at .10 lots for each bullet fired off.
At the very same time I can be trading a dozen other pairs. Heck, there are bullets fired everywhere. Long, short and you name it. I am scalping.
At the very same time I am hitting larger bullets fired, like .10 lots, for damage control or for intraday swings on 15 minute to one hour charts.
I use Mt4 Floating Charts set up all over the 8 monitors I have in front of me.
I toggle time frames constantly!
I use alarms on Clock X to alert me to every 15 minute bar closure all day, every day. When that alarm goes off, I toggle every chart to the 15 minute timeframe and gauge and re-assess the situation with a bar by bar mentality! Very, very important.
I attempt very hard not to go beyond .50 lots or maybe even 1.0 lots as a maximum in any given currency pair. If I have to stretch that far I am in trouble and I am on the wrong side. Whenever that happens, that currency moves to the top of my list and into “get out of trouble” mode.
So what do I mean by this? Well, if I have a .05 and then another and then a .10 and then another and I look at my exposure and I see I am down several hundred dollars; it’s pretty darn obvious I made a mistake and that I am wrong. I then go into a highly concentrated “washing mode“.
Wash mode or the Turbo Wash mode is when you go into high speed, big size scalping in order to dig out. I will grab $20, $30 or $50 per clip and start washing off micros of loss (from losing positions) as fast as I can.
I’ve talked about this before. Sometimes it’s easy and after just a few washes it’s all over. Sometimes it gets ugly and can take 30 or 50 washes to clean out of a runaway trade that got the better of me. This is a highly developed skill and cannot be well explained here. It takes years to master, especially the psychology of it.
To put it simply, I force a losing trade (that I may be down $500 in for example) to pay me no matter what. I work the heck out of it until the loss is gone and money is in my account.
My trading accuracy is 83-87% right now. Only a tad over 10 % of my trades go bad and each to various degrees of “badness”.
I am very, very happy that in any set of 100 trades, 80+ % work out just fine and spit money at me all day long. I am very happy and comfortable with 15% losing trades.
Again my trades go many ways:
I am scalping all day long.
Intraday position trades for 15 to 50 pips or so.
Sometimes I take swings for really big gains.
There is also the occasional “build a position trade” which goes just fine but takes a day or so.
The occasional “build a position” and get screwed trade… where it does not go well and I have to fire up the washing machine.
The occasional suck city trade where I have to break out a turbo washer and I am sweating bullets!
I am an honest man. I am telling you it like it is!
I hope this makes sense.
Lastly I try very hard not to go over 15 to 20 currency pairs at any given time. That is stretching my brain power and I lose focus and concentration. I hate doing that. 7 to 12 is much better!
And that’s it in a nutshell. Go small. Trade like a baby.