Jake's Live Trading Results

http://www.forexfactory.com/forexfor...ead.php?t=6090

Based on my results from the above linked demo account log I have went live with my system.

The account was started with a $2000 deposit at 200:1 leverage with MIG Investments in Switzerland.

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Day 1 (Monday, July 10th): Increased to $2057

Increased account by $57 today.

Made 18 pips on EUR/CHF.
Lost 6 pips on EUR/CHF.

Lost 4 pips on EUR/USD.

Results were not so good today, but also not so bad since I made pips.

I was moving along very well first thing in the morning but right around 22:40 Switzerland time (4:40 EST I believe) I started having problems with re-quotes and the spread on EUR/CHF increased to 3 pips.

I have been unable to make a profit trade or a good entry or exit since then... all good entry points are re-quoted as are all good exit points. I can close loss trades with no re-quote, though. Did not experience this at all early on in the day or on demo account.

Chatted with tech support and they tell me "market volatility" is to blame for the re-quotes as well as the spread increase. We will see how MIG performs in the coming days, I may have to dump them already.

$57 on a $2K account is not a bad start, that's nearly 3% carry on like that and you'll be laughing!

Thanks for the support When you look at it that way I suppose it is pretty good, although it is just alot lower than what I am used to from demo!

So far today I have tripled what I did yesterday, I had far fewer re-quotes and there was no increase to 3 pips today on EUR/CHF. My satisfaction with MIG was much higher today! I think the tech support guy must have been correct about volatility yesterday. I still had some re-quotes, don't get me wrong, but I was able to trade effectively today much unlike yesterday.

I will update with todays result when I finish my trading for the night in a few hours!

Day 2 (Tuesday, July 11th): Increased to $2211

Increased account by $154 today.

Made 18 pips on EUR/CHF.
Lost 4 pips on EUR/CHF.

Made 4 pips on EUR/USD.

My large loss for the day, a 3-pip loss on EUR/CHF on one trade, was caused by a slow trigger finger. I saw the price for +1 pip, which I was going to take as I lost confidence in the trade going farther, but right as I depressed the button it slammed down to -3 pips costing me nearly $25!

My other loss, a 1-pip loss on EUR/CHF was the same situation only with a smaller negative outcome.

As careful as I am I can't believe I did that, especially the 3 pip loss in the evening, I need to make a note to eat dinner before evening trading -- I think I was just so hungry I was slow. My smaller loss was mid-day so I guess my reflexes just weren't up to par on that one.

For that matter, trading in the evening has thusfar been VERY unproductive for me on my live account and has caused more harm than good. This is probably due to current market conditions as this was not the case during my demo account period with the same methodology.

You're doing great. Good Luck.

Hey, love the thread, followed your demo thread on to this live one. Will be following this thread as long as you take it!

Just curious if you are willing to share your system. I've tried several now with no positive results. Still searching for the system that suits my style. I'm still on demo (1 month) now, and will go live only when I get better results.

Keep up the good work!

Had a little mishap today... I failed to check for news today and thusly was in the wrong side of EUR/CHF when the announcements hit.

Since this pair normally does not move alot I had 3 different 1 lot trades open with no pre-set Stop Loss (this sort of thing is faily common in my trading)... losing a total of 84 pips across them while I walked away for a few minutes to do something at work. This netted a total loss of -$655.62 for me today.

SO... I will be spending the rest of the week using my system as normal and CHECKING THE NEWS by printing the Forex Factory calender for the month to make sure I'm not in trades at news time. During demo I avoided the news... and hence had not a single draw down day.

I will post my final daily results when I quit for the night. Today was a huge downer but I won't let it get to me too much! I need to be more careful about the news times!

Glad you have enjoyed my logs so far. Hopefully I'll be running this thread until I reach my first goal; paying off my car, student loans, and credit cards. Sum total of about $25,000 if you add all of them up.

The method I use works quite a bit better on demo, latency on live order execution causes me to miss a good bit of the trades I aim for. I am hoping that I don't have issues trading on Sunday live (we'll find out soon enough) since it was, by far, my most productive day of the week in demo.

My method isn't for those concerned about free time... it's very time consuming. In fact. I can only do it since I have a PocketPC to watch at work, and sometimes that is a problem -- such as today, when I had to walk off and didn't realize news was coming up.

It probably wouldn't be helpful for me to share my strategy and it might just mess you all up. But I will say it's pretty simple, just very time consuming and it doesn't use any indicators. I just spot channels and pick off the outliers. Watch the price action and see if you can pick up on this. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine and he couldn't see it, so I guess you need to have a good feel for it.

Day 3 (Wednesday, July 12th): Decreased to $1854

I made a loss of -$357 today. See post #7 for details.

I made 2 pips on EUR/CHF this morning.
I lost 84 pips on EUR/CHF this afternoon.

I made 29 pips on EUR/USD.
I lost 3 pips on EUR/USD.
I made $22.50 in swap on EUR/USD.

After absolutely losing my tail on the EUR/CHF incident I stayed away from my bread and butter pair for the rest of the day -- I was out of touch with it's price action after the news event. My confidence was also hurt with this pair so I didn't want to make stupid mistakes.

I caught lots of tail-end action on EUR/USD to make up for near half of my loss for the day. I did take a loss on my final EUR/USD trade of 3 pips, but it also had a $22.50 swap so I only lost -$7.50 and I really needed to quit for the day -- my big loss took alot of energy out of me.

I will be working hard to restore my account balance. I hope to be at least break even by the end of trading on Sunday. At which time I can resume trading as normal -- albeit with MUCH more attention to announcement schedules.

Day 4 (Thursday, July 13th): Increased to $2048

Increased account by $194 today. I consider my results today to be good, but not exceptional.

Made 17 pips on EUR/USD.
Made 3 pips on EUR/CHF.

No loss trades today.

I have brought the account back up from the pit it fell into yesterday.

To my dismay I saw the price of EUR/CHF run down to a position of 50 pips in FAVOR of the position I was holding yesterday which I closed at a huge loss. Unfortunatly I was not able to see this coming so I got out to prevent a risk of total loss of my account.

Hindsight is a kicker sometimes! I won't let that discourage me... my trading the last two days after the loss has been very good.

My favorite EUR/CHF has been acting strangely the past few days and has been trending too hard to enable me to use my usual method.

I have found that EUR/USD has been setting itself up VERY nicely for my method starting around 3:30 PM EST and ending at around 6:00 PM EST both yesterday and today. Therefore it has been the source of most of my winning trades for the previous two days.

Same thing happened to me today on EURJPY, I gave up waiting for it to move the way I'd expected, pulled the plug with a small loss and then saw later that I'd waved 50+ pips goodbye.
Oh the joy of it all
Peter

Sometimes these markets will pull a mean trick on you Thankfully I am coming back strong from my mishap, as I hope you have as well.

Day 5 (Friday, July 14th): Increased to $2280

Increased account by $232 today. I consider this a very good Friday.

Made 22 pips on EUR/CHF.
Lost 2 pips on EUR/CHF. (Slow Trigger Finger)

Made 7 pips on EUR/USD.

Thanks to my printed news calender for the week courtesy of Forex Factory (thanks), I was able to avoid all news announcements this morning. Once news time was finished I dug into trading.

I found that EUR/CHF had once again entered into it's usual behavior for at least part of the day today allowing me to produce a net gain of 20 pips. Towards the end of the trading day EUR/USD once again entered into "Jake's Channel," as I suppose I will call it, so I was able to produce a net gain of 7 pips from it.

The overall increase on my account has been only 14% this week due to my unfortunate incident on Day 3. My gross profit is actually $1080 for the week... which would have given me the 50% gain that I was aiming for. Unfortunatly for me, as I have stated numerous times, I was irresponsible and failed to check the news schedule on Wednesday!

Day 6 (Sunday, July 16th): Decreased to $2229

Decreased account by -$51 today.

Gained 2 pips on EUR/CHF.
Gained 1 pip on EUR/USD.

Lost 8 pips on USD/JPY.

I am pretty upset with MIG today... I received TREMENDOUS amounts of re-quotes when I was trying to trade between 5:00 - 7:00 PM EST. I got so frustrated after my 3 pips of profit today that I quit trading until 9:00 PM EST. At which time I discovered they raised the spread to 4 pips on EUR/CHF!!! I continued to receive relentless re-quotes on EUR/USD so that was also fruitless.

In my frustration I made a mistake and entered at the wrong time on USD/JPY thus making a loss for the day. I was re-quoted trying to enter at a certain price point several times... when entry was finally allowed it was right before it went against me, whereas my re-quoted entry points all would have turned into small profit positions.

MIG Investments may lose a customer very soon if it keeps up like this. On demo trading Sunday was my MOST productive day in general. Live trading with MIG was nearly useless today, and in fact, was a loss day!

Day 7 (Monday, July 17th): Increased to $2323

Increased account by $94 today.

Made 9 pips on EUR/USD.
Lost 2 pips on EUR/USD.
Made $15.00 in swap on EUR/USD.

EUR/CHF did not work out at all for me today. The spread was still 4 pips this morning, when it returned to 2 pips as it should be none of my channels developed properly, and then when they started to form MIG raised the spread to 3 pips thus destroying my ability to play them.

I battled re-quoting again all day on EUR/USD. I would venture to say that 75% of the trades I tried to enter were re-quoted today.

I also had a miss on a limit sell order and a miss on a take profit order (it went 2 pips beyond my TP point and still didn't execute).

So... this leaves me with a dilemma. It seems that MIG isn't working out so well for me thusfar, their order execution leaves ALOT to be desired. Unfortunatly, they are the only broker using Metatrader that I can locate with a 2 pip spread on EUR/USD and EUR/CHF which are central to my method of trading. I requite an MT4 broker so I can trade on my mobile device at work... otherwise it is almost pointless for me to trade at all.

I am calling it a night early at a bit before 7:30 PM EST... I am exausted from not sleeping well lately and simply frustrated out of my wits by the re-quoting and spread widening issues I've been having.

On the bright side... a 16.15% return in 7 active trading days isn't exactly bad... but it's not what I would have hoped for based on results from demo when I wasn't battling re-quotes on almost every trade.

Hey Sundownz,

No worries, don't get frustrated it's part of the game. Time is on your side

take care...

Thanks very much for the words of encouragement

- Jake

Day 8 (Tuesday, July 18th): Increased to $2480

Increased account by $157 today.

Made 11 pips on EUR/USD.
Made $15.00 in swap on EUR/USD.

Made 4 pips on EUR/CHF.

No loss trades today.

Calling it a day already at 6:45 PM EST. Made enough pips today and the trading day stressed me out so I don't want to make mistakes tonight.

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TRADING COMMENTS:

Not a bad day overall. I have started doing a little trick where I will toss in some EUR/USD shorts right before 6:00 PM EST (Swiss end of day when interest is calculated) to build some swap if I think I can get away with the trade at break even or profit I pulled off to a gas station on my drive home from work to do so.

BROKER COMMENTS:

I had somewhere in the area of 40 - 50 requotes today... so many that I cannot possibly have kept count of them. I managed to do quite well today despite this... but my profits would have been at least double today if I would have had just half as many requotes.

I had a good bit of take profit and limit order slippage today as well:

1) I tried to play the news today. My sell stop order slipped and didn't execute until the upwards rebound. Fortunatly, I waited it out and came out of this trade okay in the end.

2) One of my orders had a take profit slip *three* times.

3) Another one of my orders had a take profite slip twice. I ended up closing both of these orders later at break even since I was worried I would never be able to execute my close properly!

MARKET COMMENTS:

EUR/CHF has not been forming channels very well ever since the start of all of the terrorist action. I assume it is due to the fact that the swiss currency has been moving so much due to world turbulance. This has made my method a bit harder to operate, although I still find enough channels to survive between EUR/CHF and EUR/USD.

Man, Jake you're doing pretty awesome?
What is your strategy based on? Is it a project here @ FF?
So, you're using MIG. I saw you wrote alot of bad comments about requotes. I also read they're the "king of requoting" @ forexbastards.com. Is it really so bad? Why are you still using them?

My strategy is pretty basic when it comes right down to it. So much so that it isn't much to explain at all I watch price action VERY closely and get a feel for the chart and it's behavior for the day and then wait until it develops itself into a narrow channel... at which time I simply snag outlier prices, favoring outliers on the opposite side of the overall trend. I then close the trade when it gets pulled back into the channel generally at 1 or 2 pips of profit.

Care must be exercised not to snag an outlier when a true channel breakout is happening -- this part I don't know how to explain but I get it right most of the time. I think it comes from the hours every day that I watch the price charts on my PocketPC. I might watch the charts for a few hours before doing anything at all, patience is key.

FAST order execution is critical for my method, as is 2 pip spreads on EUR/CHF and EUR/USD -- the latter is why I am using MIG and the former is why MIG isn't making me happy.

I also require an MT4 broker so I can trade on my mobile device at work, since FOREX is not full time for me as of right now. Unfortunatly I miss more than half of my entry points due to the re-quotes from slow execution but I cannot find another broker that meets my other criteria so I am stuck for the moment.

Once I build up a good bit of profit I would like to open an Oanda account to trade Sundays since it was useless on MIG. Oanda has my desired spreads most of the time, since their spread is variable they won't always be ideal for me -- but then again, MIG has changed the EUR/CHF spread to 3 and 4 pips on me anyway.

Eventually I would be able to accumulate enough profit to leave my day job and do FOREX full time, provided my strategy holds water. It seems to work very well provided that I show incredible patience and only enter on the BEST signals.