In Charts and Tables
My first month trading FOREX trading is now complete and as expected (but definitely not wanted) my account balance has gone down 52%. I have done a total 115 trades which equates to about 28 trades per week.
Trade History export to CSV
MetaTrader must have been designed by geeks for geeks as there is no export to CSV/Excell. Fortunately I am such aforementioned geek and created a script for this purpose. On the bright side is I expected to start learning MQL at some point so this started that process. You can find my script at this link: MetaTrader Export Trade History to CSV.
Lossing vs Winning Trades
I did really great in the first week, perhaps it was luck perhaps it was new trader confidence. Looking back at the trades I seldom had a stop loss, had a generous stop loss in place, or kept adjusting it, and I recall leaving the trades alone then coming back to them seeing profits and just setting a trailing stop loss; I can possibly confirm this by looking how the order duration changed over the weeks so I have added this as a TODO item.
Overall it's a good sign that I have more winning trades vs loosing trades per week.
Average Percentage Return for Lossing vs Winning Trades
This picture tells where the 51% overall loss comes from, even though I have a more winning trades the percentage gain is small compared to my loosing trades percentage loss.
Analyzing the Loosing Trades
Throughout the trading I would review my loosing trades and adjust my strategy, some of the first lessons were always setting stop losses which can be seen having the effect of lowering my loss % average. However I am now questioning that because after reviewing 10 of the loosing order I notice that if I held them I would have made a profit, the median time for that to happen is 21 hours. This needs further investigation so I have added a TODO item to modify the export script to include information like time to profit, max % drop, trade duration.
| Order # | Time to Profit? (H) |
|---|---|
| 8556355 | 2 |
| 8565603 | 1 |
| 8574119 | 6 |
| 8603378 | 511 |
| 8606686 | 18 |
| 8611039 | 8 |
| 8622820 | 45 |
| 8622844 | 24 |
| 8622935 | 39 |
| 8639032 | 80 |
Focus for the upcoming month
Bring the number of winning trades up by strictly following my price action enter trade rules and using mental stop losses too allow up to 48 (might change this) hours for the trade to come back if I called it wrong.
How was your first month trading FOREX? Please share in the comments section.
Well in the name of transparency, a quick update - I have depleted my account.
ReplyDeleteLessons: invest only money you can loose, use smallest lot, gauge your progress on % instead of $, work on your emotions, stick to your SL/TP.
Coding in MQL4/5 is painful and debugging tools weak, I am searching for an alternative so please comment.
The small amount I lost did not discourage me and I will continue.