So March is off to an early start with a trade in GBP/USD at 18:33ET. An hour and a half into the month- only managed 10 pips out of the 22 which was available to me. At first, I put the inefficient locking in of profits down to the low volume environment that I've always avoided (hence two of the five missed trades in February).
While the comparatively erractic price movement and enormous spreads didn't help, it didn't actually cause the inefficiency... it just highlighted one which has always been there...
Basically, my modus operandi is to trail stops until stopped out....while this has worked very well so far(ie I'm making money!) there's a simple adjustment that can be made to capture more of the initial move out of the pattern- too often I'm giving back large amounts of it, up to 60% (as mentioned before, there's usually alot more follow through than the "initial move" but I'll tackle that after first maximizing what I'm already doing)
It's something I've been doing on occasion, in some form or another. Whether it was moving up the stop prematurely (for example, off the top of my head, on the 17th Feb trade in London) or just simply exiting before getting stopped.
I felt I was "breaking the rules" even though it maximized gains- now I need to make it a rule!
So, from now on: If I find myself in a trade that has begun it's momentum move and it's approaching first resistance/support, I will tighten stops in anyway possible, ignoring usual procedure, in the first instance. If it stalls there I'll go ahead and exit. Will go through every Feb trade to reinforce that idea by looking at the times I did this and how results differ from when I didn't do this...won't take another trade 'till that's done!
Nevertheless, I'm happy with the start to the month as I stuck to the rules as they were and acted on past fears (ie trading during the evening, eastern time- night for me)
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