The last couple weeks have been a pretty wild ride in many ways. The markets have been moving well (with EUR/JPY being especially active much of the time) and there has been plenty of opportunity out there for the Elite Range Bar trader. I’ve also been extremely busy with some other trading projects as well but everything seems to coming together.
The trading on Wednesday was a fairly straight-forward affair but it wasn’t exactly easy. Most of the trades required a fair bit of managing and few of the decisions that needed to be made were obvious. Because of that I took a fairly conservative approach for the most part, banking pips if the price movement stalled for too long and was starting to show bottoming/topping behaviour.
The third trade of the day fully cemented that thinking when I saw over 15 pips come back to nothing. That’s just something you have to accept as a trader – if you want to look for more confirmation to exit or an extra leg in a move, sometimes you are going to give back some pips to the market. The way I like to think of my trades is in sets of 20. Ask yourself, if you took that setup 20 times and made the same decision, would it work out favourably? More often than not I would expect at least another attempt higher that would give me a second chance to exit rather than a full reversal, and in some cases by holding I might see a lot of extra pips in a nice run. Considering those possibilities it makes sense for me to hold these types of trades instead of just taking 5-10 pips on a strong pullback, even if it means I get nothing in this particular case.
Don’t forget that Non-Farm Payroll is on Friday. What that means is that we will likely see little movement during European morning (though this isn’t always the case) before some significant volatility upon release. If the reaction is particularly strong it’s probably be best to switch over to 4 pip range bars to trade the aftermath. Best of luck to all of you and be careful out there!
