The only way to discover how to turn a losing or borderline lucrative foreign exchange trading system into a winning one is to record all of your trades. Then all you have got to do is look for a method to eliminate some of the losing trades, and your profits go up, most likely doubling or even trebling without any need for additional trades or systems. Your tracking system does not have to be complicated of tricky to administer. Most traders use a spreadsheet to record their trades. You’ll keep this on your personal computer naturally but you may also want to print out a blank one to fill out as you trade everyday. It is mostly faster to fill out you chart with a pencil while you have the information on screen, than to switch into Excel and type the right figure in the right space on your spreadsheet. The very first thing to note is that if you use several different trading methodologies you want to record them on separate spreadsheets so that you can see which need attention and which are doing fine and should not be messed with. You’ll need your position size, costs ( spread, fees etc ) and the particular profit and loss in dollars ( or the currency that your account is held in ). This is going to help you see if you could increase your profits by changing your position on different sorts of trades.
To proceed, I’ll use information from http://www.forexmachines.com/reviews/forex-profit-predictor/. You may additionally want to record the particular signals that made you open the trade. As an example if you’ve got a system that relies on the stochastic being in the highest or lowest quintile (above 80% or below 20%) you can record the exact point that it was at when you decided to open the trade. Very few traders do this but it can be useful to Just note the levels of the stop and limit orders that you set, even though they weren’t caused, plus how close the price came to untriggered orders and how far it went beyond triggered orders. So if the trade was profitable, you would know how close the price came to causing your stoploss before it headed back in your direction and you closed at a reasonable profit. You would also know how far it went beyond your limit order (how much more profit you may have made with a higher target). For a bad trade you may know how close the price came to your target profit before turning back and causing your stop. That info might be extraordinarily valuable if you start to have the belief that your system would do better if stops were further out, as an example.
Naturally, you want info regarding a large number of trades before you start changing your foreign exchange trading technique. Never start messing with a system simply because it was regarded as having a couple of losses in succession, or had a bad month. It’s best to have full info on at least 100 trades, maybe more, before even beginning to consider looking for a pattern in the losses.
Many traders waste a lot of time attempting to find more systems and more trades, trying to increase their profits by finding extra lucrative trades. This can make all of the difference between profits and losses in the long run without requiring you to get a new foreign exchange trading system .