April 2022 Trading Review

I failed both of my FTMO challenges and I'm close to failing the CTI one. I decided not to try to skip steps anymore and prepare properly before I try the challenges.

I thought that taking the challenges will enforce discipline on me and make me a better trader. So in a sense it seemed logical to jump on those challenges before being fully prepared. But when I bought the most expensive challenge for €1080 and failed it - I understood that running for $200.000 USD funded account is not going to help.

Therefore, I opened a micro account on XM so that I can still trade with real money but I wanted to limit my losses. On a standard account the minimum viable trading account size is €2000, while on the micro it's just €20. So I funded the account with €20 and now I'm focusing only on raw pip performance - i.e. how many pips I'm pulling per day and week. When I achieve a good level of consistency I'll get back to the prop challenges. Because I need to keep myself sane and really there's no need to lose a lot when I can lose just a little - if I'm losing. The lessons learnt are the same anyway.

Of course, education and knowledge remains my key focus point. I'm happy that my patience is getting better and most of the time I can retain a calm mind. What I still do is entering into bad setups out of boredom. I have to commit to perfection and enter the best setups only. In many cases I can already tell when a setup is really good, with my current level of knowledge. But sometimes funny things happen. For example - yesterday I saw a good setup on M15 chart and entered. After a couple of hours the trade turned against me before reaching my expected point and there were some danger signals on the chart. So I decided to exit the trade at break-even. Then I went for lunch and when I got back I saw that another setup happened on the same pair, same chart - while I was at lunch. And this time the setup actually happened and the price moved to where I was expecting. But it was too late to enter. These kind of things do happen, because I'm a human and not a robot.

When such things happen, I enter the missed pips into my TraderWise journal's "missed entries" field on the Daily Self Review feature. I don't calculate from bottom to top of course, because it would be a lie. What I do is to subtract entry point from take profit level on the original trade that I did set up but didn't profit from. That way I know how many pips I would have actually got. This helps to evaluate the quality of my market judgement even if for some human reason I didn't realise the profit.

I also decided to invest more into education. At some point during this year I'll fly to the UK to visit my teacher in person and have additional lessons with him. Wanted to do it together with my GF in the end of this month as the travel restrictions are now lifted and my 30th birthday will happen on the 24th. But my teacher said he'll be heading off to Greece for a holiday so I'll travel at a later time - summer or autumn. Summer may be tricky for learning because markets don't move much (all the teachings he does are during live market conditions, 1-on-1). On the other hand, summer is the best time to travel in Europe (excluding some very hot areas like Seville)!

Why I'm going to further invest into education? Because full understanding of the market is essential to become a consistently profitable trader. If I'm not there yet, it means I have to learn more. Simple.