July 2022 Trading Review

July was my best month so far. A true breakthrough month. I made 1400 pips in profit or +24% net (update: 1000 pips and +17.9% net). I also must mention that most of these trades were without stop-loss as it is based on a strategy that has over 97% win rate. Trading without SL sounds scary to most people but only if you don't know what you're doing. The reason why we're learning about how the market works is to be able to filter out those 3% of bad trades. So I'm not perfect yet and I got into a long-running position which is in a floating loss and still haven't reached the TP in 2 weeks (Update: now all of July's positions are closed. I clearly overtraded because I had 8 trades running for this position - closed 4 of them for profit when a good opportunity came but kept the other 4 and had to close them for a bigger loss instead of small loss. My final monthly result is 17.9% now). But it will at some point. It's a matter of my patience - whether I want to wait or just close it on retracement for a loss and clear my head for new opportunities. The good thing is that I understand why did it happen and I recognise it was a mistake. Because nothing is random in the FX market - everything can be explained and if I'm in a loss it means I didn't read the chart correctly due to my rushing and impatience.

On the other hand, I see that even though I like the no-SL approach on my personal account - it can be too dangerous on prop firm accounts. And also you need to allow for more leeway on those trades to avoid hitting the drawdown limits. It means trading with lower position sizes and needing to make more pips.

So a few days ago I shifted my focus to with-SL strategies and I'm testing this approach on FTMO trial account. The good thing is that I need to make much less pips with this approach due to bigger position sizes, but sometimes it's annoying because it means my tight stops are often stopped out during the stop runs and a re-entry is not always possible in those situations. But all in all you still make more profit than loss and in the end you're still net profitable. It's just about being psychologically prepared to see losses as just a part of this business and being ready to re-enter after stop runs, sometimes even for a few times.

By the way, this month marks my first year of full time day trading in the Forex market. A year ago I had a very different mindset and had unrealistic expectations. It was just a dream to become rich from trading but I wasn't sure how to do it. Now after much struggle the path is becoming more and more clear. Results are there and confidence is rising. But constant learning and improvement is key of course. There's still a lot to do!

For the last 2 weeks we were on the road with my girlfriend, travelling from Lithuania to Greece with my car and back. I was working most of the working days in hotels, apartments and coworking spaces. My initial goal was to reach Thessaloniki in 2 full days (weekend). But the problem is that everyone is on holiday now and the roads are extremely congested in Europe and you have to wait at border crossings for extraordinary times. For example, we spent 3 hours at the Hungarian-Serbian border crossing during the heat of the midday.

So we managed to reach Nis, Serbia by Sunday evening and then continued to travel in the evenings, staying in Skopje the following night and reaching Thessaloniki the next evening. We also spent a few days in a quiet neighbourhood near Volos, living in a house very close to the beach. Then Meteora, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia...

And on the way back I crashed my car on the slippery rainy highway in Poland. I had to sell the car as it was not drive-able anymore and buy another cheap car urgently just for the sake of getting back to Lithuania. Going by bus or airplane was not an option as everything was fully booked during the peak holiday period, and also we were carrying bikes and much of the luggage. We finally reached home this morning. :)