That's great Shard.
Wish I could make money in my sleep too. 😀
Is there a basic methodology that you could teach us on technical trading or is it so involved that I need a PhD? 🙂
I could get into certain tactics, but there are really too many out there and you have to take them with a grain of salt. No one indicator is good on it's own (at least I don't think so, contrary to many technical traders!) so when I get consistent signals from a few different sources, then I feel more confident in taking the trade. I try to couple it with fundamentals too. Remember a few posts ago how I talked about correlation between USD, Gold, commodities, etc. - that has a part to play in it as well. When I saw the May contract of Gold shooting up last night I knew the USD would experience weakness. And then, rightly or wrongly, I have seen that lots of times currency pairs will hit certain levels based on technical support and resistance levels - so whether they should or not, or there are fundamental reasons to the contrary, technical factors do come into play and are valid. After all, you don't think major institutions and hedge funds engage in technical trading?
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So, specifically with last night's trade, I had many factors pointing towards a rise in the GBPUSD, coupled with a strong support level just below my entry point, which made my risk/reward attractive as I didn't stand to lose much if I was wrong. Stop losses are key. I picked the point of resistance, put a TP in there and was right - again, rightly or wrongly, the currency stalled out there before moving upwards again. My trade was existed even before the news, but if it has been open for the news and the news was bad, my stop would have ben hit, so no harm no foul.
As for specific tactics, yeah, I could get into them at some point, but it's rather hard without using a ton of screenshots, drawing on charts as I describe things, etc. in some cases.
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Shard, great trade.. but it could have gone against you, if the GDP had a surprise positive result. Combine that with the upward spike in consumer sentiment and you would have seen GBP at much lower levels. So be careful 🙂
Yep, duly noted.
🙂 I have lost a lot on trades on the stock markets over the years to know that one very well.
😉 Again, I felt my risk/reward was fairly attractive on this trade and I had a relatively tight stop. Plus, I did have a gut feeling towards the GDP #s and although you can't put a lot of stock into that (pardon the pun!) sometimes you do have to go with your intuition - that's another thing I have learned over the years. The flip-side of that, of course is that you can't get emotional and get caught up in the psychology of trading - you need discipline and a balance.
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Thanks for the PM by the way, I will respond later today.
🙂