Freakin' Greek Week!

So those profligate Greeks are getting their bailout... seems like they announce the same thing every few days, and it's an excuse to run the Euro up a few hundred pips. The open trades were looking great going into Friday morning. Things just got worse from there especially with Sunday evening's blowout rally in EUR. Sometimes it's just my turn to be on the wrong side of such moves... but it still isn't any fun. What had been looking like a nicely profitable week turned into a marginally losing week. Bummer.
 We have the holdover GBP/JPY short from last week. It's not looking too healthy, but it hasn't been stopped out yet...
Otherwise, here are the trades that have been opened so far:

Long 263 USD/CHF at 1.0614 with stoploss at 1.0534
Short 379 EUR/CAD at 1.3643 with stoploss at 1.3755
Short 428 EUR/USD at 1.3612 with stoploss at 1.3711
Short 402 GBP/USD at 1.5406 with stoploss at 1.5511
Short 292 AUD/USD at 0.9291 with stoploss at 0.9363

Nothing to do but keep taking the trades as they come...

Current account equity: $89.57

Results for the Week of 4/4 - 4/11

Beginning equity: 96.48

Currency   Units               P/L     Equity
AUD/USD       431       -2.45    94.01
GBP/USD       312       -4.86    89.14
EUR/USD       583       -5.36    83.83
USD/CHF       242       -2.29    81.58
EUR/CAD       612       -4.83    76.75
AUD/USD       861       7.80     84.55
USD/JPY       234       1.44       85.99
GBP/USD       222       3.62      89.61
AUD/USD       222       0.89     90.50

High Drama in Cable

Boy if this isn't just an awful looking trade so far! The entry got triggered and the trade was profitable for less than 5 minutes. It came within 4 pips of being stopped out. It headed back towards profitability, and has now gone back towards getting stopped out yet again. Will it survive? Stay tuned...

Current account equity: $108.73

So We're Taking 2 in the Aussie This Week...

The strategy I trade can sometimes throw curves... We had a somewhat small range of 140 pips in the AUD/USD last week. That makes the breakout points rather close at only +/- 42 pips from the open. We got triggered into the short AUD trade a little after Midnight EDT, and then we were promptly stopped out about 17 minutes later. Then about 2.5 hours later, the long trade got triggered. I don't have anything set up to alert me while I'm asleep that trades have occurred. I could, but I'd rather have the sleep. I don't worry about situations like this, because it is rare and the effect of these sorts of happenings will tend to get smoothed out over the course of thousands of trades. Actually, the 2nd trigger in this strategy has an edge as well, and you could design a profitable system to take both trades. You'd have to do it consistently to extract the edge... not just when you happen to trigger into it like I just did.

 So here we are with the first realized loss of the week:

Short 431 AUD/USD at 0.9165 stopped out at 0.9221 for a loss of -$2.45 or -2.54%

 Next, we have several trades which have triggered and are sitting with a mix of profits and losses:

Short 612 EUR/CAD at 1.3556 with stoploss at 1.3635
Short 583 EUR/USD at 1.3445 with stoploss at 1.3528
Long 861 AUD/USD at 0.9249 with stoploss at 0.9193
Long 242 USD/CHF at 1.0677 with stoploss at 1.0577
Short 101 GBP/JPY at 142.23 with stoploss at 144.61
Short 312 GBP/USD at 1.5135 with stoploss at 1.5290

Only USD/JPY remains to be triggered, and we're about 30 pips from shorting it. Anything can happen... it's the currency market, Baby!

Current account equity: $105.52

Booking Some Profits For a Change!

It's not always pain and misery... just most of the time! We may have seen a near-term top in the US Dollar. 3 of this week's winning trades were bets against the Greenback.

One can never know, but hopefully we've seen the equity lows for this trading campaign. An equity reading of $74.72 represents a $125.28 realized loss, or -62.64% drawdown from initial equity. That is much more than most people can handle emotionally. It is easy to be sanguine about such fluctuations in equity when they are not dealing with life-altering amounts of money. Will it be so easy to weather these storms when we're dealing with a few more digits to the left of the decimal point? Going from $200,000 to $74,720 will probably feel a lot different... but then again, perhaps not, since the buildup to those levels will likely take a few years. We shall see as time goes on.

 So far, only one trade has been triggered to kick off the new week. It's yet another short of the EUR/CAD... a trade which has been working since December. Let us hope that this is not the week for it to stop!

 Short 612 EUR/CAD at 1.3556 with stoploss at 1.3635

Current account equity: $98.46

Results for the Week of 3/28 - 4/4

Beginning equity:         80.82

Currency      Units    P/L         Equity
EUR/USD     356    -4.08         76.75
EUR/USD     167    -2.03         74.72
USD/CHF     248    0.34         75.14
AUD/USD     513    3.35         78.50
GBP/USD     161    3.79         82.29
GBP/JPY     141    7.06         89.35
EUR/CAD     378    2.69         92.04
USD/JPY     323    2.98         95.02
USD/JPY     173    0.74         95.76
GBP/JPY     170    0.72         96.48

Results for the Week of 3/21 - 3/28

Beginning equity:    89.76

Currency          Units      P/L     Equity
USD/CHF        410    -2.12    87.64
AUD/USD        360    -2.28    85.35
EUR/CAD        150    -2.22    83.12
USD/JPY          534    -2.50    80.63
GBP/USD         139    -2.25    78.38
GBP/JPY          134      2.52    80.82