I don't know if it's luck or what but I couldn't ask for a better start to todays trading day. As you know I am both a day and swing trader that uses both a long-term system (hours to days) and a shorter term system (minutes to hours) to trade. Well today I had trades posted in each system going in opposite directions. I was going long on the USDCHF and short on the EURUSD. Before the news event at 8:30 I was very close to being stopped out in the EURUSD trade and about half way to my target in the USDCHF trade. When the news event came out in the US's favor I figured that whether good or bad I would be stopped out of at least one trade. To my enjoyment when the release came out it shot my USDCHF to my profit target area. It was actually about 10pips short but I have in my rules that I can take profit out early if it's within a certain percentage. And with the EURUSD trade, price action came within 1pip of stopping me out (and reversing me for another loss) and shot up and hit my profit target. Call it having my stops in the right place, or just plain old good luck, but I needed something like that to start my day off.  It's been a much better month of trading so far and with my 6 month anniversary coming up I have a lot to look forward to. 

To continue off of yesterdays post I have been vigorously back-testing this new system. I look at about 17 pairs on my swing trading frames so I decided see how I could I cut down my list so that I didn't have to back-test all of those pairs. Since this new model in a day trading model that I will trade from 6am-12noon I decided to only trade the European ans American pairs since those pairs will move the most during that time period (the London/US Session). While back-testing I also noticed that the strictly European pairs were not too profitable and that the major US pairs were. Out of the 8 pairs tested I have currently found 3 to my liking. After finishing this post I'm going to re-test USDCAD because I forgot to save the data, but if I can get a 4 pair portfolio to trade that would be good. The reason I think 4 would be a good amount is because I don't want to overwhelm myself with data. If i'm following and concentrating on too many pairs then I fear that I will lose the focus I need to trade them correctly. I'm very excited about it and I hope that this is something that I can use in the long-run to help supplement my swing trading. 

I've learned that when I get bored I tend to try and force trades to happen. And when swing trading it's possible that I can go days to even a week without taking a trade.  This can become very annoying especially when this is your full time job. I figure if I could trade a day-trading model as well, this will allow me to stay busy in the market and just allow the swing trading signals to come to me.

Lastly the big question is what if I get 2 opposite signals on the same pair? If this is the case I have already predetermined that the swing trading signal will always be taken over the day trading signal. I decided to do this because the swing trading moves are the bigger moves and signals on a higher time frame are always more credible than the ones on smaller time frames.

@iambusinesstr

If you've been following my posting the you know that I'm always looking for a way to improve (Kaizen). Over the weekend I think I may have found a method that really works well. It's funny because this trading method actually came from a part of a method that failed in the past.  I had a past method that used about 3 or so indicators to try and generate an entry signal. While going through these old charts i began deleting indicators just for the heck of it and I ran across something that caught my attention. So as always, after passing the eye test I went back and grabbed some historical data and started back testing. I tested it on various time frames and was really impressed with the win percentage which was about 50% but the one thing that bothered me was the inverse risk reward ratio. Meaning that whenever I had a losing trade I would lose much more than what I would gain on my winning trades. So you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if I win the same number as times as I lose then I'll be losing money at the end of the day. So I wrecked my brain and played around with a few settings and found something that worked. I just finished up my testing last night so today is the first day that I am trading it live on a pair so i'm interested to see how it goes. If it does turn out to be a success, then it just goes to show you that you don't need a fancy method or millions of special indicators. Sometimes the simplest methods work just as good, and are a lot less confusing.  However the most important part (as my trading mentor/coach told me) A good method means nothing without the willingness to follow your rules.