Mistakes Yield Lessons (Trading Rewind)

As the title says, today was an interesting day. With Thanksgiving being tomorrow I honestly didn't expect to get any moves and that prediction did hold up for the most part. in fact I only has one valid signal complete. However I was 1 for 2 on trades today. How does that happen? Let me explain. I'll post a chart below, but long story short I took a pretty good looking trade on the EURJPY 5min, There was an ABCD pattern that met at a 1.272 extension and a .618 retracement. Great stuff right? As always (on the 5min charts) my initial target is the .618 retracement of the move and my stop is half of that giving me a 2:1. After setting my limit orders I went ahead and placed my stop.  A few minutes later when I clicked the chart to see what progress price action had made, I noticed that my Buy Stop order was gone, but price never reached where I had placed it.  Then it hit me...The Spread, I had forgotten to account for the spread. "Idiot" I told myself. Fortunately I was able to re-order the same trade at market and watch it rollover for a target 1 & 2 winner.  Because I am used to trading on longer timeframes the spread is something that I never really took into account. I mean let's just be honest, when you're stops are a hundred pips away, you should be safe enough so that 1 or 2 pips doesn't make that big of a difference. However, on a 5min chart where targets 1 was only 14pips, it does. 

In conclusion I'm not upset at all about goofing on the 1st trade because it allowed me to realize something important that had slipped my mind. And that learning experience is much more valuable than the harsh agony of losing 12pips. So at the end of the day I was 1 for 2 today yielding a total of 34 pips. I'm shutting things down for the week so that makes the week total -70pips.  Hey loosing weeks happen, and when the two previous weeks were +298 and +171, losing 70pips is just the price of doing business.  have a great Thanksgiving and I'll be back on Monday. :-)