Friday

Missed NFP today, came late from a trip and had some pips before the weekend.

"I can't be wrong"

Two red bars at the same level but I can't be wrong, price must go up! So I lowered my defense and got an uppercut on the face!..-14 pips and felt really stupid.. This is the price of arrogance. I can't be wrong means I am smarter than the markets. But I have already learned that I am just a humble follower of the market. The days I feel I am something special, the loss is there to keep me on the soil...

Madness

Compulsive trading is just that : trading and trading at aeternam, exiting and re-entering at the same point, again and again. Overtrading is the "art" to destroy a genuine price move by splitting it into many trades and get ruined from the paid commissions.. From this 40 pips move I got ..nothing and payed a lot to my broker too.. I had a minor excuse - the move was hesitant and i had to be cautious and expect a reversal, BUT this is only an excuse..

Breakout and retracement

1.3757 (blue horizontal line) was the daily high. I was very cautious with that level, I closed trades, not waiting for the breakout, when price approached this  and found the slightest resistance. I had then two trades above the level, at the break of the high, very cautious again. But, from all these trades, the one I am proud of, is the last one, a breakeven. I closed immediately when i "smelled" that a correction was imminent.

As a scalper, I am realy privileged to trade as described above : imagine, on the contrary, a guy who trades the 15m chart and went long at the break, 1.3760. Taking an affordable risk, he has a stoploss of, say, 25 pips. But price retraced immediately after the break to 1.3728, 35 pips lower with spreads and stop was reached! Even worse, at the previous attempt to break this level today, price retraced 60  pips!.. All stops were taken...

Going up

My Sunday with Euclid

""THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN BY A HUMAN. I'm not kidding and I'm not exaggerating; there is no way to express the joy of reading Euclid without sounding like a lunatic. There are very few books which reach their umpteenth thousandth edition without promising a posthumous infinity of bliss. The bliss of 'The Elements' is admittedly finite, but it delivers right away. This is an electrifying piece of work which has produced a chorus of rapture and inspiration lasting two millennia.""wrote a reviewer on Amazon.

I passed my morning today re-reading (10th time?) the geometry-dedicated 6 first books of Euclid's Elements. I have the chance to read them in the original : greek never sounded so elegant and precise. I felt the same joy and enthusiasm as the reader cited above. This edition is the best translation in english and comprises all the 13 books in one volume.

What is the relation of this material with trading, you may ask. In my humble opinion, trading is pure geometry. It is the skill to think visually, in the two dimensions of a chart, as the chess player thinks in the 64 squares and 2 dimensions. Euclid's geometry is the best exercise i ever found for training your mind to think visually.

During my studies back in the 80's, I got a "passion" for some other geometries too. Among them, the now out-of-fashion projective geometry. Twenty years later, when I started reading trading books, I was really surpised to discover that all this stuff was the inspiration for the trading patterns of the first serious, pioneering book on Technical Analysis by Edwards and Magee, the famous Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, written in the 40's. Human knowledge transplanted on an other domain!..

 To trade properly, you need just two things : geometry and table tennis. The first, explained above. Table tennis makes you fast. More on this on an other post!