Simply put, the trading competition went straight to hell. Ok, it wasn't that bad, but during the 4 weeks the competition lasted I only traded on two days, altogether made 12 trades. Out of which 7 were winning trades and 5 were losing trades. Overally I produced no profit, but rather a small minus. Why?
Two main reasons. When doing those trades I did them for the simple reason of doing trades not based on some great analysis. I just didn't feel I'm capable of doing the trades just not yet, but as the competition was about to end then I thought it might be a good idea to make at least some trades.
Second reason is simple lack of stop loss in case of one trade. If there wasn't for this one trade I would have ended at around the starting point. But it didn't go like that - I bought a stock, not knowing I did a wrong prediction of course and without setting a stop loss and went for a lunch. Never do that. When I came back this trade had produced me around - EUR 600. My other trades produced 50-150, whether profit or loss. So this one trade hurt me a lot.
What can you expect from next week?
I think that even though there's always a lot to learn it's time to get into practical trading. I have read tens of books, but without any practice and familiarity with actual analysis it's worth nothing. So starting from next week I will start trading with forex. First with my Easy Forex account with 10pip spread and $50 capital. I won't be trying to make any money with it, but rather, will try to make trades where I could at least break even with these 10 pip spreads. Will try to set stop losses so that I couldn't lose more than $5 per trade. This of course means that due to 10pip spread I can't use much leverage. So one way or another, this is the money I can lose and this is exactly for that - for testing. And I will be making posts about all of my trades here.
And very soon I will also be making a deposit (up to $3000) to some better forex platform. Once I do I will create a new channel called "Forex Diary".
I will also continue learning about it all and making posts about new stuff and such.