Hi again, all. Back for week two of our FX-Smooth test.

First though, an apology:

Due to time constraints, it was my intention to post the results on a weekly basis for the first two weeks, then revert to daily posts. Well…best laid plans and all that…

I was about to post these, only for my broadband to go down – ‘a major service issue’ – apparently and one which they seem to be having major problems addressing, which means I’ve had to give up waiting – on the off-chance that they might actually repair it any time soon – and save as a pdf, dump it onto a stick and find another computer – one with an internet connection that bl*%!y works! – to email it to John and have him cut-and-paste it into the blog!!! Not clever…not clever at all. Can you tell I’m annoyed yet?

Ho hum…Hopefully – and I’m crossing everything crossable here – I will be up and running again soon.

It does bring up an important issue. As I mentioned last week, I have been running two versions of a bot 24/7 on a personal test and their open trades would now be running free without the bots to manage them. Always have your broker’s emergency contact number to hand so you can have them intervene if necessary.

This stands, even if you are trading manually, as we are with FX- Smooth and if you do use a bot, hooking yourself up with a VPS to run it on is the ideal solution.

Anyway, that’s that, thanks for your patience and we will now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…

As mentioned in last week’s post, I wasn’t able to trade on Monday, however when checking back, it seems that nothing was missed, so on to Tuesday…

There were a couple of early trades which I wasn’t able to get to but they seem to have pretty much cancelled each other out. As a result, we were looking at a late start to the day.

Tuesday, 13th July

17:00 Buy EURGBP fx-p

08:57 cl -$311.93

There were an interesting set of circumstances here. I made a note at the time of entry, that this seemed a little late and it looked to be topping out, albeit on the H4 chart it still showed a strong

buy. However by 18.14, the entry signal was flickering, with us sitting at -$68.18. We now needed to break through to a new high to show a profit. Now this is where it gets a bit weird…the

entry turned red but the exit stayed blue and there was no audible exit alert…mmmmmm…

…At 19:00, we got a Sell signal on the pair, still with no exit signal for our trade. I made the decision to ride it out, staying with my original trade and ignoring the new sell.

This was a manual close and the audio alert came at 02:00, when the +/- sat at -$402.80, however we benefited from a small bounce later on, which gave us our close. Not FX-Smooth’s finest moment, however.

19:00 Buy GBPJPY fx-s

10:11 cl +$692.49

This was exited on the indicator and was a slam-dunk trade.

19:08 Buy USDCAD fx-p

22:00 cl -$174.71

A possible error on my part here, as I exited on the later audio alert, when at 20:00 the line indicator showed exit. I shouldn’t have waited for confirmation and let the decision slide for 2 hrs and if I had taken the earlier out, we would only have dropped -

$87.00…

22:00 Sell USDCAD fx-p

09:24 cl -$19.40

Closed this one manually and nothing particularly wrong about the trade other than it was a loss. The audio exit alert came at 02:00 when we were on -$30.00…

22:00 Buy EURJPY fx-p

09:20 cl +$123.64

Another vanilla trade, which was closed on the audio alert.

23:00 Buy AUDCAD fx-p

09:14 cl -$160.07

The audio exit bonged at 05:00 and this time we would have been a little better off at a loss of -$140.65…c’est la vie.

So, figures for the day, after all trades had closed:

+$150.02 on the day.

New account balance: $5058.18

New profit: +$2058.18

+68.61%

Day 4 (traded)

Wednesday, 14th July

Bastille Day is the  French national holiday which is celebrated on 14 July each year. In France, it is formally called La Fête Nationale(The National Celebration) and commonly le quatorze juillet (the fourteenth of July). It commemorates the 1790  Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789; the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille fortress-prison was seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern nation, and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the  First Republic, during the  French Revolution. Festivities are held on the morning of 14 July, on the  Champs-Élysées avenue inParis in front of the President of the Republic.

My thanks to Wikipedia for the definition of Bastille Day. Unfortunately, this came to my attention while watching The Tour de France, not in the morning when I started to trade and should have been paying attention to major European public holidays…

Whether I can use this as a reason for the results below – who knows – but it certainly was a bumpy day.

From now on, I will add the method of closing the trade to the data, whether it is on the audio alert, the indicator changing colour, by stop-out, or by my manual close.

11:00 Buy USDCAD fx-p

17:00 cl (audio) -$169.84

We were sitting on +$86.90 at 14:08, so some kind of profit-taking would have bagged some of that. Too bad.

12:59 Sell USDJPY fx-s

04:47 cl (exit-indicator) +$187.01

This trade triggered on a small zoom candle but the H4 chart was very strong and after a very small retrace of the opening candle, we came good. Having said that, at 16:59 we got an audio entry for a long trade but we had no exit on the indicator and no audio

exit. If we had bailed on the opposite trade notification, we would have ended up flat.

14:59 Sell EURJPY fx-p

16:04 stopped -$389.83

At 16:00, we got a long alert on this pair. Our exit indicator was still red. Irritatingly, our entry has flickered and gone blue. This is the main reason why I would caution anyone against putting too much faith in back-checking the screens. Unless you have actually been in the trades, you cannot be sure what would have happened live. After all is said and done, however, this is only the second trade we have been stopped-out on.

14:59 Sell USDCHF fx-s

06:52 cl (exit-indicator) +$180.57

Rock solid trade, no dramas.

-$192.09 on the day.

New account balance: $4857.68

New profit: +$1857.68

+61.92%

Day 5 (traded)

Thursday, 15th July

Wanting to avoid any more Bastille Days, I remembered to check ForexFactory.com for any major alerts today. Turns out there were two reds against the USD.

Duly noted, I plowed on regardless…

09:00 Sell USDCHF fx-s

22:57 cl (manually) +$432.03

09:00 Buy GBPUSD fx-s

22:58 cl (manually) +$755.00

At 22.50, or thereabouts, these looked like they had pretty much topped-out, setting themselves up for a reversal, or at the very least, a major pull-back. The last two candles had shown reversal colours, both H4 charts were weakening and on the Daily, we were also now seeing reversal colours, with the prices banging their heads off resistance lines.

The GBPUSD had come down from a High of +$815.00 and the USDCHF

likewise from +$456.25…

As a result – and one executive decision later – at 22:59, I closed both trades manually, then set up two limit-orders to re- open them should they eventually continue on.

They didn’t…we got the audio exit for GBPUSD at 01:59 and the USDCHF at 02:04…the indicator exit came slightly earlier, 01:01 for GBPUSD when we would have bagged +$630.00-ish and 01:01 for the USDCHF, for +$405.00-ish.

As I said, executive decision. I sure wasn’t willing to sit up, potentially all night, baby-sitting these trades and an awful lot of movement could have happened before I got up the next morning. The thought of losing all that profit…

That, coupled with my reading of the charts, meant I was confident

in the decision and as it turns out, I called it right. However, it does reinforce my comments from last week about you needing at least some trading experience/knowledge and the ability to read the market if you want to get the best from this indicator.

There were a couple of other incidents to fill you in on. Firstly, there was a huge move on the USDCAD which was missed and though this was actually a re-entry of an earlier move, that doesn’t seem to have been any barrier to entry in the past…

There was a Buy on the EURGBP but the indicator stayed red…

On the EURGBP we then got a short-lived notification of a Sell, which flickered constantly. (H4 was in a rock-solid buy move)…

The same thing happened on the EURCHF.

Staying well clear of these trades paid off, as none of them amounted to anything at all.

+$1187.03 on the day.

New account balance: $6043.33

New profit: +$3043.33

+101.44%

Day 6 (traded)

Friday, 16th July

Nothing triggered before noon.

It is very rare that I will open a trade after noon, GMT, on a Friday, especially on the H1 time-frame, as you can be very badly burned if the price gaps the wrong way on the next week’s open. Because this is my usual trading regime, I let anything that came after that go without getting involved.

At 13.59, there was a big move to support the Dollar and take it back up, especially on the USDCHF, which eventually would have pulled in around +$545.00-ish…

Similarly – though not so violently – the GBPUSD moved but there was no call on this one…

The EURUSD showed conflicting signals and went nowhere…

The USD jumped up against the CAD on the back of a zoom candle. This was a continuation of a trade from earlier in the week. There was no entry call…

…and finally, I thought I’d mention a trade on the USDJPY – a

Sell from the 14th of June – which sits at around the +$910.00

mark, as profit-takers make their move, from a maximum of around +

$1130.00 and with the price still well under the 20-period EMA. That’s the kind of figures to send you into a weekend, smiling…

Account balance: $6043.33

Profit: +$3043.33

+101.44%

Graham.