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Building on the strong performance from late March, I closed my gold short on Tuesday 13 March. I moved my SL to secure some profit after the US CPI data was released. I saw that Gold reacted in a positive manner after the announcement of the data and wanted to protect my floating profit. The stop loss was hit and I was out of the trade. You can read more about this trade on this link: https://www.marketinsides.com/post/trading-journal-5-9-april-don-t-get-complacent
Oil Long
Remember that oil setup I talked in my last trading journal entry. It did break out of it’s recent range – to the upside. It was soon after the weekly EIA inventories were released. The numbers were bullish. I entered a long trade with a wide stop loss – below the low for that day. My initial trade was heavy on the size and I closed half of it a few minutes later to lower exposure and secure some profit. I let the rest run and closed it a few hours later 1.2USD higher from where I bought.
WTI Daily Chart. The upper black line shows my entry price. I entered the trade on the big green candle which broke to the upside. I closed the trade on the green line as it coincided with the February high for WTI.
Gold Long
And to continue to amazing week I entered a gold long, when it broke above its recent highs. I held that trade over the weekend as Gold closed with a green candle on Friday. I closed that trade on Monday (19.04.2021) to secure a gain of 22 points.
Gold Daily chart. The arrow highlights the big green candle which broke above the March and April highs for gold highlighted with the black line. My entry was just above that line at 1764.77. The green line shows where I closed the trade.
This makes it three positive weeks in a row. No losing trades from 29.03. 7 out of 7 winners. Patience and better entries are starting to pay off. From a drawdown of almost 10% in March, I am now into positive figures for the year.
First algo
Among other exciting projects – I coded my first algo on python. It’s being tested on demo and I admit that I check the trading platform to see how it’s doing every 5min. The whole process was intense – I found the strategy online in a random setting. Someone on upwork was looking for a person to code it for them. I ended up stealing it for myself. I am not going to share too much about – it’s a technical strategy which does trend following. I did the initial backtest on tradingview and it showed promise. I then gathered 1hour data going back almost 20 years to do a more thorough backtest. The results looked good for that as well. I used backtesting.py and ta-lib for the backtest. I then did optimisation for the parameters which were used in the indicators. I also added some risk management criteria – SL. The results were even better. It was time to code it – I am used the FXCM python api. I am impressed by how simple and easy to use it is. I used a scheduler library to run the code and ran the strategy for the first time on Friday evening. There were some bugs as the strategy was executing double the size I wanted and more trades than I wanted. After fixing some boolean statements over the weekend, I ran the strategy last night. So far it’s doing everything right in terms of execution. I will be running it on demo for at least a month. During that time some additional risk management rules on the account level will be added. I will also build a log file which will log all trades and execution. I am also planning on setting up a monitoring system which will notify me when trades are open and closed.
Regardless of whether the algorithm makes it to live trading, I am proud with my achievement. I look forward to building more strategies in the future.