Paper Trading Day 60 of 90

two thirds of the way through my paper trading apprenticeship today and a good day to review how it is going.

FOREX:

My short trade onBritish Pound / US Dollar today has traded the wrong direction two days in a row which is both days that I have been in the trade and while it hasn't hit the stop point I am going to exit from it. Lifestyle Trader showed an entry signal for a short trade on Euro / Swiss Franc.

Profit on open trades is currently $10,586.70 and profit on closed trades is $12,875.80 a for a total profit of $23,472.50 an increase of 63.44%.

30 trading days ago things were not looking so good as they are now. Closed trades were down by nearly $5000 and in the last 30 days they have reversed by nearly $18,000 a figure attributable to the fall in the British Pound and the US Dollar not fluctuating quite so much.

30 trading days ago I said that I would keep an extra set of records that just traded the currency pairs that did not have the US Dollar in them and while I haven't been showing the results in this blog I have kept recording on it and the figures after just as amazing. I have one open trade at the moment a Long trade on Euro / British Pound and an order in for a short trade on Euro / Swiss Franc. Profit on Open trades is $2,857.90 and profit on closed trades is $10,689.15 a total profit of $13,546.75 an increase of 36.61% in just 30 days of trading four non US Dollar currency pairs.

And the good news is that a new version of Lifestyle trader is due to be released soon that has two extra currency pairs with another non US Dollar Pair, Australian Dollar / Japanese Yen, can't wait for that.

COMMODITIES:

Very little to report here again no exits and no signals. Profit on open trades is currently $6,341.25 and profit on closed trades is $9,434.25 for a total profit of $15,775.50 an increase of 32.87% on my original account.

While the difference between now and 30 days ago seems to be in my good there has been a lot happening in between. Profits soured for the first half of those 30 days to a point where I had an increase of 48.61%. So what has happened here?

I have heard that October is a notoriously bad time to trade and in fact all the great market crashes have occured in October and just in the last two weeks profits on my closed trades has dropped by 1/3.

A few weeks ago I made the decision to take a conservative approach with my trading as a result of my seemingly bad record with forex trading, i.e. if the daily trend is not in the same direction as the weekly trend then dont take the trade. This seems to be working well with forex but could it be hampering my progress with commodities. At the moment I only have three open trades out of a possible fourteen in the sectors I have chosen to trade in (grains, livestock and softs). And while all three of these trades are currently doing well. I have had quite a few recently that have not done so well.

I think it would be a bad time to start experimenting it being October, so I will continue taking the conservative approach for now and see how things go after October has ended. It certainly has been interesting to see what has happened so far this month.

All said and done though when looking at the total figures with both forex and commodities combined. With a total starting figure of $85,000 and a current balance of $124,248. Nearly $40,000 in profits that is a staggering increase of 46.17% in just 60 days of trading.