Judgement Calls - The Human Element to System Trading

My goodness what a long day it has been. I cannot express really what I am feeling for the AussieYen of late. :) Emotional trading is a bad thing, fortunately for me I have a system in place.

Let's start off with the AussieYen.

Looking good except it's like 11am in the middle of the dreaded Asian Session. The pair is overbought, our system flags us an entry. Just something about this setup doesn't click for me. System wise, it meets the entry signal. For conformation, let's look at it's parent the AUDUSD.

Things seem to meet up. Both are way overbought, we have our system entry signalling at the same time for this pair.

Hours later and millimeters of chart movement in candle sizes, a nice tight stop of 79.95 finally gets hit. Even now, while writing this, both pairs are drifting sideways in very small candles. The AUD news that came out earlier in the day was pretty good. What I was intending to play on here was some retracement of the impulsive move up. we got neither no retracement, nor any substantial continuation. Please return 9 hours of my life AY!! :)

Trade 2, and where the true Judgement call comes in. The GBPJPY. I miss sending the signal at 142.20. Price receded back too quickly for me to visually confirm that that was a good price level to enter. I get in at 141.85. We see some downward movement, as the GBPUSD is also very toppish at this same time. VERY good factors in OUR favour. The interesting thing with FX is, that it doesn't matter how much everything lines up in your favour, that is NO guarantee the trade will be a winner.

Here is the chart. 3. depicts where the exit at a -30 pip loss (for me, soon after sending the email to exit, price retested 142.00 for a -15 pip loss for some of our subscribers).

9:30pm rolls around and US news comes out not so bad for the USD. I'm no fundamentalist, but right now, we are looking at 2-3 hours of no solid movement in either direction. Even now we are still sitting on the 142.00 level and the original trade call may still end up being a winner.

So why call it CLOSEd? We are sitting on weekly and monthly level support for the USDJPY pair. My guess is at these levels, not many people are too keen to sell into the face of such strong support. No trade is really worth waiting hours to play out unless you are already on 4hrly or daily charts. It works or it doesn't, and after seeing the signal and acting upon it, I'm just not that confident that after London and now NY coming into bat, that 88.25 level of the USDJPY isn't going to break tonight.

Erase 130 pips off that 800pips start to the month :(