Friday, April 21, 2006

Current positions, 3 new potential trades

We were taken out of all but two trades but still doing well and locking in more profits. The new trades are interesting. We were in the Gbp/Jpy until stopped out yesterday, the pullback became a retracement and gave a short signal today. This is surprising as oil broke through $75 for the first time in history. This tells me that we definitely have strength in the yen and the Usd/Jpy trade should continue to run. The dollar looks to continue weakening, the Swedish National Bank dropped the USD holdings nearly in half. I am expecting a continue run on the Usd/Cad as well.

Gold pushed back to near the close two days ago, making up the majority of losses from yesterday. Surprisingly, my system is giving a buy signal but I am still not comfortable with this kind of a move. I want to see another day or two before buying gold or silver. The Usd/Zar gave a short signal, the rand is highly correlated to gold as well. I have placed an entry order at 6.0019 to try to get a better price or miss the trade entirely, just because this gold volatility is making my indicator act unusual.

Time will tell but things are still going well.

Happy Weekend.
Blake Young
Random Acts of Forex

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Base 10/unit based trading and streaming quotes

GFT has lowered their initial deposit requirements. If you are interested in the functionality of GFT you can set up a demo by clicking on the link to the right or even set up an account with them. The followers of this blog know I am a huge proponent of base 10 and unit based trading for the money management aspect.

I have also added streaming quotes, courtesy of GFT Forex as well.

HUGE PULL BACK!

This is the biggest pull back I have seen in Silver and Gold. Silver pulled back nearly 6 times the average daily range. The market commodity market was shaken unbelievably. It is my opinion that the gold and silver market will not give clear signals for the next 3-10 days as traders try to figure out what happened and while large hedge funds and institutions apply salve to their wounds. Luckily I tightened my stops and was not hammered nearly as much as some friends nor as much as the institutions and funds did today. Anyone holding silver futures today would have lost as much as $14,000 per full contract held today if they did not have tight stops in play. Only two of our positions got stopped out otherwise. One of those stopped out was the Usd/Zar which is heavily correlated to gold. We received a buy signal on Eur/Aud. I am very concerned about this trade due to the AUD and Gold correlation with the big gold retrace. I am not planning on taking any metal signals for the next few days. Even still, to trade my system I am taking a 1% trade long on the Eur/Aud.
I feel like most of my signals related to metals at all are going to be sketchy for the next few days. Here is a chart of my system I have been trading and developing. As you can see prior to today the signals are not quick or dramatic. This is will through the chart I have been using off by at least 4 days. It was an insane move.













Below are the current positions. I gave up a lot of equity but that money was not mine until I closed the trades. Still holding over 100% return in under a month.












Blake Young
Random Acts of Forex

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Another great day ahead of major announcements.

Today was yet again a phenominal day. All positions are positive and running.

Tonight and tomorrow we have trade balance, cpi, initial jobless claims, and retail sales coming out of Japan, the Euro-zone, Canada and the US. Because of all of this volatility, I am actually tightening the stops a smidge more than I usually do. Not by much, just putting it closer to the lows for the day instead of 10 pips or more below the mark.

No new trades. Tomorrow will either solidify trades or break us out to new levels.

Below are the current positions and stop losses. I did catch another entry on gold and took a half positions but got in near $635 instead of the $633 I was eyeing. Silver has been so aggresive in its growth and did not retrace, so I am not comfortable with chasing it on another entry. I need it to breath out before or break the $15 mark before I get too anxious to put more into the trade.

Current equity shows 175%. But they are not closed out. If all of the closed out against us tomorrow, we should still be up about 145-155%.

Gold and Silver on a run

Gold and silver are taking off again.  If you don't have access to spot precious metals or futures, watch for a move in the Aussie, either paired with the Usd or the Jpy.
 
If gold breaks through 633 I will be watching for another entry position.  Silver has already broken through where I was hoping to add to my position, I will probably wait for a small pullback and try to add half of a position again.
 
There will be a scheduled outage on blogger.com today at about the time I run the update.  So please be aware that the update may be delayed a couple of hours.
 
Blake

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Silver trigger, Account holding well over 100%

The silver entry position posted earlier today was triggered, gold was very close. There are no new trades today, just tightening of stops, many into profitable or near profitable territory.

I sent out an email before stating that my goal was to surpass the 100% return in less than a month. Now, in 27 days, under 4 weeks of time the current equity is at over 117% return without risking more than about 3% in any one position. This was accomplished with slower moving trades off the daily charts, not scalping the 5 minute charts. On significant breakouts I added to positions such as on silver today. I manually trailed stops that allowed for shortened losses, but all in all this has been a conservative trading style.

I do not expect these kind of returns continuously. If I hit 50% for the year I would be out performing 95% of all funds out there. We have hit 117% in a short time frame.

To compare to Barklay's Top CTA funds, they on average are down nearly 1% for March and up 0.01% in April.

This index I am referring to can be found at http://www.barclaygrp.com/indices/btopfx/


Best of success.

Blake Young
Random Acts of Forex
http://randomactsofforex.blogspot.com

Placing additional entry orders on Gold and Silver

Gold and Silver are running higher and higher. I am placing an entry order for both, which will add to my positions if gold moves over $622.85, beyond todays R1 and well above the pivots. Silver entry order above $14 at $14.10 which is R2 and a nice round number which precious metals seem to enjoy breaking through. If you do not have spot market available for the precious metals and do have a stock account, these trades can be used frequently with gold and silver mining stocks or by trading some of the indexes or futures.

I have activated the http://www.weblogs.com/ update on this blog. This means if you set up an account with http://www.weblogs.com/ they will notify you everytime my blog (or other blogs you may be interested in tracking) is updated. I believe this is a free service.

Questions and Answers

I would like to get some more dialog going. If you have questions or comments email actsofforex@gmail.com and let me know if you would like your question answered on the blog rather than going through the comment area. If it is a private/personal question that you would like answered, please specify. Please be thoughtful in your questions and comments as this should be a learning forum.

I will leave this open until the # of questions or comments is too taxing to my time, otherwise it is open to questions immediately. Share the email, share the blog, let's learn together.

If you would like to be part of the email list and you are not currently, email actsofforex@gmail.com and I will include you on the list. Emails go out occasionally on non standard updates of the blog (meaning not in the afternoon) and if I want to add additional information not published on the blog. I may answer some of the questions through the email rather than the blog.

Blake Young
Random Acts of Forex

Monday, April 17, 2006

Anti dollar plays



There are a lot of new positions and break outs today. Because of the number of signals today, I am taking half sized positions on everything that is anti dollar. This is not because of my love for the dollar, rather because if the new 6 trades are all retracements that would be painful. Instead I am taking all 6 new signals entering half the size I normally would and adding to my Gbp/Jpy position.

See below for the current trades, new trades and current equity.

Happy Trading.

Blake Young
Random Acts of Forex

Euro Break out

This was the bounce and possible entry signal I was discussing. Great break, great run, lots of money to be had, Blake was moving from one house to another and didn't catch the trade.
Bummer.

Even though this trade was not entered into the other active trades are doing really well and I added to the silver position. I am expecting a number of signals at close today.