Returning back with some binary trading on September 9, 2013

It’s been over one week since I last did any form of trading, binaries or otherwise. Last week I was in the process of initiating myself with a new environment, given that I’m back at university for the new school year. In general, I think it’s always a smart decision to trade only when you’re mentally ready; that is, being fully comfortable in your surroundings, and able to abide by some sort of routine or regimentation in your daily schedule. Last week was a period of adjustment, getting organized and comfortable in my new residence and trying to figure out how to best regiment my schedule and fit trading into that to some extent. But as a general rule, never try to trade when you’re tired, undergoing stress, or your mind simply isn’t fully clear, as that can cloud judgment and undermine trading performance.

I did get back into some USD/CHF trading on Trade Rush. For binaries, my current plan is to take one early-morning binary trade per day if I can manage to do so and keep it at that, win, lose, or draw. I can’t trade the binaries quite as extensively as I did during the summertime at the moment given I need to spend quite a bit of my day attending classes and studying.

I started watching the USD/CHF market around 2:30AM EST, but I didn’t find my first set-up worth taking until around three hours in. From the attached screenshot, it’s clear that the USD/CHF was in a morning downtrend. Therefore, taking trend into account, my first potentially targeted area was the 0.93825 area which had seen some previous price congestion. That said, this wasn’t a level that I was necessarily looking to trade if I got a touch, bounce, and re-touch. This level did form some minor support before 2AM (nothing noteworthy), and formed some brief congestion when in the process of forming the current main leg of that morning’s downtrend. So it wasn’t necessarily a resistance level, per se. I thought 0.93887 would perhaps be a safer level to take a trade. 0.93825 never did show enough price congestion to consider it trade-able.

However, 0.93887 was never reached and the pair began to resume its downtrend. After an hour spent returning back down to its expected target of 0.93706 (support level created by that day’s current low), it was broken on its first touch before forming a new daily low at the 0.93665 support. The 0.93706 level was broken to the top-side, suggesting that some weakening of the downtrend wasn’t out of the question.

It turned out that my trade for the day would come as a call option at the 0.93665 level. It was a level I had marked off as a potential call option area after serving as the new daily low. Price strongly wicked after touching the level on the 5:30 candle, so I entered on the re-touch of 0.93665 on the 5:35 candle. The trade expired on the next candle, about half-a-pip ITM.

By the end of the week, I hope to have my first forex-related article ready. I’ve received several requests over the months to start some sort of blogging on how I approach that type of trading, and I’m definitely looking forward to getting something started, hopefully as a once-a-week thing. Similar to my binary posts, I’ll mainly cover trade examples and write about entry, stop-loss, take-profit, trailing strops, and so forth. I’ll also cover such things like money management, position sizing, and more of my general approach to spot fx as it currently stands. I’m only about a year into my forex career so far, but it’s been a pretty seamless transition so far thanks to my prior experience in trading binaries.

Many thanks for reading!