EUR/USD Ranger - Week 3

Greetings fellow Zulutraders. For week #3 of my EUR/USD range trading system, I picked up an unimpressive +21 pips. Even less impressive was than out of 15 trades, I miscalculated the stops of 4 of the 16. For 2 of the 4, that resulted in getting stopped out with a -20 pip loss instead of the full -120 pips. On the other 2 cases, I set the stop at a value greater than 120 pips and ended up winning +50 pips on a trade that went -125 pips against me before coming back for a 50-pip profit. If I figure correctly, I would have been stopped out at -120 pip losses for the 2 that I got out without only a 20-pip loss. So I would have done much worse without those mistakes.

In retrospect, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday were good range trading days, and I closed 100 pips each day on those days. But Wednesday and Friday were strong trending days - to the downside for EUR/USD which caused range trades to buy below the market, and sell even farther below when EUR/USD broke down.

Lessons learned - calculate the stops carefully. How hard is it to subtract 120 pips from 1.3600 - come on, its 1.3480 not 1.3580. Second, don't trade a ahead of big economic reports. Keep on top of the economic events calendar. Big trends can start (or continue) once those reports are released. Range trading works better in the sleepy in-between hours of 12 noon EST and say 2AM EST. By then the London guys have packed it in for the day, and most economic data has been released. Third, I need to start looking at hourly ADX, or some other trend activity indicator to avoid range trading when there's a strong trend in place. More to come on that.