25th November

Hi John

Thank you so much for your call today. I felt a whole lot better after our chat. Please do not feel bad about anything. It was all my fault and I should know better with the money management you taught me. You were right in thinking I had a bigger account as I did when I was with Worldspreads but I hadn’t told you that I wasn’t able to increase my VT account until I got home so for now I’m on $500.

I will go over the basic Forex course again and get that embedded on my mind. I will put the scalping away for the time being till I am comfortable trying to scalp again. The course is tremendous but it affected my trading. I doubt this will happen to others but I think in my case I did both courses too close together. They are two different entities and being so new to the trade I am mixing them up and making a right hash of things. If I was more comfortable trading the transition to scalping would have been a breeze but my trading skills are still too erratic and that’s why I need to go back to basics. I don’t mind. I do like the idea of entering a trade and letting it work for me. Had VT not done what it did I’d have made over 60 pips on the rally but I console myself there are always more opportunities and that’s a great feeling that you never miss the bus.

I went in on the Dow and made 59 pips. I trailed my stops and at one point I was 88 pips in profit. Then just after I moved my stop to the allowed limit the Dow turned and shot up and I stopped out at 59 pips. After we chatted I saw Darren was online and he showed me how to trail the stop. It is very complicated especially if you don’t intend being in the trade for long. I had so many windows open I was in a knot. Also every time you want to trail your stop you have to cancel the one previous one and open a new one. I did this 4 times. I can see why folk don’t put in stops on CMC and try to stop mentally. It took me several minutes to see what I was making. At one point I had 5 windows open!

After that I watched the charts and went back to VT. Then I went into a buy on the euro. It shot up to 16 pips profit before I could put my stop in. When I wanted to add a stop it wouldn’t allow me and the platform froze on me. So I had to shut it down and open it again. I reopened the VT and decided to take my 16 pips which had in the meantime gone down as far as -4 and then up to 16 again. It would not let me out the trade. It hung up on me again. By the time I got out I was 3 pips in profit. I went into two further trades after rebooting the computer a second time and with both trades I was more than double in profit yet when I wanted to get out it froze and I lost half my pips (16 pips both times). So on the euro today I made 18 pips and the Dow 59. I am happy with my gains and feel scared to trade more today because of the unreliability of VT today. Every time I tried to view my report on VT I got a fatal error. To me this is a sign to call it a day.

So now I’m working on my day job and will watch the charts. As soon as I’m back in the UK I want to put more money into the account because trading with such small amounts is painful but at least its allowing me to build up again albeit slowly.

Leigh will be in Bombay around noon my time. I have a dentist appointment at 1 so I am now going to sit back and let things run. The Dow and the Dax both look sideways to me right now and I’m happy to stay out. It was amazing how fast the Dow shot up 100 points. The 5 minute chart looked like a 1m chart.

Have a good day and chat to you later on again. Thank you for everything. I owe you so much because you have changed my life. I have gone from being frustrated and heading towards burnout in my day job to being revitalised and so full of energy and to think that with all my messes and platform issues I’m not giving up and I’ve learned a lot about myself. I don’t give up when I know I’m onto something good. I still dream of trades and charts and never once think of failure or losses. Even after a bad day I will go over entry and exit points in my head and imagine winning trades. One book on psychology I read said you have to think this way if you want to be a trader. It comes naturally to me to think positively. My parents brought us up to always see the half full cup.

Cheers - Desiree