My Forex 2019

The feeling of time is subjective. Sometimes it seems to pass very slowly, while sometimes it seems to fly. In my case, time passes very quickly in the last period. It seems to me that I was describing my 2018 Forex experience yesterday, but it was about a year ago. In 2018 I traded not much, because I had no funds: I was invested everything in two positions that did not want to close. Towards the end of the year, one position finally closed positively, and unlocked me some money to reinvest. So, in 2018 I only performed 5 operations. 2019 was much more intense, so I ended up counting 39 positions done. Below is a table that listing all the operations performed. I have adapted the Excel spreadsheet, which I use to follow the progress of my investments. Since the purpose of the spreadsheet I use is different from what I would like to show here, I had to make some changes. For this reason, there are no columns in the table showing the overnight tax. It was too complicated for me to adapt this data in an easily and understandable way, without further enlarging the table and making it unclear.

Here are some clarifications regarding the data in the table, a sort of legend. The first column contains the ordinal numbers of the positions. The operations are organized in chronological order based on the closing date. Following is the date, time and price of the currency pair at the time of opening and therefore the same information at closing. The "Pips" column shows the number of points earned or lost (negative number). The description of the transaction follows: buy or sell. Then the currency pair object of transaction and the financial leverage used are shown. The "Gain/Loss" column shows the percentage of gain or loss (negative number). Finally, there is the "Close Mod" column, which indicates how the position was closed. Here is the explanation of the symbols in this column:

M - manual closing: at some point I decided to manually close the position (profit or loss).
TP - automatic closing: the "Take Profit" limit is reached (always profit).
SL - automatic closing: the "Stop Loss" limit is reached (always loss).
SL+ - automatic closing: reached the positive "Stop Loss" limit. The limit was moved manually to the area where a profit had already been made (always profit).

Two other clarifications: the lines with closed positions at a loss are indicated in red. It is immediately evident that I had two negative operations, while the other 37 produced a profit. Positions passed to the next day, those that generate rollover, have the opening date in italics and underlined.

Let's start with the negative aspects. The first "red" position is number 9, where I lost 18.48% when I closed the USDTRY pair. As I said earlier, the table does not show overnight tax. I got a positive overnight rate of 45.08% on that position, so the overall result was very positive: 26.6%. The detail description of the story of this position is shown on the previous page Emotions.

The next one, and fortunately the last negative operation, is the one under number 35. Unfortunately, there is not much influence of the overnight tax here and the loss is really big: 109.44%. As can be seen from the table, the position was open towards the end of 2017 and is one of the two that has remained open for a long time. While the other closed in a positive area, this unfortunately generated a large loss, over one hundred percent. I defended it by increasing the "Stop Loss " limit to an amount higher than the amount initially invested.

As for those positive operations, it is seen that many of them are closed with a low profit, often less than 1%. The highest profit in one transaction, the sale of USDRUB, is 7%. What was the final balance of my trading last year? It depends on how one use to calculate it. My Forex provider always calculates the real value of a position still open at a certain time, i.e. the amount that would have been obtained if the position was closed at that time. According to this approach, I ended the year with a 33% profit. My way of calculating is different and it's simpler. I consider that the value of the open position corresponds to the money invested, i.e. as if the price of the currency pair were the same as that at the time of opening. According to my methodology, the year was positive, but significantly lower: the gain was 14%. What to say: I'm not even dissatisfied, but I'm not very happy either. If I neglected the 109% loss, the total gain would have been a wonderful 54%; I would be very happy. I hope that this 2020 will be better.