My Forex 2022

Many years ago, when I entered the Forex world, I focused almost exclusively on currency trading; from this also comes the name Forex. At that time, the service providers almost exclusively offered only this option, and only a few of them gave the possibility of trading with commodities, making available only few products, such as oil, gold, silver, platinum and a few others. It seemed complicated to me to deal with two different areas, so I only traded gold a couple of times. Over time Forex providers have significantly expanded their offer, the number of commodities available to traders has increased tenfold. From the point of view of price movements, commodities have some different characteristics from money. In fact, money is virtual and in fact it is a good that is used for exchange with other products. To produce money, it's enought to start a printing house that prints it. Today, in fact, the issuance of new money is mostly virtual: the central bank records the amount and has had it available ever since. Commodities are concrete, material goods and must be produced. As with money, their price is determined on the basis of supply and demand. Current inflation, i.e. the decrease in the value of money, is mainly caused by an excessive amount of money in circulation: at the time of Covid, central banks issued money that had no equivalent value in the assets on the market.

Already with money there are dozens of things that can change the performance of a currency, but with commodities the number of these factors is significantly higher. Just think of the weather conditions somewhere in the world linked to wheat cultivation (a year of drought and a very poor harvest) or some accident in a copper mine in Chile (it happened); these are just two possible factors that can cause the price to skyrocket. Unlike money, the production of which is almost free, raw materials have their own production price, sometimes even very high. It is unlikely that a producer of a raw material will decide to operate at a loss in the long run, because the price of his product has fallen significantly and no longer even covers the cost of production. The moment the producer stops producing, the supply decreases and the price increases, i.e. the market works, balancing itself. On the other hand, the prices of commodities can also rise a lot due to speculation; this is what happened with natural gas. Speculation cannot go on indefinitely because it wreaks havoc on the market, which is defending itself from excessive imbalance. Therefore, as a result of the gas price increase, the demand for other energy sources has increased enormously; solar panel prices have recently increased significantly as demand has rised disproportionately. Therefore, when the price of a commodity is too low or too high, it's a great time to invest.

I made this long introduction to explain why I mainly traded with natural gas this year. Only 4 positions refer to the trading of currencies. Below is the table with an overview of all my managed positions in 2022. The first thing you notice is that there are no red numbers (indicate a loss). This is the second year in a row that I have managed to close all positions with a profit.

Unlike the previous year, the profit was significantly higher and far exceeded the 50% of the capital I hold in my Forex account. You may notice that the gains made by trading currencies are much, much smaller, almost negligible, compared to those related to trading natural gas (NATGAS). It can also be seen that at the beginning I was only selling, but then in June I also started buying the product. You also see a lot of manual closings of positions, as I was often overly cautious. My slogan is: better to earn less than lose. Below the table you will find an explanation of the meaning of the abbreviations in the table. Also, underlined dates indicate positions that were not closed on the same day, meaning that the position has been open for several days, sometimes more than ten. In fact, most of the operations in the table below are like this. It takes patience to achieve the desired goal.

M - manual closing. In other words, at some point I decided to close the position manually, without waiting for the initially imposed limit to take the profit..
TP - automatic closing: the “Take Profit” limit has been reached.
SL+ - automatic closing: the positive “Stop Loss” limit has been reached, ie the “stop loss” limit has been moved to the area where the profit has already been assured.