Bi-Directional System - First Week

Since Monday of last week I have been trading my Bi-Drectional System TS04. At the beginning of the week I made some silly trades manually on top of those indicated by the system. It's a little nerve-wracking to follow a system - a lot scarier than making "discretionary" trades. It felt at first like I was less in control than before. Now I welcome the fact that I don't actually have to watch each trade all the way through until the position is closed.

I have posted a summary of my trades since last Monday on my site since the tabular display doesn't work well with my blogger template. You can see the nervous trades I made at the beginning (on the 27th). All times in the summary are in GMT.

It's pretty exciting to be profitable so many days in a row - a total of 255 pips.

The one annoyance is that I am trading this system manually whereas a mechanical system would have opened a few more profitable trades than I have been able to since my trades were closed out at my TP several times and I wasn't in front of my computer to properly open the next set of positions. Eventually (maybe next week) I'll shift this over to use the GainCapital API so that I can test it more accurately.

Another aspect of this system is that it really only works properly in a choppy market. As soon as the market starts to trend this system gets stuck. I therefore need another system to counter-balance this one and make profits during a trend; or at the very least prevent this system from giving up all its profits.

I will continue to trade this system manually for the next two weeks or so and then I'll post some more details on the system itself.

Lessons learned:

• Trading a system is much less stress and trouble than trading in a "discretionary" fashion - once you get used to it
• Trading manually misses out on some trades so a given system should not be dependant on a religious adherence to its rules (at least insofar as timing is concerned)