Well, my fancy ass Access database broke and it was just not worth the time to fix it, so I’m going to have to do this report manually.
Zen Trading in December was not as good as in November. I made $106.92 on a beginning balance of $3,064.23, for a +3.4% gain on the account.
There were a couple of big lessons that I learned this past month. First of all, it is not good to put limit orders on trades that are closest to the current price. This leads to cutting profits short and letting losers run. Initially, I did not want to lose out on small moves so I put in limit orders on all my orders. You know how that goes.
Secondly, I would prefer to close all positions out every night, or at least have a target where all positions are closed out. This prevents carrying losses for an extended period of time. I am looking for techniques to exit initial losers with a profit using the hedging technique at Oanda.
In addition, sitting in front of the screens every night has really been wearing on me. It can be fun at times, but when I get stuck, it is frustrating. Again, I think I would prefer to have a hard stop and profit targets out there.
January Zen Trading to come!
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend! I have had quite a few questions about Zen trading and I have been referring people to Rob Booker’s free website but apparently one of the Zen trading videos is corrupt. I had a good copy of the video and I feel that is instrumental in understanding the method, so I have posted it on a free file sharing site.
Click here to check out the videos.
Check out Rob’s website, Postcards from the Right Edge for more trading ideas and free webinars.
Although this method and any other method you read about may work for some people, it does NOT mean that it will work for you. However, if you are not consistently profitable, it is my opinion that you should expose yourself to different profitable strategies and give them an honest try to see if they may work for you. When possible, you should backtest the strategy so you are comfortable trading it with real money.
Mid September through October 2009 was the testing period for Zen Trading. There were a couple of bugs that had to be worked out but it is now a feasible trading system. November is the first full fledged Zen trading month and here are my results up until the third week.
I also had to build an Access database to create this report. Initially in this post, I thought that I could get by with an Excel spreadsheet but because of the way I trade Zen, Access turned out to be the only way I could create the reports I wanted. This report still isn’t where I would like it but it’s a work in progress.
Click here to see the trading results in PDF format.
I was actually doing better in October so I still have work to do, but this is the first time in my trading life that I am consistently profitable. I was also on vacation for a week so I wasn’t trading as much as I normally like.
If you don’t have a PDF reader, click here to download one from the Adobe website for free.
Here are some free introductory videos on the Zen trading technique, click here to see them. It is free to sign up and there is all kinds of great information on this site. It was been working well for me thus far and my friend has been making money after only learning it a month ago.
If you want to see it in action, download the Sept. 11, 2009 chart school video on the site and you will see it being traded live.
I am a little reluctant to share numbers yet because I have been only been trading it for two months but the returns they mention in the video are what I expect this style can produce. I trade a modified version of what they talk about, but there are so many ways that this can be traded profitably, to go into any depth on what I do would be kind of pointless.
What do you think? If you are trading this already, how do you deal with a big losing trade? Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions or observations.
I heard about this short term trading method in the Rob Booker camp called Zen Trading. At first I wrote it off because it seemed like a crackhead way of trading. Only going for one pip, no stop losses. No way, that’s crazy.
However, I firmly believe in “don’t knock it until you have tried it”, so I decided to at least find out more about it. I attended one of Rob’s daily webinars where they were doing a presentation on Zen trading and would actually be trading it live.
The best Zen trader who works with Rob is this guy Josh. As Josh started to talk about his experiences and was trading right there on the screen, I thought to myself, hey this might just work.
The reason it is called Zen trading is because it is probably the most minimalistic trading style ever. Josh even suggests that you don’t trade with charts in the beginning. No charts?!!
You just enter a trade, it doesn’t matter the direction. When you have a 1 pip profit, close it out. Obviously you want to trade a pair that has a very low spread. I have been trading the EUR/USD.
I have only been trading it for a few days, but the results have been good so far. It is work and you have to grind out profits, but it can be a great way to make a living and it is fun.
More to come in future posts.
