After taking a bit of a break, and reading some related books on trading financial markets, I am back in the forex trading world. I have now completed a mentorship course offered by my broker Global Prime. This course is currently available for free to all active traders of their brokerage; i.e. traders with a live account who deposited at least the equivalent of A$ 200. There are is a also an entirely free preview for the course, which only requires a demo account with Global Prime, and gives an introduction to the types of strategies that are being taught.
Additionally, there are Discord chat rooms that allow traders who are practicing a certain type of trading strategy to communicate with each other and with their mentor, ask questions, analyze each other's trades, and so forth.
I am still using TradingView to search for setups, then execute those trades in MT4. For this purpose, I have found my multi-monitor setup with my PC and laptop extremely helpful! This is what my dashboard and chart setups look like now, for the specific strategy that I am practicing with:
All of the indicators and the strategy behind them are explained in detail in the course material that can be found on the Global Prime website.
I have executed 3 live trades based on this strategy; all 3 of them failed due to human error on my part.
Trade 1
AUDCAD long.
The setup for this trade was valid, going well for a while, and went up easily to 100% profit. At this point, according to the strategy, I should have moved my stop loss to break even, which I didn't do. I was motivated by greed and the expectation to chase an extra few pips. Excited that this trade was going well, I did not want it to get stopped out. Like one of the mentors at Global Prime said to me: "Never chase those extra 3 pips, there is always another bus to get on." I didn't have the discipline of sticking to my strategy, which is required to be successful as a trader. I also held the position over the weekend, in the hopes of the trade going my direction again in the new week. The result was a loss instead of breaking even.
Trade 2
EURCAD short.
This was simply a weak setup, wishful thinking on my part, trying to find patterns when there were none. The result was that the trade went straight against me and resulted in a loss.
Trade 3
AUDJPY long.
Same as the trade before, this was a weak setup, wishful thinking on my part, trying to find patterns when there were none. The result was that the trade went straight against me and resulted in another loss.