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08 May 2012

Preview of 24Option Broker Review

Posted in Binary Options, Updates | Leave a comment

As with all the other brokers, I never review them unless I’ve traded a sufficient number of trades with them. Given the rate that I’m going (or losing money right now), let’s set a goal of 100 trades before I review their platform.

From what other people tell me, no one ever has an issue with withdrawals. They’re fairly fast when it comes to withdrawals, that in combination of trying them out in January is when I’ve recommended them all this time. Whether or not that changes in the future depends on my review (most likely will still recommend them since fast withdrawals beats pretty much every other factor out there). Given the trades I tried out yesterday + the 1 trade today (loss) + demo trades, I’ve concluded the following things:

  • There’s no way to be aggressive when you trade on their platform. I’m too used to BBinary and TradeRush where I’m able to enter trade after trade quickly for those times where price moves fast. Given the “processing time” to enter a trade, this prevents quick entries and it also prevents entries during fast price movement. If price moves away from your entry, it won’t let you in and will show “price has changed, please try again”. I find this annoying as it has come up several times already.
  • I would “like to” blame the platform for some of my losses because after being rejected the original try entry, I just click without thinking to enter again. This leads to be worse trade entry that I’d normally be happy with. Imagine a scenario where price touches the S/R level for 3 seconds, you want to enter but after 3 seconds it moves and your entry gets rejected.
  • The processing time is on every trade on all their trade features including the 2 minute trades, bringing me to my next point. You need precision timing to get into good trades for the 2 minute trades and the processing time really messes up the mechanics of fast trading. Potential problems/strategies I’ve noticed for the 2 minute trades, you must get in near the edge of the candle in order to win, if you get in near the middle, your odds are cut off a bit. I’ll make a strategy video for these when I come up with one that works effectively with the processing times (sorry again, I know people have been expecting one for quite some time now).
  • Regarding touch options, these are weird, they change the payouts from time to time and the spreads fluctuate. I’m fine with the spread, but the payout should be fixed. Spread in this context is the price between the market and the target touch price, not between your chart price and their price.
  • Lastly, the odd thing with their expiries for their trade features. You can’t pick :30 or :45, they automatically rotate it for you as they become available. For example, EUR/USD always expires at :00 and :30 and USD/CAD always expires at :15 and :45, this is pretty weird. The normal options can be picked, but the touch or boundary are at their discretion.

That’s pretty much it for the preview, these will be concluded in the ‘platform’ section of the review after I reach 100 trades (assuming I don’t wipe my account before then), if I do wipe out then that just automatically means I write a review. So far between Jan and now, I have a total of 50 trades.

As for trading, after demo trading some more touch options today, I don’t think I want to actively trade any of the features on live trading until I develop a good strategy to use them properly. I’ll stick to normal options for now.

07 May 2012

May 7th, 2012 – Daily Trade Recap

Posted in Binary Options, Live Trades | Leave a comment

Hello everyone!

Sorry to disappoint everyone but unfortunately, making live trading videos takes up too much screen time and editing time. I attempted it this morning when I started trading, I left the screen recorder on for about 3 hours before shutting it off to try to edit/render it. Although after editing, I only had an hour’s worth left. I think that’s still way too much content to present in a video. I doubt many of you would sit thru an hour of me commentating on the price action of the markets and/or my own trades.

Then, I proceeded to attempt to cast each trade separately, kind of like a verbal version of the live trades that I post here on the blog. Even though this focuses exclusively on trade set ups and my trade entry/expiry, this still adds up to about 30-40 minutes of talking. Even if you guys want to watch that, that takes way too long on my part to edit and produce. In the future, when I get more consistent in trading instead of inconsistencies like today, I may considering doing a live stream since that wouldn’t require me to edit or be formal or anything like that. Once again, I apologize!

As for my trades: Overall, a shitty day in monetary terms but pretty educational considering it’s my first day back to trading after a 3 week break

Stats: 13/29 = 44.83%, -$141.85 = -56.74%, Trade vol = $734.45

Things worth mentioning before I get to the trades:

  1. I broke all my rules after I decided to go into “test mode” whereby I tried out various strategies that I had saved up from the past few weeks of no trading.
  2. 2 Minute trades were an epic fail, but I’ll elaborate on that in a future blog post. I’m well aware the binary options community is awaiting my 2 minute strategy video since I posted the announcement video in April. This will come at a later point in time, when I figure out a proper strategy.
  3. I proceeded to try out touch options afterwards (LOVE these)
  4. I didn’t bother to try out boundaries, but seems like they’d be useless unless it’s perfectly flat…
  5. Lastly, if I can’t bring the account up tomorrow, I’m prepared to deposit another $250 to top up the balance so I can trade seriously now that I’ve tried out the features properly.

As you’ll notice, the first trade is at 4:45am, I managed to wake up at 4:15am and prepped my charts by 4:30am. News came out at 4:30am, 6:00am and 8:30am. I avoided trading around 6:00 am for whatever reasons I don’t remember. Then for 8:30am, I placed a USD/CAD call based on 61.8 fib level (that I didn’t include due to too many lines on the charts) but didn’t realize that news was coming out in 5 minutes and that ended up screwing me over (although it was close).

Everything else should be self explanatory for those of you that have been thru my trades in the past. Just correlate the trade entry to the appropriate time on the chart and you’ll see where my entry is. All the charts below have thin vertical lines indicating a trade entry (or 2) at that time. I guess this is where the video would’ve made sense for the eager newbies who are willing to sit thru my videos.

USD/CAD – 5min chart

AUD/USD – 5min chart

EUR/USD – 1min chart

EUR/USD – 5min chart

GBP/USD – 1min chart

Despite the losses, it’s definitely good to be back in the markets trading again. Albeit, I went overboard today with testing out different strategies (again, I don’t like demo so don’t even ask me why I didn’t use demo because I don’t treat demo the same as live). The only thing I have to complain about is the fact that I have to wake up at 4am in order to ensure that I don’t miss the BOSE signals (they were 1/3 today by the way but I waited for pullbacks, so I had 2/3 instead). Still slowly adjusting to the new sleeping cycle because I now have to try to fall asleep at 10pm (instead of 12am) and waking up at 4am (instead of 6am).

PS: I got an email today requesting to try out BOTS, I don’t plan to try out Franco’s signals because that requires me to sit in a chatroom watching him trade and then copying him. That takes a lot of effort to pay attention to him, so I won’t bother with that.

Until tomorrow,

Brian

06 May 2012

Summer 2012 – Trading Rules

Posted in Updates | Leave a comment

As I explain in one of my videos, I forget which one but having a trading journal is useful because it lets you recap on your mistakes. So, as I went thru my journal for the past year and noticed a lot of issues with my trading, especially with hedging.

So, here are my new trading rules:

  • Max 10% per trade up to 2 trades per expiry.
  • Hedging is not an option unless it’s a real hedge, like 10-20 pips in between the call and put so that I have a high probability of it winning in the middle.
  • Also, try to avoid risk splitting as much as possible. i.e. min trade is $10 on TradeRush, 10% would be $25 trades, splitting would mean putting 2x $12.5 trades instead of 1x $25 trade.
  • Absolutely no correlation trading at all. The two trade rule above helps with this because the 2nd trade is primarily reserved for hedging.
  • Stop after losing 3 trades in a row.

Guidelines

  • Take a break when I feel my trading capabilities are lacking, especially the case if I’m going to be casting my own trades as I go along, so I’d imagine this is exhausting.
  • Mandatory break every hour for at least 10 minutes
  • If the markets are boring, don’t bother watching it, move onto something else.

PS: The video will be recording all day but I’ll cut out all the silences when I’m not talking/trading. Also, I’ll mention this again in the video but viewer’s discretion is advised lol, I do occasionally swear  when I trade. So if you’re watching the video around your kids and don’t want them to hear foul language, then make sure you use earphones or something.

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