Trading Options

I took a few days off from Forex and headed up to Sacramento to join N at the state fair on Saturday. It was pretty fun! I think the best part was the giant turkey leg N had for lunch. That was some turkey leg! Food and fat people galore…and lots of ways to spend money, though N and I got out relatively unscathed. Even though the fair was held in Sacramento, which is notorious for being really hot in the summer, it was a gorgeous day and wasn’t burning hot.

Last night, I dove back into Forex for my 1-week anniversary of trading. Last night felt to me like the first night where I had true confidence in my trading skills, and it showed… I made 14 pips in 2 trades!

There are many different styles of trading, from “day trading” (where you hold open a trade from 1 hour to 72 hours), to “momentum trading” (you “ride the wave” and try to get a lot of pips in a short time), to this goofy little offshoot of trading called “pip sniping”. Pip snipers are the hit-and-run gangsters of trading. Pip snipers “pick off” tiny movements in currency and get 2, 3, 5, or 10 pips in a trade… and they do it as many times a day as necessary to make a ton of money in trading.

After a few days of trading, you definitely find the trading style of the 3 above that you’re most in line with. Day traders will leave trades open overnight and set careful limits and stops to get what they want; momentum traders keep half an eye on the market all day (and often set up SMS alerts when a market hits a certain level); and pip snipers are always ready with the trigger finger, poised on that “buy” or “sell” button. Yeah, I’m a pip sniper! (Actually, I think most traders start out as pip snipers, and then progress to other forms of trading.) There’s something about the adrenaline rush of pip sniping that’s quite addictive. “It’s going up!” you crow excitedly (or in dismay, depending on how you just traded.) “Now it’s going down!” Since the market changes every few seconds, you always have something going on. This is when it’s helpful to have two monitors; you can keep the charts open on the secondary monitor and glance over every few minutes to make sure you have a good feel for what the market is doing.

I’ve pip-sniped 3 pips so far tonight, and I called the market right on the money! I’m going to put up some example charts on makemoneytradingcurrency.com just as soon as I have time to write about how I trade.

As a side note, I started with $ 5000 in my demo account (demo account = not real money), and I now have $ 5025. In my first week, I’ve made 17 trades, of which 10 have gained me pips. That’s a 58.8% average, which is pretty good for week #1! I’ll keep these statistics updated as I continue trading.