Introduction

Welcome to Macrotactics. Macrotactics is a blog devoted to recording a part time trader’s journey into the world of trading currencies. Please feel free to hang out and send me a comment if you think I have gotten something blatently wrong or don’t understand something.

Why am I writing this Blog?

“The future will not belong to the educated, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure time wisely” -Anon

This blog was established in January 2008 as part of my new years resolution to improve my edge in trading. There is a maxim in the field of education that goes something like this:

You remember 10% of what you read
You remember 20% of what you hear
You remember 30% of what you see
You remember 90% of what you do

Now whether this is true or not, who knows, but anything that lifts my retention rate and makes me think more criticially and deeply about my trading is bound to give me a tradeable edge over the market.

What this blog is not

While I am happy to answer some questions, please don’t confuse this blog with a service for providing signals, mentoring, trading plan reviews, system evaluations, coding of systems, product reviews, etc and all the other things people want me to do for them for free.   

About me

In my day job I work as a manager in an Information Technology company. I live in sunny Brisbane, Australia with my wife, a baby girl and a cat.

I am still working full time and trading part time.  I trade with enough real money to make my trading worth more than the hours of toil I put into it, but not so high that I am risking my family or future.  At present, I don’t have enough in the kitty to allow me to “live the dream” and trade for a living.  Until that day I still need to do the daily grind of working a full time job and doing the trading thing late at night after the family have gone to bed so I can do my other daily grind of compounding my account. You can understand why this blog is powered by coffee.

About My Trading

I have been banging my head on this trading thing for since 2004.  In 2004 I was working in a job where one of my colleagues mentioned he was trading options and making money. I had no real clue what he was on about, but I decided I wanted to know more about trading. I bought a book at the airport on trading and went to a free seminar on options trading. The book was full of mysterious Japanese names for candle stick patterns. The options guy at the free seminar must have been on speed as he paced up and down the stage rambling about his best friend the trend and about how Anthony Robbins solved his psychology problems. For some strange reason, despite this bizarre introduction, I was hooked and wanted to know more. Since 2004, I have dabbled in stocks and options, but eventually I settled into the area of forex trading in about 2006.

I am fairly flexible in how I trade. and I am open to using a variety of trading methods, including position trading, swing trading, grid trading, options trading and automated trading.  In fact I am open to trading any method that I can fit into a less than a hour or two a day between a full time job, family and sleep.  Day trading obviously doesn’t fit my life style.

In my position trading I like to use classical trend trading methods. In my swing trading I like to use breakout trading and trading reversals off of tops and bottoms.

I am not a “technical analyst” in the pure sense of the word, as I don’t believe that all information is contained in the price. I like to mix technical analysis with fundamental Fed watching and sentiment analysis based on the COT report before committing to a longer term trade.   I think the short term is far too random to trade well using popular forex day trading methods, that is why I like using automated trading and grid trading for this time frame.

Naturally like all every trader should I also manage risk using a combination of stop losses and profit taking tactics and money management methods.  While I do think trading psychology is important, I do think at times it is highly overrated.