Last Christmas I took off with my family up to the farm for 3 quiet weeks, where I spent all of my time either hitting golf balls or studying the FX market. I looked at charts, fundamentals, flows, positioning, and basically anything else I could get my hands on. I formulated trading strategies based on these 3 weeks worth of ‘work’. The result of this was that I had very strong convictions about directions and ranges ensuring that I had confidence to take on reasonable risk when my levels were reached. This meant that I had an excellent trading period Jan-Apr (and my handicap fell to 1).

Then I took 6 weeks off for a holiday to Europe, spending time travelling and visiting friends and family, and I did not study the market at all during this period. The result of this was that since then I have really struggled to find any rhythm in my trading (and my conviction and confidence levels have been low). I’ve done well I think to be only facing a very small loss for the last 5 months.

Conclusion: For me at least there is no substitute for hard work. I need to figure out my own theories and strategies based on solid evidence and then implement my trading based on this work. The stupid thing is that its really not work at all, I love doing it, so it will be back to basics for me over the next two weeks.

I will be on-line occasionally over the next fortnight, certainly I will update the site when anything happens in the market, and it will be back to normal on January 7th.