FRUSTRATION & OTHER TRADER MALADIES

“There used to be “pits” where you could hit somebody!”

I get up this morning, and I’m at the trading screen a minute or two before 4

AM EST … I take a look at the Asian session, and quite frankly folks that scream

you heard coming out of the East was me from the gentle breezes of the

Caribbean … and once again, Asia has most of the action, Europe can’t figure

out shit, and the U.S. is nothing but a “protect & defend” money laundering

operation … my level of frustration with financial markets is building.

And here are my levels of frustration … 1) once again, USDJPY has become a

nightmare to navigate … can’t move 5 PIPS in 2 hours for days on end, but can

move 100 PIPS on nothing in 15 minutes … and what we’re seeing is not a Yen

market that moves, but a Yen market that serves only the Japanese importers &

exporters via BOJ manipulation, and everybody else can GF themselves

… bottom line is that Yen is not being the “risk off” denominator pair that

enhances any Yen cross … in fact, since I began to trade GBPJPY, every day the

Yen has hurt trading performance … when Cable goes up, Yen goes up … when

Cable goes down, Yen goes down … and when like today, all hell breaks loose,

Yen hurts you cuz of the sell stops getting butchered in GBPJPY.

2) Europe is comatose, and the U.S. session is a joke … there are only “freight

train” runs anymore, which when done, turn on a dime and scream the other

direction … and what this is doing to markets in general is causing volumes &

liquidity to dry up, creating a negative feedback loop for even less volumes and

liquidity, and creating ever bigger runs in one direction first, then the other

… and most importantly 3) I feel like I’m attempting to trade back month cocoa

or coffee market spreads … today, a “double reversal” WITH RANGE IN GBPJPY,

which is very rarely seen … and more importantly, a “triple reversal” day in

GBPUSD, which in over 40+ years of trading I can’t EVER recall any U.S. dollar

pair having a “triple reversal” day with range … doesn’t mean there isn’t one

somewhere I missed, but we’re in “Twilight Zone” territory!

And it “spooks” the living shit out of me, cuz what it means is, “there literally are

NO fucking rules for trading anymore … anything, and I do mean anything, can

AND WILL HAPPEN! … throw into the mix the bullshit known as USDJPY, and it

makes the YEN crosses on the same level as “Stock Bellies” … even with

“MOMO” at your back, all it takes is a “slip of the tongue” by some shit weasel

Apparatchik [cough, Navarro, cough], and price turns lower like a “lightning

strike” hitting a tree … how does the tree step “out of the way”? … and it just

gets worse from there, cuz if caught wrong your stop gets raped.

All day, every day, all USDJPY does is “hurt” my GBPJPY position … a few times

the algorithm was in “sell mode”, and although there were no sell signals, from

the moment it went “sell”, Yen turned and went the other direction potentially

hurting short positions … earlier when I was long, all it did was give me heartburn

by hurting profitability on long positions … seriously, WTF is this? … and through

it all, the bullshit that goes on in USDJPY is simply unreal … “can’t move 5 PIPS

to save it’s life for days on end … then out of the blue moves 100+ PIPS within a

few minutes … if it traded like the other pairs, with a modicum of IVIX, it’s

manageable, but this kind of shit where either it’s asleep or on meth can’t be

managed by anybody … “I can’t imagine anybody in their right mind “straight up”

trading USDJPY, cuz there’s no limit to what your risk / reward ratio actually is

when you trade, and given the way it’s acting there’s no way to avoid the damage

when SHTF.

Multiple algorithm buy signals today in GBPJPY & GBPUSD … TURNKEY PAMM /

MAM DOWN SLIGHTLY.

And literally, seeing first in EURUSD last week 2 “double reversal” days with

range, in a row … now today GBPJPY has a double reversal with range, and Cable

goes for the “never before seen” triple reversal with range, and I don’t have any

clue where my risk / reward ratio in GBPJPY is at, but I know it’s a helluva lot

higher than I want! … and for that reason, until USDJPY becomes more

consistently volatile with it’s ranges & goes back to normal inversion to other

dollar pairs, I’m going back to trading GBPUSD straight up … this bullshit of

always seeing USDJPY hurting me with same direction moves as Cable is for the

birds … even if Cable doesn’t have the range GBPJPY has, what’s it matter, I

can’t catch the “lightning strike” in a bottle anyway? … nobody can”! … quite

frankly, unless and until Yen improves [cuz make no mistake it’s FUBAR NOW],

we’re better off in the dollar pairs, specifically Cable … I’ll just deal with the

issues I had before with slippage and take it from there … it is what it is.

The trading algorithm continues to perform in an excellent fashion … yet, it can’t

sidestep slippage, and it can’t always get me the fill I want when I hit the button

… today a perfect example, I’m up on one of the long GBPJPY trades I made, and

in less time than it takes to blink your eyes, it’s no longer a profit but a loss, and

now add an extra PIP to the bill for slippage … and it ain’t Cable that’s the

problem, it’s Yen … and after the fill, I look at Cable and just shake my head cuz

if I had taken the signal there, it would have put us up money for the day … so I

made the switch back to Cable right then and there … you simply do what you

have to do, when it’s time to do it!

… until tomorrow mi amigos … Onward & Upward!!

Have a great day everybody!

-vegas