Don't chase the highest profits

In today's part of the series on successful traders, we'll look at a trader who, although he didn't make the highest profit or achieve the highest profit/loss ratio, was certainly satisfied at the end of the trading period. And that's often much better than breaking records for profits.

Trading is not about achieving record payouts and beating each other to see who can achieve the highest return. It is much more important to stick to a solid trading plan and strategy, and then consistency of results, which can be the right way to achieve regular returns over the long term.

Today's trader may not have achieved the highest return compared to previous cases, but his balance curve still looks pretty good and is trending upwards. Despite a failed trade that initially put him in the red at the beginning of the trading period, he was able to weather the setback with ease. After a period of lower returns and experimentation with smaller positions, he achieved a quite interesting return, thanks to a good consistency score.

A total profit of over $11,000 is not a record with an account size of $200,000, but most of us would certainly be happy with such a result. The Maximum Loss and Maximum Daily Loss limits were no problem for the trader.

The trader executed 24 trades during 16 trading days with a total volume of 327.04 lots. This is an average of 13.6 lots per trade, which is not much for currency pairs in a $200,000 account. The largest positions then amounted to 20 lots, which is also okay.

The average RRR of 1.04 is also okay, which at a success rate of 66.67% was quite enough for an interesting return. There is simply no need to chase a high RRR, which may not suit everyone. If a trader trusts his strategy, even a relatively low RRR can lead to very good results.

The journal shows that the trader opened positions of different sizes, probably depending on his SL in points, so as not to risk too much money in the account. A bit of a surprise are the minimum positions of 0.01 lots, which may indicate some experiment or another approach where the trader did not want to take unnecessary risks.

These trades were also the only ones in which the trader did not set an SL and TP, while in the others he always set a Stop Loss, which is of course positive. He never set the TP in advance, so he closed profitable positions manually, which may not always pay off in fast markets, as the trader may lose profits in case of inattention. On the other hand, if a trader is lucky, he can earn more this way than he would have earned on a fixed TP.

A lot of traders trade this way, but it should be remembered that it can be very time-consuming, as the markets need to be closely monitored after opening a position. And it is certainly not recommended to use this approach if the trader trades multiple instruments, as watching several charts at once is neither safe nor very efficient.

Our trader was focused on one instrument, which was the most traded currency pair, EURUSD, so following the chart was certainly not a problem for him. On the GBPUSD currency pair, the trader made only one trade, which ended in the negative. Perhaps it is a pity that he did not try it in more cases, but since it was only a short-term speculation, and given the mentioned TP-free approach, the decision not to continue trading with this instrument was a good idea.

The trader often traded at the turn of the trading day, or right at the beginning of the week, where he could take advantage of gaps, for example, which can bring interesting trading opportunities to more experienced traders. This was also the case in our example, where the trader used a gap that formed at the beginning of the trading week, after two days off. These common gaps do not occur often in currency pairs, as they are very liquid markets and can occur just after the weekend.

So the trader entered the position nearly an hour after the market opened and speculated on filling the gap, which he eventually did. He set the Stop Loss quite low at first glance, placing it not below the price when the market opened after the gap, but below the local low from the previous Friday (at the top of the arrow in the picture).

This is a fairly conservative approach, but the trader is likely to skip a high profit rather than risk a loss, for which we cannot explicitly criticise him. This SL setting turned out to be a good move in the end, as the price fell below the mentioned opening price twice after the trade opened, which could have triggered the SL and led to a loss in the end. Thus, the conservative approach paid off.

The conservative nature of the trader was also evident when closing the trade, as the trader closed the trade after reaching a new local high and then proceeded to close the position when a subsequent lower high seemed to have formed on the price. This did not happen in the end, but the reversal of price direction eventually occurred after a double top was formed, so the exit can be assessed as very good.

Note: Since we cannot clearly define the exact trader's strategy from the chart, this is only the private opinion of the author of this article. FTMO Traders are free to choose their strategy and as long as they do not explicitly violate our Terms and Conditions and follow our risk management rules, the choice of strategy and execution of individual trades is up to them.