One of the points of interest that I came across recently but didn’t have chance to point out was an article in the Economist that highlights the lengths the big boys (banks) are going to. Keep your eyes peeled for the Rationalizer, a device being developed jointly by Philips and ABN AMRO’s Dialogues Incubator.

While ABN AMRO want to help their traders gain more insight into their emotions, it looks like it is being targeted for serious at home investors too. Even better are the promo videos on Engadget.

Another Economist highlight is one of its leaders last week on the current US dollar weakness. They even reused the image of the dollar going down in flames that was itself a prelude to my trading crashing and burning at the end of 2007. Maybe it marks a bookmark end to my woes and return to some consistency. If nothing else, it questions the chance of further dollar depreciation in the coming weeks. 1.5050 might be the high for a while yet.

My actual trading was not impeded and I had nine trades closed out during October. Five winners and four losses. Not a great ratio but the results make for much better viewing.

My (demo) account equity grew by 12.52%.

This is definitely a monthly return that I’m happy with. My goal is 10%, so having gotten past that mark was gratifying.

Since I was unable to review these trades on a day by day (or even week by week) basis, here’s the blotter on how they unfolded:

So when all was said and done I had accumulated 250 pips for the month. Here’s what the trades looked like on my charts. Oanda only tracks historical trades for about the last two weeks, so I have to show two charts to make sure that all trades for the month are displayed.

Van Tharp delves into various forms of intuition that apply to trading. Intuition is something that I am definitely trying to foster. The hard part comes in that it can only be gained via experience, which means that there is no real short cut that can be taken. Tharp also mentions that he has written the foreword for Curtis Faith’s forthcoming book, Trading from Your Gut, due out early next year. I enjoyed Faith’s Way of the Turtle so I’m looking forward to this one.

I’ve also think that there’s a lot of insight to be gleaned from Don Millar’s blog. Definitely one of the better trading bloggers out there. To see what I mean, try some of his recent posts such as The Blue Wall and Keys to the Castle.

I’m definitely on the same page with him when it comes to understanding market bias. I can see where he’s coming from with the outliers, but that key just doesn’t seem to fit my psychological profile. What he advocates is pretty much straight up pyramiding, which I most closely associate with the rules put forward by The Phantom of the Pits.

I placed 10 trades during the month, with 8 winners and 2 losers. As a quick recap, I have been using 5:1 leverage, 50 pip profit targets (in general) and a 100 pip fixed stop loss.

7 of the winners hit their 50 pip profit target while one produced 10 pips after falling back to hit its stop loss which had been moved.

This produced (demo) account equity growth of 5.5%.

If my comfort level and resulting increased confidence continue apace over the next few months I will return to live trading. I’ve set myself that goal quite a few times over the past year when I’ve felt myself to be getting somewhere but have yet to have the consistency to achieve it. I feel that it might be different this time.

I think the highs near 1.4850 from last week are going to be an intermediate high for now. I have a slight dollar bull bias at the moment, as in today; although the fickleness of the market means that I’m ready to do an about face at any time.