Guest post by Hugh Kimura
In a previous post, I mentioned MeetPips.com and how it could be a great online solution for your trade journaling. Well, I don’t just write about stuff, I actually try them, so I started a profile and journaled my first trade.
Like I said before, there are a lot of good features. It is easy to use and it is actually fun, if that adjective can be applied to trade journaling.
Anyway, I got through most of the process and it was pretty easy.
Then I hit a few snags
In my opinion, the trade exit process is confusing and is missing some key functionality. My primary concern is that you cannot “roll off†parts of an existing position.
Let’s say you traded 5 mini lots on the initial position with the intention of closing them all at your target price. Then you are getting sleepy and the trade is profitable, but has not hit your target yet. You want to close 3 mini lots to take some profit off the table, move the stop to breakeven and let the rest of it run.
Well, in the MeetPips system (at the time I tried it), you cannot do that. It is all or nothing!
As a workaround, you would have to enter each partial exit as a separate position, then close each one individually with the corresponding exit price.
Not so intuitive and hard to do if you are trying to journal and trade at the same time.
It’s all about the PIPS
Another major issue that I have with this site is that it tracks pips. To me, that is worthless.
It tells you nothing about a person’s money management skills. For example take the following two fictitious trades:
- Long EURUSD: +5 pips
- Short GBPUSD: -20 pips
In the MeetPips system, this would equate to a -15 pip record.
But wait!
What if trade #1 was traded at $10 a pip and trade #2 was traded at $1 a pip? In spite of the losing pip record, there would be a +$30 P/L.
My suggestion would be to allow traders to input their account balance before the trade and the $ P/L. This would give percentage numbers and give a much better indication of how well someone is really trading.
Other sites
The only other site that I know of that will track trades like this is Currensee.com. This site is pretty cool because it is linked into your brokerage account and updates your trades on the site in real-time.
The only disadvantage is that you have to have one of the broker’s on their list. This is because these are the brokers that they have worked out the data integration with.
Unfortunately, there is no integration with Oanda.
Anyway, I think that there is still a big opportunity to create a free online journaling and social networking site for forex traders because these two sites are still very limited in what they can do.
