opie999

Total noobster, playing with something he knows nothing about, following Judes forex tutorial from his fx blog. White arrows indicate entry/exit points.

http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w...fx_graph_1.jpg

It's easy to say in hindsight I should have rode it out a few more hours for a significantly greater profit but truth be told, if this were a live account, I'd be absolutely thrilled with my dumbass beginners luck.

A few questions on my first toss of the dart.

The first "Price" column is easy but what is that second "Price" column all about?

Why is the "Commission" 0.00? Don't they show what the house take is on a demo account?

What the heck is "Swap"?

The "Profit" column has me completely lost. Where is that -360.00 coming from? Did I make a $930.00 profit or a $569.00 profit?

Did I wager the entire $50K or just $500?

What's "Margin level"?

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tianx

Ok, Quick run down of the Screenshot.

Number 1 = When you did your buy order
Number 2 = When you did your sell order

The first Price Column is the price when you opened the position
The second Price Column is the current price of the position

Looks like an OCO order to me, so one order cancels the other.

The profit colum shows the Profit or Loss of the position relative to when you opened it. So, your buy order (first) Earned $930 till that point in time, while your sell order lost $360 till that point in time. That's just confusing you, just look at the net Profit or loss at the bottom, that's what's important. Until that trade is netted by the backoffice, it will continue to fluctuate, but the bottom line will stay the same.

You used $500 as margin, so you probably leveraged that position 200:1 for 1 Lot.

Available margin is 50k-ish, = Starting Balance - Initial Margin + Floating P/L

Comission, is broker comission, depends on broker if they charge to open/close positions.

Swap is overnight interest. It's for when holding a position more than 24 hours, or past the rollover point.

To easier understand swap. It's the interest of the currency pairs your holding, GBP/USD virtually has no swap, so nothing to worry about.

But, for example, you're holding GBP/JPY, you'd get a few +% every day you hold on to the position on LONG orders, and -% every day you hold on the position for SHORT orders.

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allinvain

I love the GBP/JPY pair for swap.. EUR/JPY is great too but from my understanding GBP/JPY offer the highest swap rate of all the majors.

opie999

Thanks, tianx. That clarified a few things. I guess I really need to hit the books and get a better grasp of the basics.

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robat

Another ignorant noob here getting a little confused. Didn't his sell order supposedly close his original buy order, so the whole 930.00 profit should be credited to his equity. But it seems his sell order was treated as a new open position which led to the loss of -360.00 (which will still fluctuate since his the position is still open). So how should we close a buy position and lock in the profit (930.00 in this example)?

opie999

Hi, robat. Welcome to the forum!

Lol!! Well, it took a noob to spot the "error" made by another noob!
That's what I thought too, but no, that's not what happened!
You are exactly correct! This fact finally dawned on me last night! I opened the original position going long, i.e. "buy". When I executed a "sell" on that postion, all I did was create a new position going short. The original long position was still open! D'oh! I think this is the procedure for doing a hedge. At one point last night I had about seven or eight open positions going before I realized what the heck was happening. I closed them all and still ended up with a profit of almost $900!

In the dialog window to modify a postion, there is a "close" button that um..."closes" the position (imagine that) whether it's long or short thereby locking in any profit/loss. Sheesh!

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Dan

If the broker doesn't allow hedging, selling the pair would have closed your long positions. In this case, Ibfx allows hedging so you're just opening new positions

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opie999

Thanks, Dan. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I don't really count that as a noobie error. I count it as a simple dumba$$ error!

There was a wonderful opportunity last night for a hedge. GBP/USD was sideways and appeared to be ready to bust out in one direction or the other. I set up a hedge and went to bed with visions of pips dancing in my head. Welll, I set the SL in my short position too narrow. The price touched briefly on my SL price and closed the position too early. Later, the bottom dropped and my short would have made a very handsome profit. grrrr

Oh well, another valuable lesson learned. Don't set your hedge stops in too narrow of a band!

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