changes in forex trades

As part of the work on forex I've gotten away from trying to day trade forex and instead just take small stakes and swing trade them. One of the key advantages of trading a currency pair is that there is not a natural up or down. All other securities will eventually trend higher because everything becomes more expensive, and going short in anything is, well, against the long term natural way of things. Currencies only have relative value, and they move within that, so going short is something that is natural.

After I had placed all the forex trades the other day I looked at them on their dailys, and all but one were directionally placed in opposition to the daily MACD. The other day all of the ones that I had out of sync with their MACD (4 out of 5) went hard against me. The one that was with the MACD went up.

The absolute dollars in loss were small ($40) but percentage wise it was a massive move. This is a good reminder that leverage cuts both ways, and a reminder to me to keep the positions small relative to the amount I want to use for forex.

I sold the losers and today went through the currency pairs available to me and picked things that were all macd black (just to pick a direction) and I have 4 new positions. I also picked things that were other than dollar positions, like AUD/JPY. This can get me away from positions which are purely based on how the dollar does and are also not correlated so much with each other.

I'm not sure what the right number of positions is. 5? 10? I'll hold onto these and see how it goes. My strategy will be to swap in and out based on the MACD change and just swing them. I'll keep the risk as a proportion of the amount to invest so I'm not wiped out. By having a number of positions that are disparate across different currencies I hope to balance out the risk of everything going wrong at once and see what sort of aggregate return I can get and smooth out the return.

I'm up 50% on the one winner, AUD/USD, over a week or so. A position of $3000 at a risk of $60 and its up $38. This is the sort of movement that can provide a chunk of return. If I can maintain any sort of consistent aggregate return it could be very powerful. My plan is to use the house's money if I win and allow that to grow.