Harley Heavens is the Community Manager at The Duomo Initiative. He began as a member of the Duomo Method course, where he established himself as an integral part of the community. This eventually led to him joining the Duomo Team in his current role. In this series of blog posts, Harley will speak about his own experiences in trading and give some insights into life at The Duomo Initiative.

Since I started working at The Duomo Initiative in October 2017, I have spent a lot of time monitoring the markets with Nicholas; discussing our analysis and following live trade situations together. This has helped me identify weaknesses in my trading and bring these up to speed, to help me become a more accomplished trader.

One of my main problems up until this point was that my approach to finding trade opportunities was too rigid. If you are always waiting for the ‘stars to align’ you will pick up very few trades.

Learning how to be more flexible with the tools and concepts to find confirmed opportunities, while still following the rules of the method, isn’t always easy. In the live markets everything is context-specific, which makes it difficult to figure out when it is (or isn’t) the right time to loosen up with the approach.

Through a combination of trial-and-error and guidance, I began to understand more about the situations where I can choose to be more flexible with my use of the tools and concepts. For example, situations where you can enter on a single confirmation initially, in expectation of a double confirmation coming while the trade is still ‘in setup’. Although it seemed like a challenge at first, it didn’t take too long to adapt to this — in the end, the approach is always logical.

An important part of understanding this was to really break down my trading approach into a process. I would start with the daily and weekly charts to prioritise markets that were in high activity areas. I would then follow this with my analysis on the hourly time frame, before trading the levels I found to be particularly significant on the hourly, 15 minute or 5 minute charts, depending on the situation.

After doing this time and time again, I have progressed to the point that I can identify these setups quickly on the lower time frames only, which makes the process more efficient.

The area I have seen the most improvement is in my trade management. The way we manage trades is very intense and the day soon disappears after taking a few trades. My previous approach was to open trades and then leave them alone, to a certain degree. But now I am monitoring the movements after entering, to see how it interacts with various significant areas.

I have been getting more and more involved in micro analysis, so I can have a good vision of where I expect the price to go in any given situation based on the candle movements alone. There are always little clues that show if a level is going to be respected or broken.

Of course, we can’t always predict them correctly (unfortunately!) but it’s amazing to see how accurately it plays out when we are correct (which for Nicholas is a high percentage of the time!). By doing this I can pick up on areas where I may want to either reduce my position size, close the position or even add more into a position size. Therefore, my trade management is now becoming integrated with my risk management.

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