PIPS, PAIN & PROGRESS A Forex Diary — Episode 3: "The First Pull of the Trigger"

If you've been following the series, you already know — it's that time.

No more studying. No more note-taking. No more watching from the sidelines like a footballer who's memorised the entire playbook but never touched the pitch.

Our guy is stepping onto the field.

Will he bottle it right on his first baby steps — or plunge head-on into a world he's yet to fully understand?

If you're just joining us — why not catch up from Episode 1? We built this from the ground up.

This is Pips, Pain & Progress, Episode 3.

Let's go!

***

There's a particular kind of madness that lives in the space between knowing enough and knowing what you're doing.

It feels exactly like wisdom. It smells like readiness. It whispers in your ear with the calm, convincing voice of a man who has never actually been tested.

That madness had moved into my head and made itself very comfortable.

By the time Jordan was done with me, my notes looked like a war room — charts, patterns, Fibonacci levels, market structure… everything.

On paper? I was dangerous.

In the market? 

I was a man who had read every book about swimming and was now standing at the edge of the deep end.

But that voice — that smooth, persuasive, completely delusional voice — said: 

"You know enough. Go take something from this market."

And I listened.

I opened up my charts and took on a handful of pairs — EURUSD, GBPUSD, NZDUSD, CADCHF, BTCUSD and a few others. I pulled them up with the energy of a general surveying a battlefield, even though I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for. The plan, if you could call it that, was to look at each one and go with whatever felt right in line with what I'd studied.

Yes. Felt right. That was the strategy.

Now here's something interesting though — most beginners in my position would have immediately gravitated toward XAUUSD. Gold. The one that moves like a sports car with no seatbelts, all adrenaline and volatility and excitement. The one that has humbled more beginners than any other instrument on the market.

I avoided it entirely.

Not because I was disciplined. Not because I had a risk framework. I just… didn't feel ready for it. In hindsight, that instinct was one of the smartest decisions I made in those early days — even if it was accidental wisdom rather than calculated restraint. I'll take it, lol.

London Session came and went. I watched pairs move. I studied. I second-guessed. I watched some more. The charts were talking — I just wasn't fluent enough yet to fully understand what they were saying.

Then came New York Session.

I was watching BTCUSD when it happened.

A Break of Structure — clean, decisive, with momentum behind it. My brain, now wired from weeks of study, fired immediately: there's an imbalance here. The market will want to come back and fill it.

I reached for the Fibonacci tool like a soldier pulling a weapon — swift, instinctive, rehearsed. I measured the first pullback. A wry smile crossed my face as I confirmed it hadn't reached the 50% level. Which meant, by the logic I'd been studying, price would retrace. Come back. Fill that inefficiency.

I set my long entry at the Golden Zone of the Fibonacci levels. Stop loss placed neatly below the low of the demand zone that caused the BOS. Target? The next significant high that price was structurally due to take out.

The analysis was clean. The logic was sound.

And then — I froze.

I could not bring myself to place the order.

I sat there, finger hovering, and felt something I hadn't fully accounted for in all those weeks of studying charts: fear. Not the dramatic, movie kind. The quiet kind. The kind that disguises itself as caution and whispers, "what if you're wrong?"

My conviction in the analysis was real. But my fear of being wrong was louder. What I didn't understand yet — what I'd only grasp much later reading Mark Douglas again with new eyes — was that this wasn't a technical problem. It was a psychological one. And I had a lot of work to do on that front. But that's a conversation for another episode.

For now — I watched without executing. I needed to know if I was right, even if I wasn't brave enough to put money on it.

Price began to retrace.

Every tick felt like a footstep toward a cliff edge. I watched, barely breathing, as it moved closer to my zone. The tension was absurd for a trade I hadn't even placed. I had no financial capital at stake — but I had mental capital in that position, and the weight of it was very real.

Then price tapped into the Golden Zone.

And then it danced.

That's the only word for it. It hovered, oscillated, flickered up and down within that zone like it was registering a heartbeat — like one of those hospital monitors, the ones tracking your pulse in real time, the line jumping with every beat. 

An ECG. 

That's exactly what the candles looked like. My ECG.

I couldn't watch anymore.

I stepped away. Paced the room. Scrolled aimlessly through my phone seeing nothing. Came back.

And the chart had moved.

Price had broken above the consolidation zone, retested it like a gentleman, and then sliced clean through my Take Profit target like it had somewhere to be.

I let out a scream.

The kind that has no words — just pure, unfiltered, primal vindication. My neighbour, startled, called out:

"You don cash out!?"

I called Jordan almost instinctively.

He picked up and in a flash, he was in my room.

“Bro—” I started, already halfway into the explanation, flipping my screen around. “Look at this. Look at where it tapped. The retrace, the zone, the break—”

I was talking too fast. Jumping steps. Trying to prove something I hadn’t fully processed myself.

He didn’t interrupt.

Just watched. Quiet. A small smile forming — the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself.

When I finally paused, he nodded once.

“You caught it,” he said.

Not you got lucky. Not nice trade.

You caught it.

Such a small sentence. But it landed heavy.

Because in that moment, I wasn’t just excited.

I felt… validated.

Like all the noise, all the confusion, all the hours staring at charts — had finally arranged themselves into something real.

And in my chest, something settled into place. A certainty, warm and intoxicating:

"The long nights paid off. I was actually right. Which means I can make money from this thing.

Maybe it's time I went all in."

Hey reader — if you've ever felt this exact feeling after one good outcome? You already know what's coming.

Episode 4 will talk about it. Watch out!

Reading the Market — Episode 3 Concepts

You just watched someone read a chart well enough to call a near-perfect trade — without placing a cent.

Before Episode 4 arrives, let's build the foundation underneath what just happened.

Lessons for Episode 3

9. Trading Sessions:

The Forex market runs 24 hours a day — but not all hours are created equal.

The market is divided into four major trading sessions, each named after the financial capital driving it:

• The Asian Session (Sydney and Tokyo) — opens the week. Generally quieter, lower volatility, smaller price movements. Think of it as the market warming up. It typically starts with the Sydney by 22 PM until 7 AM where Sydney ends and Tokyo begins from 12 AM until 9 AM.

• The London Session between 8 AM until 5 PM— where things start getting serious. London is the world's largest Forex hub, and when it opens, volume and volatility surge. Major moves are born here. 

• The New York Session — the second heavyweight between 1 PM until 10 PM. When New York overlaps with London? That window — roughly 1pm to 5pm Lagos time — is the highest volume, highest volatility period of the entire trading day. This is where our guy was sitting when BTCUSD made its move. Not a coincidence.

Knowing when to trade is just as important as knowing what to trade. The best analysis in the world executed in the wrong session is still a gamble.

10. Candlestick Charts:

If you've ever looked at a Forex chart and seen those little rectangular bars with lines sticking out of them — those are candlesticks. And they are the primary language of price action trading.

Each candle tells you four things about a specific period of time:

• Open — where price started
• Close — where price ended
• High — the highest point it reached
• Low — the lowest point it reached

The body of the candle (the rectangle) shows the distance between open and close. The wicks (the thin lines above and below) show how far price stretched before pulling back.

A green/white candle means price closed higher than it opened — buyers were in control. A red/black candle means price closed lower — sellers dominated.

Simple. But in the right hands? Extraordinarily powerful. Entire trading strategies are built on nothing but the stories these candles tell.

11. Support & Resistance:

Imagine the market as a bouncing ball inside a room.

Support is the floor — a price level where buyers have historically stepped in strongly enough to stop price from falling further. Every time price drops to that level, demand shows up and pushes it back up.

Resistance is the ceiling — a price level where sellers consistently overpower buyers, stopping price from rising further.

These levels aren't magic lines. They're zones of memory — areas where the market has made significant decisions before, and where it tends to make significant decisions again.

The most important thing a beginner can learn about support and resistance: when support breaks, it often becomes resistance. When resistance breaks, it often becomes support. This is known by some as Support Turns Resistance (STR) and Resistance Turns Support (RTS) while some simply refer to it as "Flip Zones" (FZ)... (If you want to learn more about this guys, let me know in the comments).

The market has a habit of coming back to revisit the scenes of its biggest moves — which is exactly what price did in our guy's trade.

12. Trend Analysis:

Before you place any trade, there's one question that should come before all others: which way is this market moving?

There are three answers:

• Uptrend — price is making Higher Highs and Higher Lows. Buyers are in control. The smart play is generally to look for opportunities to buy.

• Downtrend — price is making Lower Highs and Lower Lows. Sellers dominate. Look for opportunities to sell.

• Consolidation / Ranging — price is moving sideways, bouncing between a defined support and resistance level with no clear directional bias. This is when the market goes DND. It'd be in your best interest to respect it, lol.

Trading with the trend is one of the oldest and most reliable principles in the game. It doesn't guarantee winning trades — nothing does. But it puts the probability on your side. And in trading, probability is everything.

"The trend is your friend" sounds like a cliché because it's been true long enough to become one.

Episode 3 Takeaway

Reading a market isn't guesswork — it's pattern recognition built on logic. Trading sessions tell you when the market is most alive. Candlesticks tell you what price is doing in real time. Support and resistance tell you where the key battlegrounds are. And trend analysis tells you which side of the battle to be on.

Our guy put all of this together and called a textbook trade.

He just forgot one thing — one clean winning analysis does not a trader make.

Episode 4 is going to be a very necessary conversation. 

Just joining us? 

Start from Episode 1 — the foundation matters. And if Episode 3 hit different, share it with someone who's currently staring at charts thinking they're ready. They need this!