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I am a total "newbie" in the Forum, (have been trading for years) but wanted to get my feet wet so to speak and saw your post and wanted to reply.
I think that you have accurately represented the major questions/issues that new traders need to address. A trader can't even begin to follow the market or trade in sim without solving the first two items on the list.
In regards to "Formulating your own particular trading style or methodology"; If most new traders were like me, they didn't have a clue how to do this, or what this meant. Maybe starting off, it would be good for a new trader to understand that there are as many good trade strategies as there are good traders. If you've seen one, you've seen one. What I mean by this is that early on, it would have been more helpful if I understood that trading really is personal and I needed to focus on what made sense to me, not how to emulate another trader. Maybe that is what this topic is referring to. If so, I think that this is right on.
In regards to: "Applying sound risk management for the long run", it may be enough that a new trader understand that the road to profitability is paved through sound risk management, meaning that managing risk is what new traders should be learning, and not focusing on the profit. Learn to manage risk effectively and the profit will take care of itself. I'm not suggesting that a new trader trade not to lose, but rather that they begin early to develop the habits of discipline when the market isn't doing what they thought that it would. I blew up several accounts, early on specifically because I did not build a foundation of discipline in my risk management. I kept thinking that price would eventually turn around and I could get out of the trade. I guess that a lot of times traders just need to learn this the hard way.
Anyway, I wanted my first post to be "helpful", since this is what this forum seems to be all about.
As for a name, I thought of a few:
The Art of the Start
START HERE (keeping it simple)
Guidelines/Instructions for New Traders
"In the beginning..." (I stole that from somewhere else)
How to Start Your Trading Career
Great idea to help those that are starting out. It can certainly be intimidating. Thank you for your work!!!
I think this a great idea for a webinar but I think its getting the cart before the horse so to speak. A better place to start for a beginner would be to start with the mental game. Perhaps some straight up input from successful futures.io (formerly BMT) members in terms of what they would personally change about HOW they became successful and what turned the light bulbs on for them.
The method, broker, data feed, etc are all important but ancillary from where I sit.
Just some random thoughts.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, Leonardo da Vinci
Most people chose unhappiness over uncertainty, Tim Ferris
I just finished a radio interview with a Clear Channel station in Dallas. Here are the notes I prepared for that interview, they may be helpful on this subject.
a) Searching for the Holy Grail
-> Why does everyone continually search externally for the holy grail? What I mean by this is they continually
are searching for someone to sell them systems, indicators or live chat room services so that they can copy
or mimic trades in order to hopefully one day be profitable. The holy grail is within you, it is not something
you can go out and buy.
- seek out a trading room service to tell them when to enter a trade
- buy a system that trades for them
- automation, to eliminate emotion because they've realized they don't follow their own rules
- buy indicator packages that tell them when to trade
- indicator packages that "filter" out bad trades
- chart ends up being over loaded with indicators, you can barely see price
- full of oscilators that conflict with each other, histograms, all kinds of moving averages
- new thing is exotic bar types like Renko and variations to "filter noise" and "smooth things out"
- left with such conflicting information you can literally be overwhelmed, the "deer in headlights" type of a moment
where you are frozen, unable to make trading decisions
b) Common rookie mistakes
-> Most new traders enter the market asking how much money they can make, instead of asking how much money they
can lose. On top of that, most of them have no trading plan whatsoever and can't even describe to you their stop
loss or profit target in reproducible terms without using emotion or feelings, like "I'll get out when it turns
against me".
- trading with scared money
- maybe you lost your job, and now you want to make trading work for you
- maybe your in a dead end job, and you want supplemental income
- this is income you can't afford to lose, also known as trading with rent money or scared money
- anyone that has ever played with a trade simulator knows how easy it is to make money
- many traders trade on sim for months, even a year or more, just racking up sim dollars
- then they go to cash, and lose everything
- they don't follow the same trading rules they followed in sim
- they let their emotions take control, and they start altering their trading method
- they are blind to what is happening, so instead of trying to work on improving their execution
on cash vs sim, they instead start modifying the trading method that served them so well on sim
- before you know it, they have completely abanonded the method that was profitable on sim and are now
trading a new method on cash that they have not backtested or forward tested, which makes it impossible
to have the necessary confidence in the method to be able to trade it well
c) Setting yourself up for success, not failure
-> To be a successful trader for the long haul, you need to make smarter trading decisions than your peers. You
can't expect to open a $500 forex account and turn that into $5,000. Likewise, you can't expect to open a $25,000
futures account and earn $1,000 a week from your trades. These are things that beginners constantly try to do,
and this is why we have a 90% failure rate in this industry. You need to set realistic goals for yourself and make
sure you have positioned yourself for success.
- so what can you do? well for one, there is no black or white answer, hey go to this website
and now you are a successful trader, or go buy this book and now you can make money trading
- you must create your own method so that you can fully understand it and so that you have complete
confidence in it. You can take bits and pieces from others, but you need to wrap everything up in a neat
little package as your own style of trading.
- you need to be realistic, it will take years to be a consistently profitable trader. You will spend
enormous amounts of money along the way, better viewed as your tuition or education expenses, and you'll
also spend enormous amounts of your time.
- don't trade with scared money. scared money tends to try and trade smaller and smaller, meaning you use smaller
stops, smaller charts, small time frames. Losing is painful so you are trying to minimize the pain by making the stop
smaller. In reality, you are trading noise. You aren't trading price, you aren't trading the instrument or the market,
you are trading so small that you are just trading noise.
- trade bigger time frames, bigger charts. Use bigger stops and targets, like maybe a 5 day average range.
- that said, minimize your risk in terms of dollars. don't trade full sized futures contracts. instead trade micro forex
futures on CME, or trade spot forex through a highly reputable broker. Now you are trading 10 cents a pip instead of
$12.50 a tick on full sized futures accounts. You can also trade equities or ETF's and control your share size, but
you'll need 25k in your account if you want to enter and exit the same position daily, to meet pattern day trader
rules.
How big is your account? What are you going to trade? I moved around when it comes broker. I found IB is reasonable and it fits my need.
I use IB to trade stocks, Option and ETF. I want to trade the emini S&P in the future.
From a newbie trading point of view, everything you mentioned Mike was true and inspirational. However, I look at it a little different. I beleive that looking to buy, invest, copy or follow other succefull traders doesn't always lead to ultimate failure, like every other art you need to learn from somebody , learn their technique what they look for and try it out. I think everyone must've started somehow by copying, comparing and learning others way of trading and slowly develop their own method . I personaly think if the following is offered to a starting trader, it will definitely help a great deal . I know it's all available at futures.io (formerly BMT) and IM very thankful.
1- definition of price action etc.
2- definition of charts patterns and formation etc.
3- build 3 to 4 charts with several indicators each and explicitly explain how to import them
4- explain what to look on each chart for signals to buy or sell.( good example is Perry's tradind webinar)
5- explain each chart what time frame or range or tick to use
6- build 3 to 4 different simplified money management strategies, risk reward, profit target and stops etc.
7- try each chart on sim for few weeks, then open all and sim tradng for few weeks to see what chart and strategie works best with your personality
8- i'll add few points later on IM sure.
I think this is a good start and later on they'll develop their own charts, strategies, techniques and methods and make it closer to their personality.
Please nobody go by what I said IM just thinking out loud.
Wish everyone a nice Thanksgiving.
Peace,
Robert
As I work on each of these in more detail, I am now leaning towards breaking it up into multiple webinars and just focusing on a couple of topics per webinar. The entire webinar series will still be "Where to start?", with the same theme, but I think it is better to have multiple webinars that are shorter than one marathon webinar.
Is it possible to be long-term profitable by trading only simple directional trades? For example, trading 'long ES' or 'short oil' etc. Just a simple directional trade, which either you or your trading strategy …