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I am a total newby and I am of the opinion that I will spend as little money as possible learning Forex but I will dedicate as mush time as I possibly can to finding my own Holy Grail. I have read hundreds of blogs about the fact that 95% or traders fail or do not make profits and to me this is simply a challenge as I firmly believe that I am as good as the 5% of successful traders because I am a winner, not a loser so this PMA will enable me to persist and persevere until I have reached that elite club.
My inspiration has come from one of my longest mates who is a motor mechanic and is almost totally illiterate but this guy has invested 10years of his life and I would estimate at least $80K, if not more in various tuitions, seminars and guaranteed winning strategies to only realise that it is soley up to him to find his own path which he is now doing. Although he is still not a millionair, actually not even a $10,000air in trading, he is now at last making more profitable trades than losses which I believe means he is now a successful Forex trader because he has found his own system that works for him.
My point is that $80K spent on Forex Education was a total waste of time and the ultimate fee required to become a successful trader is persistance, investing time and not worrying what anyonelse is doing.
My mate has been asking me to become involved in Forex for many years but it is only in the past couple of weeks that I have actually looked at this for the first time and it made me cry because I am now 53 years old and I now realise what opportunities I have missed if only I had looked at this sooner...well now I am on my way and my goal in life now is to make this work for me then share my success strategy with my best friend because he has always had me in mind when he started down this path.
My point is that unless you have the right motivation and desire to become a successfull Forex trader, get out of the game because the reality is there is no crystal ball and hynsight is a wonderful thing but the absolute reality is that there is not a single trade pair I have been watching that has done exactly the same today as it did yesterday, the week before or the month before so DO NOT think you will ever be able to find a foolproof indicator because all indicators are a result of the past and no indicator can tell you what the market will do on the next time frame so the only thing you can rely on is that a lot of the time you will be wrong so simply set your stop losses very short and ride your profit position as long as you can so that even if you have 10 losses of $100 = $1000, as long as you have 5 wins of $300 = $1500 then you have made a profit.
Well this is my humble opinion anyway and to you Mr $10K loss, my suggestion is stop looking for other winners and stop spending money on get rich Forex schemes and simply focus on your trading, perfecting your own indicators, following your indicators and not budging from your trading plan to get to the point of making more profits than losses and once you have come to realise this, I beleive you will have got rid of that monkey on your shoulder. Trading is you and you alone, nobody else. It is you against the market or should I say the market against you so do not try and conquer the market, simply be happy with taking little bites of it and be happy with those bites.
My spelling is not the best so please forgive me.......LOL
A few extra thoughts about this....Simple direct answer: WORK, WORK, and more WORK!
Trading strategies are not very hard to learn or devise. Keep the strategy signals obvious. Keep them simple.
What is not simple or easy is learning to understand the flow and movement of price, volume and momentum. While the strategy buy and sell signals fire within the perameters of their defined structures (rules and technical visual queues); the dynamic changes in the market immediately after entering the trade are not factored into the signals. The statistical probability of the next tick is about all that was considered in defining the signal beyond the precise moment, and it is because of this probability that we employ the strategies and take the signals (click the mouse to enter the trade).
After that, the success or failure of the trade is completely up to you. All you have to help you is the dynamic flow of current price action, evolving and accumulating volume, pace of price movement into and out of the market, and your own dicipline and experience.
Keep it simple, accept what is happening over what you want to happen, and act accordingly.
I just saw this post and i feel your pain bobby. I first became interested in daytrading back in 98 when i ran across a website of "traders" that supposedly reached out to new traders to mentor them. After finding out the cost of this I was sort of put out. I tried to study on my own but at the time i didnt know what was good method vs. garbage. Somewhere along the way i gave up the dream.
A number of years later i was discussing investments with my father, (hes got bucks) and he always told me never trade but invest for the long term etc etc, well now things were different, he had found a company that teaches trading the market and options. Between him and my step mom they probabaly sunk 40k into training, thats just a guesstimate but im betting im on the low side. This was about 4 years ago and after sifting through all of his knowledge hes boiled it down to 3 or 4 indicators and a great understanding of options. He doesnt day trade but hes a fairly active trader and is making consistent money.
When he got started in this it inspired me to renew my efforts and i have been trying to find something that works for me as well. I am not the same as my dad and I cant just take his method and run with it. First off i dont have the capital to make money using his system, second off i like trading so my dream is day trading. At 38 years old i find myself a full time student again after 12 years at the railroad and my wife brings in the paychecks. Our debt is paid off except for the house and we drive 2 cars that arent exactly crown jewels. Its hard to save money at this time so I am trying to get back into education for my trading future.
I have about 3k left from my last trading disaster but it could be worse i suppose. Anyway im glad to be here with other people that have been in my shoes or are in them right now. What Id love to hear, is stories from you guys that were in my shoes and have since launched into a successful trading career. Thanks again for this site.
Well I am now 2 months into my trading and have learnt a lot...a lot of what not to do...LOL. This caper is certainly not for the faint hearted and if you are a person that is afraid to lose money, DO NOT become a Forex trader because it is inevitable you will lose some money even when you are the best of the best but if you reduce your losses and maximise your gains then this is this is worth persuing.
Biggest thing I have found is that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of amazing, beautiful, technical, mathematical and ultimately USELESS indicators to suck in us novices. There are probably even more brokers or traders trying to sell guaranteed trading systems and methodologies........tell them all to get lost. Bottom line is that a successfull trader does not need to make money selling trading systems so do not get suckered in. I have stuck to my guns of not spending any money on trading but spending huge amounts of time learning a system/strategy and it is starting to pay off. One must make ones own mistakes and find ones own system/strategy.
Jaguar, you made a mention of watching flow, volume, momentum and such well for those that are not familiar, do not waste your time with any type of volume indicator or volume trade analysis system offered because it is impossible to get accurate volume indicators for forex as currency is not traded through a central exchange so bottom line is simply throw away any volume indicator you are using because it is simply of no use.
One of the most important things to get your head around is Price Action so try and clean your charts of all the clutter (indicators) and start with a fresh clean chart with maybe a moving average line or 2 and also a resistance level indicator. The resistance level indicator allows you to judge potential trade opportunities and also set stop loss and take profit positions. I have also found a candle count down indicator useful.
Once you have these simple indicators, simply watch the charts and see what happens on particular resistance or support levels and you will gradually see a pattern. Also for thos that are not aware, the only chart to get an accurate indication of what the market is doing is the 1 hour chart as every platform, broker and trader on earth sees the identical information on a 1 hour chart. This does not mean you need to trade on a 1 hour chart, it simply means this is your most accurate time frame and you can then reference down or up in time according to your own preference.
I hope this has been of help to fast track your learning phase and reduce your time waste phase.
Good post, and by number of thanks in response, it appears to be quite inspiring to most. Allow me
make a couple of comments.
You will find that the ratio of successful artists to artists waiting tables, is identical to the ratio of successful
traders to failed traders. The trader failure rate speaks for itself. If you believe in trading as an art, ask
yourself which group of artists will I most likely I fall in according to the failure rate. This may prompt you to investigate some other approaches to trading.
Not sure how to parlay that into helping me pull the trigger.
Not sure how you feel the indicators you are trading? But I do think you need to understand them, know what they do best, and in which circumstances they do what they do best, and in which circumstances not to trust them.
I am a contrarian by nature, so going against the market feels right to me by nature, but it constantly draws down my account. I think you will know you are on the right track when you develop a method that is consistent.
100% agreed. This is also my philosophy. But, this is not in concert with your earlier statements about trading being an 'art', 'sailing' and trades 'feeling' right.
100% agreed. I could not say it better myself, and I've said it many times
Good post, and by number of thanks in response, it appears to be quite inspiring to most. Allow me
make a couple of comments.
You will find that the ratio of successful artists to artists waiting tables, is identical to the ratio of successful
traders to failed traders. The trader failure rate speaks for itself. If you believe in trading as an art, ask
yourself which group of artists will I fall in. You may also want to investigate some other approaches to trading.
Not sure how to parlay that into helping me pull the trigger.
Not sure how to feel the indicators I am trading. But, I do think you need to understand them, know what they do best, and in which circumstances they do what they do best, and in which circumstances not to trust them.
I am a contrarian by nature, so going against the market feels right to me by nature, but it constantly draws down my account. I think you will know you are on the right track when you develop a method that is consistent.
100% agreed. This is also my philosophy. But, this is not in concert with your earlier statements about trading being an 'art', 'sailing' and trades 'feeling' right.
100% agreed. I could not say it better myself, although I've said it many times
Another thing I wanted to mention as a new trader is that stop losses are double edge swords. Yes they are critical and anyone that trades without them would have to have rocks in their heads but one of the biggest mistakes I have made in most of my past losing trades is that I simply set my stop losses too tight. Based on my indicators I did ultimately pick the right swing or entry point but because I was so paranoid about not losing too much money in the case the market went against me, I set my stop loss way too tight which resulted in me getting kicked out time and time again on a good trade then unfortunately once I realised I was kicked out there was no point in me chasing my original direction decision, in other words I had already missed the boat so this also showed me that I should not worry about chasing a trend, simply count your loss and accept this loss as a learning fee.
I now trade by placing a stop loss at 2 to 3 resistance points above my entry point and if I am trading a volatile market I simply readjust my stop loss once I am in a profit position. I also take out a portion of profit at a certain resistance level then reset my stop loss to that takeout point so no matter what happens at least I have paid myself for my trade.
PS, another indicator I have on my chart is a spread indicator so I can time my take entry position at the lowest spread level to improve my chance of getting into a profit position quicker.
I have not given up, yet.....maybe I am a gluten for pain.
Went back into it with the monies I have left(16k)
Wrote to Roger F. and asked if his offer for a nexusfi.com (formerly BMT) member to participate in his trading room was still available. He wrote me a very nice email, basically said that me looking in was not going to be enough for turning my trading around.
And made a very attractive offer if I became a paying client of his course. I am considering....
Anyway, where are we today?
after much research on my own, I concluded that the best trade opportunities happen with the trend.
and I often observed good trades utilizing the phenomina called hidden divergence; where there is a discrepency between price and an indicator.
Traders international teaches it.
Felton teaches it.
and others, so I believe its not going away any time soon.
As of last week, I took 18 LIVE trades on the 6E, was slightly up until recently, when I incurred two sessions of 4 losing trades at a time. I was trading 3 contracts, with a SL of 5 ticks per; TP on the first 2 contracts was 7 ticks, letting the 3rd run for whatever additional monies i could get, of course I had a breakeven after 4 ticks and if my 3rd contract ran well, i incrementally moved it's stoploss. Well, with that lossing streak, I am down $1.6 k
Have considered throwing in the towel forever!!
However the Masochism has kicked in again!!!!
I just re-vamped EVERYTHING on my chart.
No longer concentrating on hiden Divergence,
I'm in recovery mode and I need to trade accordingly.
I now only have the following on my 555 tick chart:
1. keltner channel
2. PriceActionSwing indicator, set to only show me a double top/double bottom
3. felton Momentum
I am looking to NIBBLE my way back to Breakeven at least (God Willing )
Entry: Only going with the trend; take a trade at a pullback to 90% of the middle or opposite keltner channel AND the PriceActionSwing indicator has marked the pullback with a DT or DB mark AND the felton momentum has stopped moving in the pullback direction AND has started moving in TREND direction, PLUS I will enter on the last 40-50 ticks of the trigger price bar ONLY if it is going in the trend direction!!!!
Folks, I am at the edge of sanity with this thing
All I want to achieve is One trade a week for approx $300
and after 5 years and 5000 chart hours I feel i was just on a merry-go-round.
Much heartfelt thanks to BIG MIKE, JEFF C., Sharky, LongBoat, Exiledgoblin, Fattails, and a mountain of other dedicated traders on this site of which would require 10 pages of space to thank!!!!
I don't want to junks whatever happens from this point on with negative karma, so any posts I make from now one, I will make at the other thread I started when I thought MARKET PROFILE was the TICKET to MY SUCCESS!
Its appropretely called "ten Thousand In education and Finally profitable"
Thank you all for your interest, kind words, and incredible advice!!!!
Bobby has moved on to "ten thousand in education and finally profitable thread".
But I thought this was just hilarious. Picture of the book for "the serious trader"
beside the trader bum who lost his money. Up on the main page side by side:
(maybe this is a tad too much picking on poor Bobby?)
On the other hand Bobby is not alone. Al Brooks said in his futures.io (formerly BMT) presentation June 29th about 10 minutes
into the webinar that he lost $10k while hiring a mentor to teach him trading. Then chucked all education and spent the next 10 years and 20000 hours working on his PA methods... Mentoring can be expensive. Someone recommended to me for Sheridan mentoring via CBOE.com on how to adjust option spreads which costs $4k to $6k
for a mentoring package. Preston James group had a different person call me every other month offering mentoring "courses" for $8k to $10k for "deluxe". Many vendor "partners" of Ninjatrader offer indicators and mentorships or training courses that run the price range from hundreds of dollars to a couple of thousands or more. Be careful, read reviews. glta
I couldnt agree more in respect to "look within" I am living prove...
I have also spent quite an amount on education etc...
I have learnt much and was even making profits quadrupling my account...
HOWEVER I am still not consistent because of ME not my trading system...
I have the psychological problem of moving my stops back when an order goes
against me to prevent me being stopped out...BIG TIME MISTAKE...
and the adverse effect it has of course, you end up loosing more and more to the
extent I have wiped out my account several times...
Trading is not that difficult being discipled IS...!
I keep telling myself being stopped out is part of trading....and yet only
a few days ago I wiped it out yet again...