A Honest journal

I did not trade today but analyzing the session I could definitely see myself going long at 1.4210. the Third attempt was a given, virtually no draw down and good for 40 something pips. Another option would be the second failed attempt @ 4260. i doubt I would take this short trade because coming from a winning long i would trade a third attempt not the second one. But the signal was there.

Apart from those two i don't see anything else that would suit my stile.

Oracle, I think it's big difference to trade $5000 with say $0.5-1 per pip or $20 as subconsciousness knows what damage such size can make.
Anyway, i wish you good luck with this.

I like Anderson Silva too. what's not to like. He is great fighter and also funny.
Shogun is also good, but suffered too much damage by now.
MMA and trading seem similar to certain extent. Success rate in both businesses is pretty low.

I assume that your goal is to be a winner trading forex. There is no holy grail or EA system or price action or technicals that will let you be a consistent winner in forex. That is not my opinion as it is just the way that it is. It requires time and patience and knowledge.

The rules do not change for anyone.

Trading forex is about many things however it is not about guessing.

You need to have the right mental tools to start with. If you do not deal with your fear and your greed and your ego you will go into the 90% category.

Then you need to know why you are putting on a trade. A trade plan. You need a entry point and here technicals are a help. You need an exit strategy and an excellent risk management system.

You need an edge over others. When I trade I have my FXCM UK platform showing the following asset classes along with a live TV feed from CNBC to follow the money flow into and out of US Bonds.

My screen now shows EUR/USD EUR/JPY USD/JPY GBP/USD

USD/CHF AUD/USD USD/CAD SPX 500

US30 USOil XAU/USD XAG/USD


What I watch on CNBC is the 2 Year US Bonds and the 10 Year US Bonds.

As the Dow crashed over 500 points money flowed out of the markets and out of Oil and other commodities into US Dollars.

The US Dollars were used to buy the US Bonds. The Yields on the 2 Year US Bonds went to .27% and the 10 Year US Bonds were at 2.40%

These movements change the technicals so by expecting the charts to show you the way gives you lagging information.


You can ignore my comments however those are the facts of life.


My EDGE is following the money flow. It works and will always work. I read 3 to 6 hours each day fundamental information. I understand the geopolitcal issues.

My point is that trading forex cannot be a part time job as well as needing the right starting capital.

Trading currencies is a way of life and that is why 90% of all traders lose whatever their issue.

Mental stability, common sense, trading experience, a trade plan, fundamental knowledge, technical knowledge, risk managemt, proper staring capital are all part of the mix to reach the 10% group.

I'm not ignoring your posts Bruce. the problem is that you are talking bananas and my business is about apples.

I'm not a fundamental trader and I do watch correlations but just for curiosity, not because I need it.

My charts tell me pretty much everything I need. You have to stick with what is working.

My system is giving me a consistent pip average for the last 6 or 8 months. that never happen with me before.

Using today as a example. People are gambling on the NFP and I'm watching a documentary on netflix.

Why? because I can 😁! I don't need to trade this thing. I'm already up around 170 pips for the week. Unless I get a really strong signal I'm just not trading.

I don't need to watch CNBC, I don't need to trade the news, I don't have to worry about widening spreads or keep watching 300 things at the same time, etc.

I don't mind you posting here Bruce but I'm not after a 'tip' you have to understand it.

I'm here to do my thing meaning develop my strategy and system. If funnymentals works for you fine, just don't try to doctrine me.

Same here Oracle. Everyone has got different style. I made my money during the week and I never trade Fridays as it is not good for my style. Also, I am sure you know this, but being focused for hours takes its toll especially trading small stops like we do. We gotta relax, right?

BTW, I was right about price action yet again. Came back and it just broke under 85.40 failing to break above 87.00.
Less money for gas. Those bastards still keep gas at $1.23 per liter here in Toronto while when oil was going up to $100 price was just $1.05-1.1 when oil was exactly for same price as today. It is pure price gorging.

Same thing here Chikot, no trades.

I had a signal from my system 14 minutes after non farm, but I usually don't trade that close after news. The double top at 4230 was also tradeable but why risk capital on so so trades when I'm already over my weekly goal?

Chikot posted:
    BTW, I was right about price action yet again. Came back and it just broke under 85.40 failing to break above 87.00.
Less money for gas. Those bastards still keep gas at $1.23 per liter here in Toronto while when oil was going up to $100 price was just $1.05-1.1 when oil was exactly for same price as today. It is pure price gorging.

I have a diesel car. Currently at the pump, diesel is at 4.08 after being 4.13 for the whole week. When Obama busted stops releasing reserves it went to 3.98 but climbed back to 4.03 pretty quick. I live in Florida

My wife jokes about me using the pomp price to analyse the market 😁!

Ok, I'm calling it a week. As always I'm gonna go over the weekend through all I learned and try to make the best of all.

As always i'm leaving my profits and losses ( profits this week) behind me. It does not matter anymore what I did, what matters is what I'm gonna do. Monday I start fresh from zero.

As always monday I'm gonna face the market without a bias. I don't know where the market will go and I don't care 😁! I'm gonna trade the day based in what my charts tell me.

Have a great weekend folks!

Statistically I have found over these years of trading that I have the highest losing chances on Fridays. Today 5-15 min candles were up to and more than 200 pips. Someone needs to have deep pockets to trade it and pip wise risk is big.
so, no trading.
I used to drive to USA in 2003-2004 regularly and noticed that gas was much cheaper there as a lot of other stuff. In any case, I hate to be cheated and this is what this gas prices is. They artificially holds price higher on oil road down in comparison to when oil was up. If oil shot up back to say $110, they would drive price to beyond $1.5 per litter while last time oil was at$115 we had price of 1.4 per liter.

Have a nice weekend Oracle.

TheOracle posted:
    I'm not ignoring your posts Bruce. the problem is that you are talking bananas and my business is about apples.

I'm not a fundamental trader and I do watch correlations but just for curiosity, not because I need it.

My charts tell me pretty much everything I need. You have to stick with what is working.

My system is giving me a consistent pip average for the last 6 or 8 months. that never happen with me before.

Using today as a example. People are gambling on the NFP and I'm watching a documentary on netflix.

Why? because I can 😁! I don't need to trade this thing. I'm already up around 170 pips for the week. Unless I get a really strong signal I'm just not trading.

I don't need to watch CNBC, I don't need to trade the news, I don't have to worry about widening spreads or keep watching 300 things at the same time, etc.

I don't mind you posting here Bruce but I'm not after a 'tip' you have to understand it.

I'm here to do my thing meaning develop my strategy and system. If funnymentals works for you fine, just don't try to doctrine me.

Good Morning

I want to correct the impression that you have from my recent post.

Regardless of what method that you use to trade with, the following factors apply to all that trade and hope to earn money trading currencies.

You need to have a trade plan for every trade. A trade plan also includes not trading just to trade. That you appear to have.

The KEY issues for all of US is conquer your FEAR, your GREED and your EGO.

I am not afraid to take a loss and I have no fears when I trade. I do not need to take additional risk so I take profits when I see them. I win easily over 80% of all my trades. When it comes to EGO I still am working on that one.

I comment in the I however it applies to ALL of us trading.

The following information thanks to Dan gives me my edge to understand the fundamentals especially when new factors come into play.

Here it is. It helps me stay on top of things and focus. By posting it here and sharing it I read it again and it becomes even clearer to me. Enjoy your weekend.

Trader Dan Comments On Today’s Market Action
August 4, 2011, at 7:12 pm
by Dan Norcini in the category Trader Dan Norcini
Dear CIGAs,

Very early this morning, gold shot up to another all time record high above the technically significant resistance level near $1680 as sovereign debt fears coming out of the Euro Zone intensified with the worsening news. It did not take long however as trading moved further into the New York session for gold to drop sharply lower as the US equity markets began imploding. The Dollar soared over 100 points, the Euro fell out of bed and the crude oil market was shellacked as investor after investor all began heading to the sidelines and running out of nearly everything out there except for US Treasuries.

Further intensifying the fear trade was news that a large bank (Bank of New Yokr Mellon) was actually charging customers a fee for putting cash INTO their bank! If that was not revealing, nothing was. It showed how nervous investors are becoming and how desperate they are to find a safe haven to park their wealth. THis news helped to further feed into the buying frenzy in the Treasury markets as investors basically shrugged their shoulders as if saying, 'What the heck, if they are going to charge me a fee to put money in their bank, I might as well just buy Treasuries instead'.

It occurs to me that the overnight intervention by the Japanese monetary authorities was extremely bullish for gold as it was further evidence of the currency debasement policy proliferation that we have been witnessing. We have seen the Swiss also playing that game along with the Brazilians which is the reason that gold has been going on to make one record high after another across a variety of major currency terms. However, all of this was outweighed by the sheer volume of money flows out of the markets in general. Many are attempting to come up with a new strategy to deal with the rapidly changing economic paradigm and prefer to just get out of their trades while they weigh their options. Others are just selling in order to raise cash to meet a plethora of margin calls. There will be more than a few utterly exhausted margin clerks before the closing bells ring on the various markets.

The Euro in particular and the commodity currencies in general were all whalloped today as traders are now coming around to the view that the next move by the ECB in regards to interest rates will be LOWER and not higher. That has led to a general theme of Euro selling along with Dollar buying. All of this mess really started in Europe which it now appears is dealing with its own version of Lehman Brothers and the liquidity crisis that erupted when that institution failed back in the summer of 2008. Their problem is related to their big banks however in the sense of the exposure that these entities have to the sovereign bonds of some of the major countries comprising the Euro Zone. Credit lock ups are what the real fear is.

The commodity currencies were crashed along with the CRB and the CCI (more on those indices later).

One of the few bright spots I can see as far as the consumer goes is that UNLEADED GASOLINE crashed through its recent low today which should eventually provide some relief at least at the gas pump for beleagured consumers. A nice $0.40 drop in the wholesale price will perhaps free up a bit of the little disposable income that consumers have left in their wallets.

Hi everyone.
This is my 2nd post in this forum. Usually i'm not a great poster in forums, but i like this thread TheOracle started.

Oracle, i can very much relate to your experience. I've been following your thread since you started it. It looks like we made a similar journey and we are almost at the same stage now. As of myself i started trading forex around 4 or 5 years ago. It took me 4 years to finally find a method that fits me. I blew out accounts as all of us. I lost real money. Made a lot of mistakes. Basically i was trading randomly even after having read lots of books with loads of info, etc.
Somewhere last year i started noticing i was not loosing constantly, and my account balance was flat for many months. I would win and loose, win and loose . In the begining of this year i started wining, small but constantly winning.

Before, i was using only SaxoBank platform for trading. Last year I started using Metatrader 4 and one good thing Metatrader provide us, is the Detailed Report . I started to read the statistics of my trading and found out what i was missing. Thie 1st thing was my poor money management. I already knew money management was important, but never payed much attention to it, until i started to crunch some numbers. Then i read a small paper on MM from a well known guy in this business called Van K. Tharp, PhD.

Lack of discipline and patience was another enemy. All very common. I would enter trades without wating for the proper setup. I always used candlesticks, but ofthen would not wait for the candle formation to finish. Now im very careful and wait for the proper setup and confirmation before i enter a trade. If i have doubts id rather stay out. So patience is very important.

Another enemy was overtrading. You know that feeling that you always must be trading otherwise you are lossing oportunities. The key is recognizing that the market is always there, if you losse one oportunity now, more will wait you in the future, so being patiance is very important.

Looking at my statistics i noticed that i had many winning streaks, but then a large loss would take away from me what i had won in days. So again lack of discipline and poor MM. Money Management helps you a lot in this field. I found out about sizing my positions properly acording with my account size and at what extent i could take losses without puting my account at risk.
Even when i was having a winning rate of around 75 to 80% imy account was still declining over time. Now i look back and say how stupid i was.

Since the begining of this year im constantly winning. The maximum drawdown i had was around 6%. Even this was because of lack of discpline from my side.

Similar to you, I think i found something that works for me and i'm seriously planning in the near future to start leaving only out of this.
I just need to look at one number to make be believe i can make it. This number is EXPECTANCY. If calculated over a relative long period, this number embodies most of what you are as trader.
I still remember in the begining when i was strugling with heavy losses and wondered where were those 10% people talked about? Do they really existed? Now i'm sure they do exist and i'm about to be one of them very soon. I just need more time to prove it to myself and work on some aspects of my tradiing style that still needs to be trimmed.

Ohh btw i trade only EURUSD as you do.

I think that if i had a mentor that guided me in this jungle, and pointed me the pitfalls right at the begining of my experience, i would be able to make it sonner. As i had none of this and basically was strugling alone with lots of misleading info you find in the internet, it took me longer.


So good luck to everyone and happy pips.

Thanks for posting Trader757.

I started this thread with basically two goals. First to record my progress, second to possibly be a credible example that you can make it on forex.

And if you think that finding somebody that actually did it on forex, posting on forums to be easy, I would advise you to not be so sure about it

In four years and a half reading forums I was never able to find a real example of a successful forex trader. Of course you can find people 'saying' that they are successful all over, but again, so far I could not find a credible one.

Take a look at FF, babypips etc. You can find a lot of gurus there but sooner or later they got busted as fakes. Newbies struggle for years trying to 'learn' their system when the fact is that there is nothing to learn, it is all fake.

Most of the 'gurus' use past examples to mesmerize the newbies. their explanations make sense because it is based in past price movements.We all know that everybody knows how to trade the last price action.

I'm always suspicious about gurus and mentors because i find it very difficult to understand why somebody would share such a profitable expertise.

Just think! In the real world when people develop a product, have an idea, discover something etc, usually they don't go giving their secret away to every stranger in the street.

Why is it that in forex the forums are packed with people eager to show you how to trade? Doesn't it sound a little weird that so many people are eager to share with you the secrets to make money in a 3 trillion dollar per day market?


Of course if you find a mentor in the beginning of your carrier to point you in the right direction it would be great, but I believe the chances of finding such a person even less probable than the very chances of making it on forex itself.


Even people that 'claim' to trade live are not telling you the whole truth. Why somebody would charge you a few bucks and let you see him trading if he could make millions trading himself?

I already wrote about one of my experiences with one of those live trading sessions out there.

Take a look on this video I'm posting. thats just another example on how things can be away different of what it seems.

The fact is that there is no such a thing as a free lunch! If you really want to make it on Forex you have to take your butt out there, work hard, pay your time and there is just no guaranties.

 

SirGoodman posted:
    

Good Morning

I want to correct the impression that you have from my recent post.


You need to have a trade plan for every trade. A trade plan also includes not trading just to trade. That you appear to have.



I am not afraid to take a loss and I have no fears when I trade. I do not need to take additional risk so I take profits when I see them. I win easily over 80% of all my trades. When it comes to EGO I still am working on that one.

</quote>

I do have a plan. Am I perfect on the execution of my plan? NO! I think you are taking my mistakes ( which I'm working on) as a lack of plan. You got it wrong Bruce

That does not impress me much 😀 because my margin call occurred in a time where I got 95% of my trades right. One cam make money trading 1% right the opposite is also correct.

80% , 70% etc is a gimmick to impress newbies your win/loss ratio does not necessarily indicates if you are profitable or not.

TheOracle posted:
    

SirGoodman posted:
    

Good Morning

I want to correct the impression that you have from my recent post.


You need to have a trade plan for every trade. A trade plan also includes not trading just to trade. That you appear to have.



I am not afraid to take a loss and I have no fears when I trade. I do not need to take additional risk so I take profits when I see them. I win easily over 80% of all my trades. When it comes to EGO I still am working on that one.

Sorry my last post got 'quoted' with Bruce's post I'm re posting

I do have a plan. Am I perfect on the execution of my plan? NO! I think you are taking my mistakes ( which I'm working on) as a lack of plan. You got it wrong Bruce

That does not impress me much because my margin call occurred in a time where I got 95% of my trades right. One can make money trading 1% right the opposite is also correct.

80% , 70% etc is a gimmick to impress newbies your win/loss ratio does not necessarily indicates if you are profitable or not.

Oracle,

The guru i was talking about would not be from internet.
Internet is full of fake gurus. I know that. I've been at FF too. I never posted though. I know that it is full of people trying to find the holly grail. There were only very few, that would post really good info there.

The so called guru would have to be someone you physically meet from time to time, with proved track record. It had to be someone that would analyze what you were doing and tell you things like: 'Son with that stragey you are going nowhere because you are risking too much and although you won this week you will be busted within 1 or 2 months', and then he would mathematically explain you why was that.
Something like a tutor in some universities. But even if you were lucky enough to find one, that would NOT guarantee anything.
You'd still have to work your butt in order to make progresses.
You know as well as i do that the psycological part is an important component of any trader.

Luckly enough i never came across any scams or dishonesty. I can only blame myself for all i lost.
I never tried things like robots, or funny forex courses, or forex signal providers, etc. I've been always suspicious about that.

trader757 posted:
    Oracle,

The guru i was talking about would not be from internet.
Internet is full of fake gurus. I know that. I've been at FF too. I never posted though. I know that it is full of people trying to find the holly grail. There were only very few, that would post really good info there.

The so called guru would have to be someone you physically meet from time to time, with proved track record. It had to be someone that would analyze what you were doing and tell you things like: 'Son with that stragey you are going nowhere because you are risking too much and although you won this week you will be busted within 1 or 2 months', and then he would mathematically explain you why was that.
Something like a tutor in some universities. But even if you were lucky enough to find one, that would NOT guarantee anything.
You'd still have to work your butt in order to make progresses.
You know as well as i do that the psycological part is an important component of any trader.

Luckly enough i never came across any scams or dishonesty. I can only blame myself for all i lost.
I never tried things like robots, or funny forex courses, or forex signal providers, etc. I've been always suspicious about that.

Got it Trader757! And I agree that if you find, lets say , a guy that trades for banks and he decides to take you under his wings it can save you years of pain 😁

I think that all of us trade similar price action styles and are day traders.
My trading started turning around last summer but I ruined it by listening to others and since than I listen to no one but myself.
Never had any mentor but No Brainer trades thread was a turning point that helped me to understand better how things work and also another thread stocks related Greed and Fear trader made me to realize that when it is the hardest to take trade it is possibly the best trade there is, LOL.

AS of my trading style i trade only EURUSD and use basically:

1. Price action
2. Support & Resistance
3. Candlesticks
4. Some pattrens formation like double tops and double tips to identify trend reversals
5. Moving averages as a support tool

I no more pay attention to any indicators such as RSI, stiochs, etc. I'm not saying they are not useful. It is jus they are not part of the arsenal i want to go to the batlefied with.

I'm a day trader too. I take trades out of M5 or M15 charts and always pay attention to the larger timeframe specially H1.
I've been scoring around 30-35 pips daily on average. when i have time to trade the full day i can go to the range 40-60 in a good day.
My best day ever was 172 pips if my memory serves me right. For that i took multiple trades in the same direction and let the trades run longer than usual.

I have a day job and i can not always look at the charts the whole day, although i work with my laptop all day :-)
Whenever possible, what i usually do is put alerts on some support/resistance levels and wait for the bell to ring.

I wish i had more time to dediacte to this. Last week i took 1 week holiday and managed to make 260 pips. I traded the 5 days from 8:00 to 18:00. Unfortunatelly it means litle because it was only 1 week.