Hello from a newbie

Hi folks,

I’m Shona. I am just starting to learn about Forex am hoping it might be a long term way of me making a bit of money when I stop doing my current job.

I currently work as a consultant in banking. Credit risk to be precise. I think forex should suit me as I’m not a gambling type but happy to take carefully managed risks.

At the moment I am in the very early days, still getting familiar with the software (metatrader) and trying to work out where I should be setting my stop losses and take profits. Not doing any real trades yet just using a practice account.

Shona

Welcome to BabyPips.com, Shona! Hope you’ll enjoy your stay here. If you need help in learning more about forex, visit the School of Pipsology.

Good luck and happy trading! :slight_smile:

Hi Shona. Nice to meet you here. Welcome to the community. So you’ll be using MT4 too?

Yes I’ll be using MT4. Seems good and easy to use. I haven’t yet got the hang of the volumes though. Tried using a babypips calculator to work out my risk but I must have inputed something wrong as the answer was nonsense. The calculator made it look like I was risking far more than I actually am.

At moment I am therefore just guessing at my risk and using tiny volumes. Need to sort that out.

I am looking forward to starting to automate trades. I am a programmer for my main job. I also do modelling but not sure if that will be as useful as I first thought, as there are already so many indicators to use. It perhaps isn’t necessary to create fancy models (or even simple ones). Any opinions on that?

For now though I need to learn the basics. School of pipsology has been very useful.

good luck:-)

Hello Shona welcome to the forum its nice to be here lets share and gather our knowledge with one another.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the welcomes.

I’ve had a few weeks now trading in my demo account. It’s really fun, though I’m not doing well yet. I guess that takes time.

One thing that seems clear to me is that I need to learn to automate my trades. At the moment I look up strategies and think I’ll give that one a go, but then how do you find the signals? Are you supposed to just sit at your computer waiting?

I have been trying to learn mql4 from YouTube and have written a mini program. It is going to take a long time though to get good at it.

Has any one got any ideas for a really basic strategy that I could try and code up? Does any one know where I could get some sample mql4 programs for free. Don’t care if they make money or not for now, just want to learn the language, then I’ll try out strategies.

Shona

Hey Shona, although forex is a 24/5 market, you don’t have to wait at your computer for signals.there are free websites that can provide you with email/text alerts when a market condition that you prefer occurs.

[QUOTE=“MrCannady;584497”]Hey Shona, although forex is a 24/5 market, you don’t have to wait at your computer for signals.there are free websites that can provide you with email/text alerts when a market condition that you prefer occurs.[/QUOTE]

That sounds like a good thing for me to do so I can still be trading and practising whilst I learn mql4.

Do you know which websites are good for alerts? Thanks for info.

I haven’t picked a strategy yet. Have just been playing with bollinger bands and putting horizontal lines on my charts where I think there might be support/resistance.

I did a basic one called fishermans strip as that comes up often enough that you can sit at your computer and wait for them. Was working ok but I never quite got the trades on at the optimal time, like an automated system would.

Shona

I use alertfx.com. Its pretty good, can pretty much give you alerts and notifications for any type of strategy you can use.