I have read through the school of pipsology twice now. I have also read The Essentials of Trading by John Foreman. I have been messing around with demo accounts for about a month now, just using heuristic type reasoning and using very basic methods like support and resistance. I have blown up my share of accounts, but my last trade is at about 100% profit now (going short on NZDJPY soon after it’s peak at around 65.400), and I hit a margin call on this account.
I guess what I am looking for is some more advanced (intermediate really) reading material or another way of learning. I guess is makes sense to try testing out various systems scientifically, but I need some insights on this too. Placing live trades on a demo account can only get you so far. Alternate methods I am interested in are testing old data candle by candle (don’t know which programs can do this) or messing around with MT4’s expert advisor programming. I have taken some computer science classes so I know the basics of programming, but I need a good resource on how to learn how to use the language (it’s ridiculous how people want to sell you knowledge in the Forex world.) I have only used MT4 now and am looking for other good trading platforms in general as well.
I could be completely wrong here, and I am a newbie so not sure how much my advice is worth,
You should still be sticking with the fundementals if you are blowing accounts (I could have your metaphor wrong but I believe you mean depleted them of funds), to quote “Placing live trades on a demo account can only get you so far” the only difference between trading a live and demo account is your own mental state, so I don’t think its possible to say you have advanced past that stage,
becuase you would then in fact be saying you have progressed passed trading itself.
as far as good testing software there is an add-on for mt4 on a simulator thread somewhere have a look around the first few pages.
Please do not take this as being presumptious, just my 2 cents
There was a simulator thread in this forum. It’s an EA that simulates a live/demo trading environment using historic data. It’s damn useful.
http://forums.babypips.com/newbie-island/31661-simulators.html
You can also learn MQL by looking at the documentation (at the Metatrader site). There is a large codebase, as well, to help speed up the process.
Couldn’t agree more than others here.
If you are a programmer, mq4 is easy. Platform at all is not bad, at least for the newbie.
Just my boring opinion to add: forex or investment like this is not the good deal for everybody. Same as not everybody is not a good basketball player, but maybe a good football player. If you have not a strong heart and end up with loss always, maybe something else would be good. Your choice, though.
I prefer trading only very reasonable trades manual and leave the rest to my pets (robots). No real experience with my pets until now, though. But they perform better than I in backtest. They taught me that my first strategies were all crap. I learned also a lot from backtest for manual trading. One important experience: You may gain profit with a couple of trades, but at least you get a hot shot down and all your profit ends in loss. So, no manual demo trading beats a backtest of 100+ trades over 2 years in H4 chart in my opinion.
Just my 2 pips. Wish you to get an edge!