Overwhelmed

Hello,

Thank you for this great site and service.

I am an absolute newbie, I am half-way through the School (at High School now). I am writing notes as I go along.

However, I am feeling a little overwhelmed. Yes, I will keep at it. Yes, I know that practice and patience will soothe things. Nonetheless, I have a few questions

  • After I finish the school, I make a demo account and start trading. I am concerned that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. For example, eventhough I am halfway thru the school right now, if someone were to immediately put me in front of a chart and ask me to trade… I wouldn’t know what should be by first thought or action.

  • Do I have to remember ALL these techniques? Or realistically do traders find their calling in a different subset of these techniques? I also find some of these techniques overlapping, yet with subtle differences.

  • I am focusing right now on the School. Is there anything else I should do in parallel with my schooling? (recall that I am taking notes as I go along). BTW, it would be nice if there were quizzes/excercises at the end.

Thanks again for the good work.

PS: I apologise if such a post has been made before, if so, please feel free to direct me to any “absolute total newbie” posts.

greetings,

i’ve been trading a live account for over 3 years now and i still get that feeling of being overwhelmed sometimes. You don’t have to, and you shouldn’t trade when you feel like that. The “trick” if you could call it that, is to have a strategy for defining opportunities in the madness of a naked chart.

You sound quite intelligent so I’ll give you the fast track to get your trading eye focusing on the right concept. Support and Resistance are the absolute foundation of this market, and any other market with a lot of players in it with good liquidity.

Money management, which I’m sure you’ll hear talked about everywhere, is about taking risks in a way that won’t destroy your account when you hit strings of losses (which inevitably happen). You just have to define the risk BEFORE you enter the trade, by determining how big you want the trade to be, and how far away the stop loss will be. The math to figure that out is in the school so I won’t go into details.

If what i’ve said makes some sense to you, I think you’d be doing yourself a favour by exploring this thread with new traders like you in mind. I trade the methods and they do work, that’s why I’m confident in recommending it to people like you that appear to be approaching forex in a professional manner.

http://forums.babypips.com/newbie-island/36328-what-every-new-aspiring-forex-trader-still-wants-know.html

Just out of interest sake, what goals do you have from your venture into trading forex? Looking to be a full-time trader in the future perhaps?

and it’s a shame they took the quizzes out, they had them when I went through the school, I thought it was pretty helpful :confused:

I agree 100% with everything Aaron (akeakamai) said.

His recommendation to dig into the Michael Huddleston (ICT) thread is spot-on.

No, absolutely not. When you have found your own style (scalper, day trader, swing trader, etc.), and when you have developed your own trading strategies, a lot of your School lessons (on indicators and how to trade with them) will become irrelevant to you. You should know about all of those things, for sure — and the School is teaching you that. But, you might never use most of them.

You’ve got it. The School is giving you a broad overview of the many different techniques that various traders have developed and used over the years. When you find what suits [B]you[/B], I think you’ll use maybe 10% of the techniques you are currently studying.

I would guess that about 10% of the School curriculum is applicable to Michael Huddleston’s trading method.

If you follow Michael’s path, you’ll be amazed at how things can be simplified. You’ll be amazed at how all the “analysis paralysis” can be cleared away.

And you’ll be amazed at how — possibly for the first time — you can look at a chart and see a tactical situation that you can take advantage of. And [B]that’s[/B] basically our goal, whenever we sit down to trade.

Thank you for responses. I have bookmarked the thread you mentioned. However, my original question persists,

Should I do demo trading in parallel to the school? Or should I finish the school first? Or it doesn’t really matter? Preferably, I would like to finish the school, and then use it as a reference while demo trading.

Just out of interest sake, what goals do you have from your venture into trading forex? Looking to be a full-time trader in the future perhaps?

No intention to be a full-time trader just yet. I have expendable income that I would like to “play” with… its not much, just 2-3k USD. Also, I’ve always believe that I would be good at this stuff. Many years ago, I used to trade in virtual economies (in online games) and I was always VERY rich, in a few cases, I even sold my online wealth and made it into real cash.

Then, that’s exactly how you should do it. We all learn differently. Do what you’re comfortable with.

You will know when you’re ready to begin practicing the theory you have been studying.


In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.
Yogi Berra

I suggest to keep on looking at the charts, and soon it all comes together. When I started I didn’t know anything, now chart patterns and trades jump out at me like second nature. I tell my wife “now that’s a beautiful chart!”…and she looks at me like I’m crazy…:slight_smile: