Hi Guys!
First of all, thank you very much for setting up this website, it’s amazing!
I’ve been reading the school material, and I’m obviously trying the concepts in Metatrader4 whilst I’m learning.
I’ve tried applying the concepts for the fibonacci retracements and extensions yesterday, but to my big surprise today, I lost on my dummy account 
Here is what I’ve done:
[ul]
[li]Traced the Fibonacci retracement
[/li][li]Traced the support and resistance levels
[/li][li]Traced the trend line
[/li][li]Confirmed the entry by looking for a suitable fib stick
[/li][li]Traced the Fibonacci extension to find where could I take profits
[/li][li]Set my stop loss at the 61.8 fib level
[/li][/ul]
Somehow, the price just went up the roof, and I lost in this trade.
Please find the graph image attached.
What was wrong with my trading setup?
Thanks in advance,
Dinis
From what I can tell, you traded against the main trend. Try using fibs on a larger time frame to the one you trade off. that way you will get a clearer sense of where price is going.
I dont trade 5 min charts, but if that it what you use, then i would suggest using the 1 hour or 30 min charts to set fibs. As the school says, get further away from the market, not closed to it when doing analysis.
Also, you could have just been unlucky. Did you see there were EU and US news releases yesterday, which caused price to rise rapidly, and then fall after the releases. this would have caused problems.
Also, with your entry (I know this is with hindsight) you could have waited for a more clear sign of which way price was going to go. The price ranged quite a lot after you entered; Ideally you should have waited for a clear break either way. remember not to be bias. The price will go either up or down. As a trader we dont care which way it goes, so long as it is moving we can make pips.
Keep trying, and keep reading the School. It gets through the basics, and allows for more advanced trading.
Hi THEWALLHITME,
thank you for your answer. I saw in the examples that sometimes the Fib levels were traced “against” the main trend like in the graphs in the lesson School->Elementary->Fibonacci->“When Fibonacci Fails” (Sorry, can’t post links yet).
How do I know if what I’m looking at is a new trend or not? Or better put, how do I know I’m retracing it against the trend?
dq, as Wall said, don’t bother with the fib on a 5 minute chart. You need to start paying attention to Price and look at it top down… ie 1 week, 1 day, 4 hour, 1 hour and so on. Just cuz it looks pretty good at say the 30 minute and 5 minute, you’ll want to look at it from a much larger perspective to see what is really going on with a currency pair. When I use the fib, I only draw it in a 4 hour chart or greater.
my two cents…
good luck,
fi
Nothing was wrong with your set up. Remember, you will lose trades. It’s inevitable. If you start questioning your methods because you lost a trade, hang up your forex hat, this won’t work for you.
The market doesn’t care about your set up. It will do what it’s going to do.
Luckily patterns emerge in the market allowing speculative to create a profitable edge in the marketplace. However it’s only an edge, not a guarantee.
Trade your set up 25 times at least before you start to question it,
Hi fihunts and mastergunner99,
thank you for replying. I’ll definitely try it on longer time frames and test it more times. I’ve only started doing the fibs 3 days ago, so I guess I need a lot more time 
Thanks a lot guys!
I agree with longer time frame analysis, it really will help. I have been trading a long time and I want to congratulate you for maintaining your stop loss. That is a lesson that it took me a long time to learn. Losses will happen, only God knows where the market will go. Not blowing up your account on one trade is a great lesson to learn.
Stay with it, success will come. One book that helped me was the Disciplined Trader. As with everything, it is not the “Holy Grail” but it offers some ideas that can help.
Keep up the good work and remained disciplined. Systems dont make you successful, your discipline will. It has been shown, you can have a system that is right less than 50% of the time and make money with proper money mgt.
