i have been using a demo account for the past month and im up 6.2k or 12 % of my account. the way i invest is if a pair is near its weekly lows i would buy it and have stop loss close to the bottom or if the pair is near its weekly highs i would sell/short it and having the stop loss above the top. As you can see it as worked well for me, I would like to know has anyone tried this ? has it worked for you? plz dont give me a stupid answer of “its a demo account”…money is money. i care about it regardless if its fake or real.
Search “Alternative Technical Templates” in the Holy Grails forum here.
Those people have made careers using simple triggers, and watching daily, weekly, and monthly opens, highs, lows, and closes, and other places that price has had obvious turning points.
So, yes, it’s been done:p There’s not really anything you or I could think of in forex, that hasn’t been tried somewhere, by somebody. With some crafty Google/Bing searching, you can also probably read about it.
tang thanks for you reply. i opened this thread because ppl are so caught up in stupid “systems”…my method is so simple that a monkey can do it lol. but i mean its working for me so time to open a real account and test this baby with 3.5k balance =P…$ 1 million here i come…in a few years LOL jks
Simple is good, but there’s a little flaw in your thinking there.
You have one last hurdle to conquer, and that’s the space between your ears. Just as learning to trade in general has a learning curve, so does learning to trade [I]live[/I]. It’s a whole different world when your losses are real. But there’s a way to manage that.
If you have 3.5 k to start with, use some money management with your startup amount.
Put 10% in an account, and trade that using your system. If you make money for a month, great. Add more at that point. If you don’t, you’re not out your whole startup kit.
If you put it all in at once, your risk of losing it all is much greater. Even if you lost half before you started making money again, you’d need to double the account to get back to your starting amount. That’s tough when there’s so much pressure on you. Take some of that stress off, and allow yourself the luxury of making a few mistakes without it costing you your entire starting balance.
I’ve been where you are. In fact, my first forex loss was more than your entire starting balance.
It wasn’t pleasant;)
tang that is some good advice there bud! I do stocks and stock options in a live account lol so i get the whole real vs fake. yeah i have more capital but i rather start small and add more once its working in the real world as per your point.
I believe the most powerful systems are simple systems so I like your idea a lot. Have you thought about programming this strategy and throwing it on a backtest? Backtests are not always going to be 100% accurate (forward tests are where it’s at), but you could get an idea of how often these trades trigger, where is the best place to set stops/limits, win/loss ratio etc. Just a thought.
I can imagine it works great in ranging markets, but try running that approach over 2008 and you may see a totally different set of results. Weekly lows being broken for a good 40 weeks on the bounce!
Very true! You would want to be selective of what’s been going on for each pair or only throw the strat on pairs known for ranging more than trending. Also, a tight stop could reduce the damage if there is a break.
lol and do you guys really expect this volatility to go away anytime soon? if you do then then you are a fool. europe isnt “fixed” yet ladies. we still got usa with 15 trillion of debt and etc.
Oh yea, 2008 was one that broke the barriers. Some traders prefer to do the whole process manually, without any indicators to signal entry points, so you could opt for either one. But since you are on a demo, you may want to test out your indicators -and keep track of the results you get.
Have you heard of trading platform like TradeStation to program and backtest your strategy? If not I strongly advise you to learn more about that.
In the fall of 2005, I lost $5,000 with a system that was very good during the 3 months of live trading but when I decided to trade real money, it all went down the drain. Why? Because the system was good ONLY during those past 3 months and stopped working in the months following the summer and that’s why I lost $$ here.
After losing money, I learned how to program and backtest trading systems using TradeStation and that’s how I found out that the system was good only during the summer but failed after and before the summer months. Knowing that BEFORE getting into the market would have saved me a lot of $$ here.
That’s why I ordered books on how to program those trading systems so that I can backtest them to see how good they were in the past which can tell you a lot about what the system can do in the future (ex: how much can you lose each day/week if it goes against you, etc…).
I don’t bet $1 until I have backtested a system on the past 5 years, you should do the same.
Merlin! thank you very much for your reply. that is an invaluable tip. I will definitely look into that.
I understand your point…it may work in the current market conditions but these markets change so it may not work at that time. I modified my “system” a bit…my broker is world wide and they tell me what are the current open positions and how many percent is short at which price. that info helps a lot! if 65 % of the market thinks its going up…its going up in a hour, 3 hours or a day…so yeah lol…but i will look into what you are saying
From what I’ve studied, retail trader sentiment in FX should be looked at in a contrarian manner. For example, if 65% of traders are long, you should be looking for opportunities to short. This makes sense because most retail traders LOSE money. If you are on the opposite side of the crowd’s trade, that should give you a slight edge.
First of all, you don’t have access to what everybody is thinking every second of the trading day and even if you do (like for those who uses Level 2/Market Depth), the market can change on a dime the next second. A good trader doesn’t think like that, he will simply REACT and ADAPT himself to what the market will be doing instead of thinking “Oh I think it’s going to go up today”.
The majority of people loses because they don’t know when to get in and when to get out. They either don’t get in exactly when they should so they miss their entry point and even if they get in at the right time, they don’t exit as planned or when they get in and are losing, they tend to stay in the trade a little bit too long because they think that it might turn around. Biiiiiiiiiig mistake.
In fact, thanks for mentioning this because that’s the 2nd reason why I went with TradeStation: To turn myself into a robot. As I mentioned earlier, I want to program a system and backtest it to see if it was good in the past and when it’s profitable, I use the Automated trading feature of TradeStation so that IT THINKS AND TRADES FOR ME so that I get in EXACTLY at the right time I should get in based on my system and get out EXACTLY when I want it to and not 2 minutes too late or too early.
I learned in the past that the more you turn into a robot and leave your emotions aside, the better trader you will be so instead of turning myself into a robot, why not use the closest thing to a robot possible and use a software to trade for me while I watch and confirm every entries/exits of course.
So backtesting a system is the 1st tip but using an automated trading platform is to me is the 2nd best advice I can give to a new trader because knowing when to get in and out based on past data is one thing, MAKING SURE you will get in and out at those precise entry/exit points is another.
well u can see my accounts…they are recent cuz my old broker only allows demo for 1 month so i had to start another account…this was just to shut you up :32:
