All agreed!
Those in favour say ‘aye’!
The ayes have it, the ayes have it.
OK, I’ll go with that! 
And maybe for a light break on a much more “important” topic - and certainly an easier one to digest and agree upon (although too much can cause just as many headaches! 
…):
Well, it is only one month now to the Midnight Sun here…in fact only yesterday we were at the Manxx country “mansion” (haha!) preparing for the summer season. So far its been a long and cold spring, but hopefully it will be above zero degs by midsummer!
So if you don’t mind lake views with your sauna and picnic- welcome (and dont forget your woolly underwear)!
Got to admit it’s nice to see a middle point in this debate. So after reading all your posts, I guess we can at least all agree that:
-
FOREX is not an easy market to trade, and may be the most difficult one to trade as so many factors can affect it’s behaviour.
-
It’s all about finding an edge. Unless you find an edge, the only way you’re going to be profitable is by pure luck. Randomness and luck are very related!
So I would like to talk about the path traders (new and experienced) follow to find their so desirable EDGE. So you hear about FOREX, you find that it’s an market you can trade even if you have a small starting capital, and you open your first account and look at the charts. You see the daily volatility, and think… wow! in just one day I could make thousands. So you start in a demo account and try to scalp some pips and you realize it’s not that easy. If price goes in you favor you’re thinking of locking profits, and if it goes against you, you wait and see if it turns around, but naah… you end up with a big loss.
So now you say… ok there are successful traders, I have to study this market and find an edge, so I know when to enter a trade, what direction to enter in, the correct position size and when to exit. And the you find babypisps school, and discover a new world of possibilities. You learn about risk reward, and how you only need to be right once every 10 trades to make profit, and all this fancy indicators like MACD, stochastic, rsi, moving average. And you think… OK I’ve found my edge, I’m going to use this to make a profit.
You go back, and fail again, so you return to learning, and find some more sophisticated stuff and think… OK, this is the good stuff, when I master this I will have my Edge!! And you start drawing trend lines, S/R, Fibonacci levels. And now your wife looks at your chart and thinks… wow… we’ve got an analyst in da houz! You’re even glad that you can draw all this stuff in a chart, just like the pros! But even then, sheeeeit, I’m still not profitable. And you go back to school! Now you here about patterns! Elliot Waves, Butterflies, Gartley, Bats, and all the zoo animals are now in your charts. So you go back to trading and also get a real account, as you’ve got all this traders in the community telling you that paper’s no good! But damn it! what are this spikes in my chart?? Are they part of the pattern?? I guess no coz my Stop got hit! I must learn to correctly draw the patterns!
But wait, you see, it’s so complicated because you are trading short term! Short term, scalping is way too noisy dude, you need to Swing trade or long term trade. just open a trade and keep it for days or weeks. Give your stops some gap man! let the price Breathe. So yes! after using your Risk reward skills, and aiming for 1000 pips profit with stops of 200 pips, a few bad trades blow up your account and… now you keep searching for your edge. This is when you discover this guy all suit up, giving a webinar from he’s lamborghini and laughing at peoples charts! Look at this dude… oscillators, moving averages, trend lines, S/R LINES, fibs, patterns! WDF dude! you even threw a few bollinger bands in there!! Standard deviation all the way! Listen dude!! remove all this BS from your chart. That’s so old school broo! In FOREX we do NAKED! Pure Price Action dude! Look at this candle! baam! and this. this is a bulish engulfment! Long it riight now man!
But naaa… still no solid profits… we have good days… bad days… and on top of that some days you stop get ran, the other your not quoted at the critical moment, and now I guess we need to find some other more solid edge! (I’m going to skip all this systems you’ve tried that are described in the forums, youtube, blogs, and also this course you purchase, because we know you’ve gone through them as well) And we buy a book called “WELCOME TO THE MARVELLOUS WORLD OF FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS”, and from there to all kind of books and even the best Macroeconomy textbooks from the best universities in the world, and now we have the knowledge! we know how the markets work! We download the COT Report, we looking for changes in the interest rate, we look at the correlations with this index and this S&P. Solid!! But wait correlation was positive, but now after the market crash it has become negative, and what? interst rate went down, but this chinese guys are buying dollars!? WDF! My broker has not even got Yuans!! Is it pegged? not any more? What? Brexit? Trump? Draghi?.. Up down? wait, is the market going left? I think I’m going crazy…
Sounds familiar? Keep looking for your “EDGE”. Today is Draghi day!!
Good luck!
What’s you EDGE’S profile?:
- Describe your Technical Edge
- Describe your fundamental Edge
- Describe your risk/reward ratio
- Describe your average number of trades per month
- Describe your average trade Pips to TP
- Describe your average trade Pips to SL
- Describe the range and average duration of your trades
I would like a bumble bee to answer this questionary! I want to know your EDGE PROFILE!!!
here it is…
ready…
its comming…
wait…
Patience.
you forgot the Duck
i realy enjoy your posts averied. and that is not meant in a negative way or sarcastic or anything.
Averied,
I agree with Turbo …
Your last post was hilarious, it made me laugh because it is so true!
You should be a comedian
In all seriousness, this is about the best write-up I have yet seen anywhere concerning the “short life of a Newbie trader”. A link to this post should be posted automatically after every new trader’s introduction post - it would probably save them years of wasted time and a lot of wasted money.
There are at least 3 simultaneous threads on this site that discuss why 90-95% of retail traders lose. Its all here, this post gives all the answers in one big nutshell.
Brilliant! Brilliantly written, brilliantly constructed and obviously written with sincerity and a lot of personal experience.
I would think that any trader will be able to identify with at least part of those stages if not all of them! 
So, one might think, why should [I]anyone [/I]trade if it is not possible to gain?
Well for one thing, although the post describes many stages along the trader development route and the pitfalls that may occur (and often, no usually, do), it stops there. It does not describe actually [I]learning [/I]from those stages. It just describes a process of “oh, that didn’t work, what shall I try next”. It entirely omits at every stage the application of the main tool that every trader needs to use that is situated approximately between, and slightly above, the left and right ear lobes.
It also only deals with extremes like jumping from scalping to 1:10 risk/reward position trading, for example:
[I]“You learn about risk reward, and how you only need to be right once every 10 trades to make profit”[/I]
There is a whole world between 1:1 and 1:10
But the OP does not explain why he thinks R/R always fails, he just concludes with,[I] “You go back, and fail again, so you return to learning” [/I] - that is one [I]huge [/I]generalisation and assumption!
But this is a serious read for ANY new trader. Read and be warned - and if you take away [I]anything [/I]from it, let it be this: [I]Learn [/I]from your journey, [I]learn [/I]your instrument , use your brain - it is what every successful professional does in every other field - why would you think that forex is any different.
Edited to add:
In a curious, double negative, kind of way, it is intriguing to ponder that if over 90% of traders lose, then if they all did a mirror image of their own trading then they would be over 90% successful. I have even seen at least one trader ask in exasperation how could he find a broker that would automatically [I]always [/I]fill his orders in the [I]opposite [/I]direction, but without him actually knowing it himself, otherwise he would automatically take that into account as well and still lose!
But the intrigue here is that, in theory, it actually [I]would [/I]work. In which case it significantly changes the target area where the problem lies.
The OP builds his case on the argument that it is the market itself that prevents a trader making money because it is untradeable due to its pseudo-random characteristics. But the fact that if 90+% traders actually traded in the opposite direction to their actual trades then they would have profited suggests powerfully (IMHO) that the problem lies in the trader and not the market - that is a crucial issue - and why we still have bumble bees…
My technical edge is joining strong trends on pull-backs.
My fundamental edge if you can call it that is not being long JPY or short EUR when everyone else is selling JPY or buying EUR.
The rest of it is just statistics which I honestly don’t collect. I do set a stop-loss based on TA: I exit winners based on weakening TA: I don’t use set pip TP’s.
For the sake of completeness I’ll give this a go
[B]- Describe your Technical Edge[/B]
Keeping it simple, using the previous days high and low levels only. Nothing else, no indicators and a single 1H TF for all analysis.
[B]- Describe your fundamental Edge[/B]
I pay no attention to fundamentals what so ever. As a ‘technical’ trader I go with the flow and take opportunities when they present themselves, regardless of news.
[B]- Describe your risk/reward ratio[/B]
Always fixed at 1:2 risk to reward
[B]- Describe your average number of trades per month[/B]
12
[B]
- Describe your average trade Pips to TP[/B]
66
[B]- Describe your average trade Pips to SL[/B]
30
[B]- Describe the range and average duration of your trades[/B]
5 hours - closing any open positions on a Friday
I never open trades on a Friday. Mon-Thur is the trading week for me.
My compliments to Tommor and RISKonFX and thanks for inputting your trading guidelines.
I am a lot more risk averse than you two. Although the technical setup of the questions thrown here at the Bumble Bees are clear and positive, I feel the fundamental factors underlying this are too negative to risk a “trade”. I do not feel the OP’s interest is really to learn and develop his trading, rather he is asking us to set ourselves up like skittles to have something to aim at, for example:
Kind of cynical that bit about being lucky to have 5 bumble bees here?
But if you look at the statistics, this site has: [I]“Threads 67,962; Posts 702,807; Members 404,998;”[/I]
So finding 5 bumble bees out of 404,998 possibles is not an improbable result at all - in fact one might conclude that if there are still 5 left here actively posting then they just might have something to say that is actually [I]relevant [/I]to profitability - why else would they still be here - unless they are selling something, which, if they are, they are not very good at it, because it is not visible at all…
I await the response from the OP with great anticipation!
He says with an evil grin.
My thoughts exactly, but as you know by now I enjoy a slapping contest as much as the next person 
Actually, here is one clue where the OP has gone wrong in his travels:
“You backtest any pure technical system, and you can will blow your account sooner or later.”
Excluding the large institutions with the resources to do that properly, I would fully agree that any amateur attempting to produce an automated, repetitive system is doomed to failure.
On one hand we argue that the market is random (-like) and on the other we argue that any systematic approach doesn’t work?! - well that conclusion does not require an Einstein.
But if one is used to really studying one’s instrument and learning how it typically moves under certain sets of circumstances, like any seasoned hunter would do, then we are talking about an entirely different matter. Then we are dealing with when to shoot, and at what, rather than always just assuming that the bullet will always just hit your own foot.
I don’t hunt BTW, well only with a camera, anyway -here’s one brand new Newbie to the world that I “shot” a few days back:
Hmmm. Maybe then I should join you. The more skittles there are the more chance some may be left standing! Unless he is going for a strike…
Sorry…couldn’t resist this one
Great reply, Manxx…
I suppose we are a band of brothers and sisters here, but sometimes it does feel like ‘the blind leading the blind’, as RiskOn put it… So after all the wonderful thinking and communicating (and sharing) that we do on here, the question of ‘can one be profitable as a self-taught retail trader (of any instrument)?’ still remains one that, being so subjective in its answer to each of us differently, cannot be resolved by any other than ourselves individually. . . There is where it becomes difficult to have a ‘one size fits all’ methodology or system…
Yes, I agree, I doubt there can be any method or system that is right for everyone. Everyone is different, has different ambitions (e.g. trading for income or capital building), different psychological makeups, and different circumstances (e,g, capital, available time, existing financial commitments) and so.
So every trader needs to develop an approach that fits their circumstances and goals.
This particular thread is different in that it is questioning whether [I]any [/I]trader can make a sustainable profit [I][U]at all[/U][/I].
An interesting thought here is that if retail traders cannot make profits because of the nature of the market rather than their own lack of expertise, then why is it that all the banks dealing in foreign exchange do not go bankrupt as well?
But regarding the question of ‘can one be profitable as a self-taught retail trader (of any instrument)?’ I really am not in a position to comment on that, as you know, my own training was very different.
Having said that, after my years in int’l banking, when I started my own account trading for real, I still found it an incredibly demanding and frustrating experience to adjust to the world of personal retail trading on shorter terms.
But I am confident that an individual can learn and make it in this business. It just demands the normal extreme effort, commitment, and dedication - and more than a little business sense, too, that most complex fields require.
My man…
I think you’ve summed it up there Pip Me.
And that is why threads such as these , thoughtful, insightful and entertaining (have my popcorn at the ready at all times) as they are, ultimately and inevitably are a continuous loop of personal opinion and experience providing no conclusive answer to anything on an individual level. One persons “fact” remains another persons “fiction”.
Yes people can succeed and sustain that success (in trading or any other field) but not everyone does.
We come up with all kinds of hare-brained ideas throughout our lives and many don’t pan out or are just completely unsuited to our personalities or patience levels.
I can do one or two things reasonably well but you could give me an eternity and I would still be lousy at the violin.
Well said, brava!!
Mind you, if you had a good teacher (like me, huh huh)…you may win that violin battle
I might just take you up on that…though it may take me a while to get to Scotland. I may be a little late.