Lol I close half the trade before I place a BE so its not worthless.
My BE is 1 pip profit. 
I just hate seeing 0.
What Iām watching for now early next weekā¦
Look familiar?
This would be nice if vol agrees at fibā¦but itās friday, so eh.
Petefader,
Nice to see you are still around here. I finally jumped in about a month (and 10 pages) ago hoping for the chance to keep up with your usual posts. Shortly thereafter you commented that you were not posting so much any longer. After years of lurking you are actually why I finally joined to post, SO I hope you will continue to show up at least now and then!
I hope you are as proud of your thread as you should be. Especially after so many traders went from ānot understandingā to fully blossoming into consistent results based off ideas you took your time to introduce.
I followed this thread in āreal timeā for the first year. I ran across it in the first place searching for any other uses of volume.
I had been using it previously with multiple strategies, but in a relatively limited way - only to distinguish if there was more buying or more selling pressure during ranging periods - never really for entry. Even such limited use was a large impact to any other methods.
So I was never a believer of volume having no place in Forex. Forex is not the first market I have traded (although I have put more overall time into it than any other). Volume was of a great deal of use to me in other markets and I never really let the concept go when changing market focus.
I have an enormously increased amount of time to trade as of late so I am looking forward to applying this for entries now that my schedule permits. With all of this chart time, it cannot hurt to have one more thing to keep an eye out for!
its already in motion. weāre just within that zone, only that we have the daily pivot at the 1.4280 zone.
Not to derail this thread, but for any of you using MT4, are you using any EAs or scripts to ease with order entry/management?
not me, i trade off FXCM Trading Station and only use MT4 for charting and analysis.
Its been a great week, once again but I donāt want to get too excited, start thinking that its all easy and forget my game rulesā¦ 
have a great weekend yāall
Nice to see you guys are doing well. That 1hr candle blew right through the fib I postedā¦but then this happened. 1hr Stopping Volume at support, and NS entry on 5 min. Text book.
Ok, based on what I have read in this thread so far it seems that if you understand this method you can have a very high percentage of wins. It seems like Dodge and Nero and Pete were winning almost all the time with > 10 pips per trade. Is this realistic or are you guys just not posting your losers? I am not saying this as a doubter, I actually think this works, but it seems almost to good to be true.
let me add some numbers ā¦
If we say that netting 10 pips per trading day average (doesnāt seem like a lot based on the thread) and we have a position size that is equal to a 2% risk for a SL of 40 pips (not saying using a SL of 40 pips but just using that for position size). Then 10 pips = 0.5 % of our balance (if trading a pair such as EUR/USD or GBP/USD).
Ok so 10 pips per day = 0.5% per day = 10.5% per month (5 days per week, 4 weeks per month).
That ends up being 231% APY before taxes, 150% APY after 35% tax rate on gains. That would turn a $5000 initial investment into almost 500K after 5 years ($492,273).
That seems really really high to me, yet 10 pips per day average doesnāt seem that high. I thought I read that Nero was saying he was averaging 1% per day (20 pips), or at least that was his target, that would be a 987% gain before tax and 641% after. A $5000 initial investment would be > 112 million after 5 years AFTER TAXES.
Can somebody bring this back to reality. Is 10 or 20 pips a day realistic. If so, then there is a lot of losing going on that is not posted in this thread, that or a couple of people getting very rich very quickly :).
EDIT: The reason for the post was not to question the validity of the thread. There was a statement about 1000 posts ago questioning the correctness of getting out of a trade early and only gaining 10 or 20 pips, and I was wanting to put some numbers behind it to see if there was any truth. Based on the above I think it is perfectly fine to be VERY content with 10-20 pips as long as you have a high win percentage and small stop losses on your losers.
my analyses for the day, i mainly use the 30 min chart but also switch to the daily, 4hour n 1H chart to see the bigger picture then the 5 min (sometimes) when approaching resistance/support area
[QUOTE=greydawg00;259197]Ok, based on what I have read in this thread so far it seems that if you understand this method you can have a very high percentage of winsā¦[/QUOTE]
for me its a winning strategy. But I added a whole lots of other tools to the chart that it might look a lil too messy but i feel that they help me a lot more to see places where price action will be dancing in one place and i can decide whether I wana jump ship, scale out, move my stop or hold onto the the position. Last week alone I had good results (from Wednesday alone) and this week, the worse day was on Tuesday but i was still in the green. I recorded a couple of video clips as i went through some of the trades as my personal journal on what i was thinking at the time and I think i will post them on youtube or something when i get time.
unfortunately am failing to upload my charts as images on here so I canāt seem to get them accross, am thinking that i should maybe post them as pdf and you can see some of the areas where i took the trades (mainly by placing sell or buy stop just after the close of what I identified as the entry bar). Actually i will post a pdf i did last weekend summarizing the set-ups of last weekās trades that i did for a friend of mine with whom iāve been going through the trading adventure with.
Knowing how to read the activity has helped me a lot and thanks to PeteFader and the other guys on here Iāve learnt a lot more. oh yeah, and not to forget Tom Williamsā book (Master the Markets) which i still need to read again and again and again, because I still havenāt grasped how to apply VSA properly. This where my journey began.
am not sure if this helps, Iāve tried various other strategies you can think of but like I said this is my best so far. its not 100% accurate but if you stick to your money management (oh yeah, and letting your profits run) you should be doing great with it. Its something you have to try out and see for yourself.
otherwise, i donāt think limiting yourself to 10 - 20 pips per day is alright if you can get more. you can always move your stop to BE then lock in 10 and let the trade run and you will be more likely to even see it run for more, in the end the big wins will upset your losses if you had such wider stops (say 40 pips). I once ran a strategy that did this on a demo account, and it did well but i was always under so much pressure especially when the stop (which used to be way off) were hit. I will try and find the demo statement for that account.
Cliffās Notes: Wow, I typed way more then I expected. I havenāt posted on this forum in a very long time but I came across this post as I follow VSA threads. My main point here is that you simply cannot rely on continuous, consistent compounding as you have in your math, even if you are a great trader and get great returns.
Whoa thereā¦ letās slow down for a minute.
Everyone wants to plug numbers into a spreadsheet and see what happens, but thatās a far cry from reality ā not because itās not possible to have great returns, but because you are simplifying this so drastically that it does not give you an accurate picture of the future. Hereās a few points in response to your post:
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I donāt see you taking out any money for living expenses from your example? Thatās not realistic for a couple reasons. First, the full-time intraday trader will always have a big advantage when it comes to focusing on the charts which equals a faster learning curve and more consistent results. Iām not saying that some guys canāt do it part time. Iām just being realistic ā youāre not going to be able to intraday trade everyday, clear-headed, uninterrupted for hours at a time, if trading isnāt your profession. Second, no one leaves all their money in their account beyond a certain pointā¦ in the beginning, everyone swears that they will compound their account until they hit retirement, but realistically whatās going to happen once your account goes from 5K to 30Kā¦ then 50Kā¦ then 70Kā¦ then 90K. You would have to be cold blooded not to pull some money out.
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ā¦Which leads me to my next point, Iāve met / heard of very few traders who have the testicular fortitude to increase their position size every week (as you would have to do with compounding) for a substantial amount of time. Some traders have a huge problem with going higher then 5-10 lots when they reach that level, and stick around that area for quite a long time. How will you react to a $50K account? $100K? $250K? Well, thereās only one way to find out.
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Good/great returns are certainly very possible, but they are not easy. Youāll notice that most of the traders having success with this method are already adept at finding good levels to watch ā theyāve been trading for a while, and theyāve put in a lot of effort to mesh VSA with their previous price action trading experience.
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Each day is not āautomaticā. Youāve got to do your homework every day, and youāve got to focus while youāre trading. If youāre worried about your spreadsheet, youāre going to get slaughtered because price action trading is all in the details, and when you add in VSA youāve now added in another layer. Think about it. There are days/weeks/months on that spreadsheet where you will be worried about things like surprise expenses, breakups or a divorce, health issues (flu, cold, whatever).
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Great traders can make great money, but thatās the same in any profession. The difference is that average traders lose money, while average doctors/lawyers/etc still make decent money. This is a 100% performance-based profession. You will NEVER be able to take tomorrowās performance for granted, no matter what your past performance is.
Dr. Mongolia, first off great response. This is sort of what I was looking for in terms of discussion.
Let me respond to some of your points (most of this is based on the assumption that the ability to gain 10-20 pips is not rocket science if you can understand what is in this thread):
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Assume that the trader has a full-time job outside of this that would handles living expenses, and the plan is to take out nothing for a long time and then once the capital grows (4-5 years) only take out a small portion of the monthly gains, not touching the capital. Yes this would end up with a smaller return in the later years, but by then the captial is built (say the 500K in the smaller example). Also I think if one trully understands the reality of what it takes to be wealthy, which is save now to spend later, living off of interest, then yes it is possible to not touch the capital.
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Really this comes down to looking at it as a percent, abstracting the actual dollar amount of the position. If you can focus on the position size being 2% and not pay attention to if it is $100 or $100,000 then the actual dollar amount wonāt matter. Until you get to VERY large positions so like a few million or even much more, the effect of the market is the same. It is one thing that is really nice about FOREX, it doesnāt matter if you are trading captial of 5k or 10mil, the concepts are exactly the same. The abstraction is similar to if you have ever played poker, if you think of it as number of blinds instead of so many dollars it makes the abstraction much easier.
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This is really the meat of my question. I know the learning and understanding is not āeasyā for most. But if you do grasp the info in this thread and can trully understand the dynamics of supply and demand which is what it is all about then is 10 pips a day reasonable. It seems like so little an amount (and this is net, not stopping after 10 pips, but your winning/losing trades average to that net). I would like to see one of the more experienced traders of this method speak to this.
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Not focused on the spreadsheet, I was just trying to quantify some of the results of this thread and some of the statements.
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agreed, have to stay on top of the game and not get comfortable.
So really your 5 points can be summed up as emotional and monetary control. Can you separate yourself from the money and treat it as a long term investment. Can you focus on the moment and not look ahead to some pie in the sky.
The point of the post is not to say that the spreadsheet is gospel but more to look at what it truly means to continually make small returns. To question why some traders always feel like they need the big 100+ pip score or even the 50+ pip when consistent, safer, smaller trades can have great results if you are disciplined.
The overall point of my response was supposed to be that learning to trade PA/VSA profitably is hard but doable, but compounding continuously is going to be very difficult. Real people in real life have breaks here and there due to various reasons. And in regards to your specific question, 10 pips per day is definitely doable, as is many more than 10 pips per day.
My points were not meant to discourage you in any way. I am just pointing out that a lot of the things that you take for granted in a ābirds-eyeā view when you are doing the math are actually NOT things that should be taken for granted. When you are in the trenches, the fog of war complicates things a great deal. Iām not going to completely rehash point #2 again but I can tell from your response that itās something you do take lightly. Who knows ā I donāt know you, so maybe you are capable of truly abstracting the dollar amount from the get go. But from my experience this is a learned skill, not an innate one. And again, Iām not saying this to discourage you, Iām just giving an example of something that will take additional time.
Learn to trade PA/VSA and youāll be well compensated. Is it for you? Who knows, youāll need to try it out and see. You mentioned in your post that you presume 10-20 pips per day is not rocket science, and Iāll confirm that it definitely isnāt. But, Iād bet that thereās a whole lot of rocket scientists, if not all, who would never be profitably trading like this. Itās discretionary trading, not mechanical tradingā¦ there is no exactness to it like math/science. Some people will take to it immediately, and some people will never grasp it, thatās just the way it is. So off the sidelines you go! Let us know how itās working out in a couple of months and go from there.
I fear that I have somewhat derailed an otherwise spectacular thread, so lets get back to the actual trading method.
If itās too good to be true, it is. Becoming a professional (and profitable) trader is one of the longest journeys you are likely to embark upon.
so, friday ends at its absolute low, price is testing a very crucial area here imo. I have no bias on short term for now, could go long or short as market brings. I expect range move at this level, if we spot stopping vl there, could be good spot for long, if thereās effort to fall through the level, Iāll look for nd on the reactive move to sell. With such a move and close on friday, I favors sell more but letās see how market brings.
