$2.74 To $2740 within 10 days

[dpaterso]

Well for what it’s worth: I for one agree with everything you’ve said.

For one thing: your gains are not ‘astronomical’ over a short period of time!!! That says a lot for you!!!

I’m also of the opinion that there is indeed WAY too much (contradicatory???) information out there.

I’ve ‘settled’ on about three or four trading sytems to be used under different circumstances and ‘stuck’ with them no matter what and that’s the only thing that’s worked in my favor.

The only thing I don’t agree with is when you say that losers cut their losses too soon. Normally it’s the other way around i.e. they cut their winners too soon and let their losses ‘run away with them in hope’!!! LOL!!!

I addressed this issue, as part of a post on my forums, just yesterday. Take a look. It may be of interest to you (you’ll just have to look for the relevant part in the post but you’ll ‘get the idea’):

Technical Trading Systems at TechTraderCentral - What do you need???

Regards,

Dale.

[paxgaea]

Thanks for the response, I will definitely check out the thread. I feel like KISS applies to quite a lot in life. You must get a lot of hating for any strategy that isn’t using 15 different indicators to call the shots.

I don’t presume to think that highly technical analysis can’t work, as I’m all for science, but I also think that anyone who says that trading isn’t also an art is deluding themselves.

sean

[paxgaea]

Thank you also Dale, I will check out your post also. That is also a very valid point that you make. Hope can definitely be a failing in trading, and that is likely one area where I need some improvement (along with many others, always a learning process). I’ve probably moved some stop loss lines that I shouldn’t have at times, and luckily it hasn’t burned me too much.

I’m editing the post because I was thinking more about what you said, and I think I disagree on the reverse side of that point. I feel like the ‘hope’ problem works in reverse also when people are seeing a gain, and they get greedy. I have to fight not to do it myself. I use higher and lower ‘take profits’ and ‘stops’ than I am comfortable with just in case I get disconnected from the system, but I usually am trading manually within those lines and I take profit at 10 or 15 pips, which I think most consider too low. I try to trade in and out fast though, as fast as possible. Six of my trades last night were 30 seconds in and out, for roughly $100 profit each, all in the span of 15 mins.

I’m thankful that we have some reasonable discussion going back and forth on this. It is exactly what I was hoping for.

sean

[Master_Tang]

I’m posting to this thread out of confusion, and a bit of frustration, because my experience contradicts what I see all of the more experienced traders on here adamantly insist upon with regards to trading forex. I didn’t come in here looking for the ‘holy grail’, because I don’t think such a thing exists, but was curious to see what others were discussing about trading systems.

My confusion stems from this: all the people that I see describing the need for systems, methods, lots of technical analysis, and a million different jingoistic terms make trading sound extremely complex, and I want to believe it is complex, and that it is possible to do relatively accurate technical analysis to squeeze out profits. And if statistics are to be believed, it would seem this is true, since I keep hearing the figure 90%+ bandied about as the percentage of people who have blown their accounts. But my admittedly limited experience is saying otherwise, that it can be relatively simple, that it is possible to not do any highly technical analysis, and still come out ahead. I am not talking roulette. I must have what would be described by me as a ‘strategy’, and I am honing it, but it is all in my head (along with some trading logs in a word editor) and would definitely be labeled by most any trader here as ‘flying by the seat of your pants’. But it seems to be working. I have taken a demo account in a matter of weeks from $8500 to over $11,000, and I think I have a better than 80% (possibly 90%, not sure how to track this) success rate over the course of 30 to 40 trades. And this isn’t looking for massively over-leveraged gains. I am working with 50:1 and not running the account on the bleeding edge, and I’m just grabbing roughly $100 profit at a time, I think roughly around 10-15 pips. Sure, I’m paying more than most would like in commission, but I’m moving forward consistently, and if I remember correctly I have a win on at least the last 20 straight trades. And yet I know I’m going to encounter losing trades again and again (but hopefully not account net losses), so I don’t have a Pollyanna view of forex.

Perhaps there is a better thread to submit this to, but I’m looking for more than the standard ‘you’re an idiot and you should use xyz method’, but I’m also looking for less than the patronizing pat on the head, ‘run along now and trade your demo account some more’ response because I’m interested in putting cash on what I’ve been doing and seeing if it continues to work.

And maybe you will think this confirms that I am in fact an idiot, but what is wrong with buckscoder’s notion that the goal is just to trade into profits, rather than trading into losses? In other words, just stop losing and start winning? I’ll wager that a large percentage of those 90%+ forex losers, lost because they didn’t have the cojones to withstand the inevitable swings that come with trading forex, and stopped out their losses waaaaaay too early, and with way too few pips. Rinse, lather, repeat, and you can kiss your account goodbye.

Am I missing something, or does my experience show that whatever I’m doing is working, and I should just stick with it? There is just way too much information out there that I think overwhelms new traders, and I think they drown in the glut of it…‘trade the news, don’t trade the news, use MA, don’t use MA, use MACD instead, trade the gap, gap is too risky, use low leverage, use high leverage, grab fewer pips, grab more pips less frequently’ and on and on. It is no wonder that new traders flail about searching for the ‘holy grail’.

Any input is appreciated, as is constructive criticism.

Thanks!

There’s an awful lot here that is very very right.

This really IS simple. It only goes up, or down. Trying to understand why is a wild goose chase.

The basics apply. More supply than demand, and down it goes. More demand than supply, and up it goes.

The best moves are the small ones. Base hits are a lot easier to come by than home runs. That’s not to say you can’t make much larger gains than 10 to 15 pips, but you won’t make them as consistently.

So take a piece of every move your setup gives you, don’t rue it if it keeps going, just move on to the next one. There are an awful lot of armchair quarterbacks in this game. Post up a mistake and 50 will tell you why your trade failed, but each of them will likely do the same thing tomorrow.

Keep reading, you’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and don’t change what’s working for you because someone else thinks you can better it.

And more importantly, don’t change what you are doing because YOU think you can better it.

Just keep rounding the bases one at a time, and experience will sharpen your ability to discern the difference between a good setup, and a GREAT setup.

Cheers!

[Nikitafx]

This really IS simple. It only goes up, or down. [B]Trying to understand why is a wild goose chase.[/B]

The basics apply. More supply than demand, and down it goes. More demand than supply, and up it goes.

[B]The best moves are the small ones. Base hits are a lot easier to come by than home runs. [/B] That’s not to say you can’t make much larger gains than 10 to 15 pips, but you won’t make them as consistently.

So take a piece of every move your setup gives you, don’t rue it if it keeps going, just move on to the next one. There are an awful lot of armchair quarterbacks in this game. Post up a mistake and 50 will tell you why your trade failed, but each of them will likely do the same thing tomorrow.

Keep reading, you’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and don’t change what’s working for you because someone else thinks you can better it.

And more importantly, don’t change what you are doing because YOU think you can better it.

Just keep rounding the bases one at a time, and [B]experience will sharpen your ability to discern the difference between a good setup, and a GREAT setup.[/B]

Cheers!

100% on the money.

[Buckscoder]

My friend doubled without any loss in 51 trades, started at 2011.11.16 11:45 to 2011.11.17 09:52

I Feel BAD, i want to triple now.

Please forgive me everybody not to read through the whole stuff, but a backtest period of not even a day sound like really great [B]gambling[/B].

[leandar]

Please forgive me everybody not to read through the whole stuff, but a backtest period of not even a day sound like really great [B]gambling[/B].

That is true forward test result.

BTW i setup one EA fixed it in a VPS deposited $2.50 Again :54:

[Buckscoder]

That is true forward test result.

BTW i setup one EA fixed it in a VPS deposited $2.50 Again :54:

Forward or backward, it’s still gambling. A reliable test needs years, not hours. Why? Because one day in the markets can never give you all possible market conditions. Even one year is a little weak.

You can have a strategy which works awesome in one day on the minute chart and the next day you will lose all your profits together with the deposit. Or it starts winning in the morning and you’ll get a margin call in the afternoon or at lunch.

[paxgaea]

Thank you all for the continuing input. Leandar, I feel like I hijacked your post, although I feel it is somewhat relevant to your OP. There are a million different methods being pushed out there as a ‘holy grail’, but I just happened to decide to post my ‘confusion’ to yours. It was your OP though, so if you want me to take it somewhere else, I can start a new thread or find one that has 70+ pages and add on to it.

In reply to buckscoder (whose input I have appreciated in other threads, such as the ‘going offshore’ thread) I hear what you are saying about back-testing, and at some point, especially when I possibly try to set up an EA, I will definitely do back-testing. But to that I would say that trading is not a hard science, and no amount of back-testing is going to prevent the very scenarios that you are sounding alarmist about in your post. For my part, to try to avoid those scenarios, I don’t stay in a trade long enough to have a ‘before lunch’ and ‘after lunch’ apocalypse. That is far too long for my tastes. In and out in less than 10 mins, and I am getting real squeamish if it drags into 15 mins. And I don’t risk the whole kitty, by using stops and TP’s and then trading in between them. And most every trader out there will tell you that there are days when they know they shouldn’t be in the market. London last night was mine. I was feeling uncomfortable about the early session trading, and thought I should stay out of it, but didn’t listen to myself, and lost $250. But that is only 10% of what I gained for the week.

As I said earlier, trading is not a hard science, and no amount of back-testing will guarantee your methods for anything that you can say is even tangentially related to the psychology sciences. I feel it can only serve to increase your odds (which begs the question, if you are playing the odds, when does it stop being gambling, and start being a more respectable ‘system’ or a ‘method’?)

Along with that, I am very willing (and hopefully intellectually able) to learn a great deal about indicators and improve my strategy. But you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk, and just because you are learning to crawl it does not necessarily follow that you are guaranteed to fall off a cliff. It seems to me that you can win at trading in your early stages of learning, and improve as time goes on (pretty much exactly what I think Master Tang, and Nikita by confirmation, were getting at). Conversely, just because you’ve been walking (or trading) for 40 years doesn’t mean you won’t fall off a cliff. ‘Systems’ and ‘methods’ can act as railings, but people still cross railings, even ones they have built.

I also very much think there has to be a very realistic and honest appraisal of your own individual situation. I am prepared to lose a few thousand on trying to see if I can make this work, because I’m in a situation where I just sold my house, and the reward vs. the risk is palatable. If it is a head of household whose family will not eat because of trading losses, then it would obviously be irresponsible. I and guess maybe that is where the alarmist rhetoric comes in, from every broker out there doing a CYA, from many of the traders on various forums, from nearly every angle, trying to save that idiot (that would starve his family) from himself.

I am worried about a couple of things though that are beyond my control that I don’t have experience with because I’ve never done live trading. How different is live trading from demo trading beyond the psychological aspect (spooking yourself because it is real money)? I tend to think that I should avoid really fast markets with the highest amount of volume, because I don’t think it really works with my trading style, but how concerned do I need to be about slippage on a live market? Any thoughts on MB Trading as a platform, 10K as a starting account size, 50:1, trading EUR/USD, 20-25 lots (which I think puts me in the 3% range), London session vs NY session (I’ve been getting up at 3 AM EST to trade London so far), and seeking to profit just $500-$750 per week and then walking away from the market (a seemingly legitimate way to minimize risk). I don’t need to withdraw anything or live off of this for at least a year or more, so I can build up the account, but after that I will need to start paying bills with it, although I live simply so not too much ($400 to $500 a week).

Thanks!

sean

[Buckscoder]

Pax.

Where did you get the myth that trading is no science? It is what you make out of it. If you gamble, it’s gambling. If you use a scientific approach, it’s trading with a scientific approach. To me it’s gambling if somebody has no reliable analysis, risk or money management.

Sure you can’t have any warranty. You also can’t have a warranty that if you drive in the streets with a car that you have no accident. It should be common sense however, that learning to drive gives better odds to survive. Testing a proper system over a period of say 2+ years with almost ALL known market states like trending, volatile, ranging, non volatile, random, etc. with say 200+ trades will give for sure a much better picture regarding the odds than way fewer trades and/or way less time. ANY testing below that is more or less gambling. Proper trading is a statistics business and statistics gain in quality with more sample data, not less.

[paxgaea]

At no point did I say that trading is not a science. I said it is not a hard science. Trading is a step further removed from hard science than Economics is, and Economics is not a hard science, such as pure mathematics, etc. You are reading what you want into my posts, because you seem to want to believe that you can shrug off what I’m saying as just another noob who will get burned by the market. And I’m not saying you’re wrong on that point, time will tell. But if you look carefully at what I have said, it is not what you are attributing to me. In fact, I’ve already stated that I am working at two of your three pillars, risk management and money management, and I’m interesting in learning more about the third, analysis, but over time. And one point of disagreement, in the science of Statistics, you can actually have too much sample data.

I do appreciate the willingness to discuss.

sean

[Buckscoder]

At no point did I say that trading is not a science. I said it is not a hard science. Trading is a step further removed from hard science than Economics is, and Economics is not a hard science, such as pure mathematics, etc. You are reading what you want into my posts, because you seem to want to believe that you can shrug off what I’m saying as just another noob who will get burned by the market. And I’m not saying you’re wrong on that point, time will tell. But if you look carefully at what I have said, it is not what you are attributing to me. In fact, I’ve already stated that I am working at two of your three pillars, risk management and money management, and I’m interesting in learning more about the third, analysis, but over time. And one point of disagreement, in the science of Statistics, you can actually have too much sample data.

I do appreciate the willingness to discuss.

sean

I really am pretty bored to be frank to discuss nonsense with trolls who play the victim role if somebody shakes their funny illusions with hard logic and facts. That makes them bad traders anyways. Plus bad discutants. I read what I see. For me there is no hard or soft science, but just science or not. Seperating science in hard and soft is utter nonsense already. Not your invention, I know. Utter nonsense nevertheless. You know what? If you want, blow your account! If blowing it one time is not enough, do it again and again! That’s probably something what people must do if they are unwilling to learn. You have been warned and that’s it. Good luck!

[leandar]

Gambling is not science but trading is science,

10 years before i deposited $400 in local stock market broker, there was many Retired old men trading together with their pension fund i was only one young there (Now i am Old) , one guy operating a computer for all of them they tell BUY BUY ZEETELE then guy buy that stocks …

I didn’t have any experience but i asked him show me the chart let me Analise old market data. nobody was using charts there, they were “gambling” in “trading”.

Depends upon our point of view Everything is gambling.

When i started reading about FX trading in babypips school there was one interesting part that proved trading is science that was Fibonacci retrace and percentages.

Fibonacci number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

None of any currency or stocks cant move too far from MA, There is limit.

[Nikitafx]

None of any currency or stocks cant move too far from MA, There is limit.

That is because the MAs are late by one candle and keep doing the best fit line as the candle progresses.

I will never forget the day the market fell by 1000 pips in 4 hours two years ago.

I was there watching with mouth wide open and I was trading MAs back than.

You can trade MAs as areas of support and resistance, bounce off etc.

But to read MAs like MA cross overs to trade is very very risky and the returns on the long run is hard to say.

Especially when we have emotions into play.

[leandar]

That is because the MAs are late by one candle and keep doing the best fit line as the candle progresses.

I will never forget the day the market fell by 1000 pips in 4 hours two years ago.

I was there watching with mouth wide open and I was trading MAs back than.

You can trade MAs as areas of support and resistance, bounce off etc.

But to read MAs like MA cross overs to trade is very very risky and the returns on the long run is hard to say.

Especially when we have emotions into play.

I will never forget the day the market fell by 1000 pips in 4 hours two years ago.

Historian Jacques Barzun termed science “a faith as fanatical as any in history”

Next time we can expect 2000 pips in 2 hours, market volume is changing every second, growing world business and population, look gold monthly chart that changed lot.

Probability is part of science we are not GOD, we can expect a limited range from real one (expect double from previous data method), i can say this is the time to change SL from BE because volume changed, second one how to recover previews loss from next trade? it all related to winning ratio. If you loss 30 pips then you have to make 30+ pips to recover.

Using maths in trades is not difficult but nobody use it.

[Fxmall]

Nice to know the holy grail is in the wings, sure wish it will get here soon enough. I do have a query though, will currency specific strategies work on gold and other metals since most of the metals tend to come with a emotive tang to the mix?
Anyone…

[TheRealChrisA]

I like what your doing here

[leandar]

@Fxmall

Nice to know the holy grail is in the wings, sure wish it will get here soon enough. I do have a query though, will currency specific strategies work on gold and other metals since most of the metals tend to come with a emotive tang to the mix?
Anyone…

Gold strategy is “buy n hold in dip” but currency is “buy and sell in range”

Here what is the different between currency and gold.

EU

GOLD

[dpaterso]

Good morning.

Are you still ‘at it’ leandar??? LOL!!!

If I MAY contribute to your ‘Holy Grail’ and Gold: just a warning (maybe not to you but to others). Be aware of the fact that Gold DOES correct and normally when it corrects it does so VIOLENTLY. What I’m saying is to be careful if you’re buying on dips and adding to a position on those dips when using leverage.

Regards,

Dale.

[leandar]

Good morning.

Are you still ‘at it’ leandar??? LOL!!!

If I MAY contribute to your ‘Holy Grail’ and Gold: just a warning (maybe not to you but to others). Be aware of the fact that Gold DOES correct and normally when it corrects it does so VIOLENTLY. What I’m saying is to be careful if you’re buying on dips and adding to a position on those dips when using [B]leverage[/B].

Regards,

Dale.

Important in gold trading. Thank you.