30 days into my Forex training, and what I have learnt

[Nickylikessss]

As the title suggests, I’m celebrating 1 month since my first decision to begin trading the Forex market and I would like to discuss what I have learnt.

I have learnt that you must stick to a system, no matter what you have been taught. You make a solid judgement that (statistically) favours for you. You follow this system and mindset with the highest integrity, and you only waver your system when it becomes useless, or you find a system that is an improvement.

Why do I post this here?

Because the school of Pipsology, the society of BabyPips and of good Forex traders is centered around trading meticulously, with strong mental discipline. And yet, here in the forums, we have a whole forum dedicated to Expert Advisors, of which 9 posts of 10 are commercial Expert Advisors, that are trading blindly for us by a system of which we have no clue about the strategy behind it! And most annoyingly of all, they’re sold to us in this Click Here You Idiot (if you don’t know what that is, I advise you Google that phrase there and click the first link) sales letter format, which rambles a load of biased statements that generally compromises of lies, backtests, and a pretty legal CFTC RULE 4.41 disclaimer so they don’t get sued.

Basically summarizing what I have learnt, after purchasing two EAs and watching one make a single profitable trades of 9 pips in two weeks and another make 246 pips only to blow 261 in a single trade, I could have made more money on my demo account that I have done nothing with than $237 worth of “robotic” oversold, salad-dressed dog lashings, and I have only Clickbank to thank for their 60-day moneyback policy for saving me an otherwise costly mistake.

Upon that, I have made 441 pips in the last two days trading, with 3 winners out of 4, simply by trading high timescale trends with shorter timescaled trends and candlestick patterns, remercier les dieux for basic logic and a discipline not to exit when times looked tough.

What do I have to say for guys that have just started the Forex market? Well, firstly congratulations for entering into a world of opportunity and possible success, but turn your little innocent eyes away from the get-rich-quick devil of Forex and look towards people who are making 100 pips a day solidly after a couple year’s work and learning. I’ve not seen a single EA brag even on their gimmick-laced sites about that.

[harmudge]

This is my very first post to the forum after joining a couple of weeks back, I have been mainly reading and working through the school of Pips-Ology…I take my hat of to you “good sir” for I feel that was a true and honest posting there.

I have been tempted myself with all the bot’s claims etc and have been reading various posts regards them good and bad. The good ones I take with a pinch of salt along with looking to see how many posts the poster has posted previously, a fair bit of the time it is maybe only 2-3…I take this as being some affiliate trying there hand at free marketing.
I also check google to see how many pages have been associated with the title, quite often it is too many…to me…over-hyped = con/rip-off.

I must admit though I came across a system a couple of weeks back that I confess…I did purchase…but haven’t tested properly (currently on holiday/vacation), but I must thank for bringing me into this world of FX trading & Spreadbetting.
I had never even heard of any of this previously.
I done a brief check on this forum and others and was unable to find anything on it, maybe it is here or else where but as I said the search was brief. I also checked google, there was only really a few entries in google that were properly associated with the systems homepage.

That said I am on the same lines as yourself Nickylikessss, I believe that if you are going to risk cash and try and make a living or at least a bit extra cash…you got to learn the in’s and out’s.

So thanks from one complete newbie to a relatively newbie for saying exactly how it is.

[Retekeger]

Hello everyone,

I also decided to give a try to automated trading on the forex markets. I read TONS of ‘innocent’, ‘unbiased’ EA reviews and came to the conclusion that 99% is pure bull**** (pardon my french). Most of the commercial robots are either not working or just breaking even in the long term but there are also hyped and working ones. We must bear in mind that all the ‘XXX$ to XXXXXX$ in weeks’ statements are one-of-its-kind examples so if we want to win a lot in very short time we better buy a lottery ticket.
The only more or less trustworthy sites to prove the efficiency of commercial robots are the ones with live forward results on live and demo accounts. Until now, I found two of them:
pipcop and 4xproject
I also belive that a high-rated commercial robot like FAPT could make some good money for many people but nowadays there are simply too many people who use it on an hourly basis and so its efficiency is steadily decreasing.
I will set up a LIVE account with two or three robots that promise much and I put them on a test. I also plan to give you live stats about it.
Now, my plan:
MT4 platform, $500 micro account, leverage 1:100
Bots: Ivybot, Forex Boomerang and Forex Humanoid. No FAPT or MegaDroid because of the above.
Please help to find an appropriate broker for me. My choice until now is Alpari UK but I find the spreads a bit too high.

You may ask:

1. why I’m doing it? Good question. I want to make some money just like you and since I give it a try, I want to share information about these bots with you beginners. We all will see the results after some weeks.
2. Where I got the money from? Easy - from others… thanks to my moderately good poker skills.

[Naynay]

I came to more or less the same conclusion myself. There is no doubt that trading with EAs can be profitable… but there is so much garbage and lies out there that you’ll need to have some basic forex trading experience, and a heck of a lot of time and energy to put into finding out how you want to go about it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… the majority of EAs are junk. If you are going to trade with a black-box system, you will STILL need to know how it trades – in case you need to intervene (which is entirely possible) – and the only way you are going to be able to do that is either through keen observation on demo, or by decompiling the EA and reading the code to find out it’s triggers… Again, this is time consuming and requires a forex education as well as an understanding of MQL4.

Once you have found EAs that you’d like to trade, you then have to outfit your portfolio with the EA(s) you intend to use. Knowing how they trade is CRITICAL, and unfortunately, since demo and live accounts are different – the only way to know how well they go is by running them live in the end. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t run them on demo either… but you need to keep a keen eye on them.

Some EAs have their own trading styles, and differing strategies and risk tolerances… not to mention differing trading times. Essentially you will want to trade as much as possible, but in such a way that no one trade can wipe you out and that your outlay of risk is balanced between bots.

What you should be aiming for is a profitability factor of about 5% to 10% per month on average, with very little chance of one trade ever wiping you out entirely. Even if you get 5% per months you are doing very well. A month in drawdown may be withstandable if your system has been regularly doing well per month, but continued heavy losses to your account should signal that something is not right with it.
If you can get a bigger ROI than 10% on your equity per month, then you have a very good system and my hat goes off to you.

Much like the existance of multiple timeframes in forex, you need to keep track of multiple timeframes to measure the profitability of your system. How much on average does it make per day? per week? per month? – taking all the losses it makes into account. Done like this you will form a better picture of what to expect.

Also talking to many other users of your system will give you some insider info on how well your broker stacks up against other ones, and what kinds of trades other people are getting.