Hullo peeps! I’m a brand new, lilly-white, sprouting-his-first-root seedling, stumbling around still blind, newborn “miracle” into Forexland - WAAAHHHH! WAAHHHH!!
So anyway; I discovered forex in Nov 2011 and have been trading a demo since then. A few days ago after mixed success with the Monopoly money, I decided to take the plunge and ‘go live’: I lost £200 in about 3 days!
My goodness how that stings like a m*********r!! Every trade I made went the opposite direction after a few pips; I was being b**ch-slapped by the markets again and again - and with no job to back me up!!! BUT I felt convinced I could make it…somehow…
Then last evening the all the fog and panic was lifted away… I learned how successful traders consider anything below a 4 hour chart to be a small time frame, so I wrote in my book “FROM NOW ON, ONLY TRADE WITH THE 4HR AND ABOVE CHARTS!!” That was the single best piece of knowledge I have learned on my jouney so far. I have been struggling away with the 5min - 1hr charts because I thought that’s how beginners are supposed to do it!!!..So - for any noobs out there tearing great chunks of their hair out, kicking their cats and punching holes in doors: spend a couple of days USING ONLY THE 4 HOUR, DAILY AND WEEKLY TIME FRAME, don’t even look at anything below (APART FROM to get your optimal entry points!!), use micro lots and see how you go.
My eyes have been opened folks, I’m up 28 pips already and it’s only 07.30gmt.
Hmm, perhaps I’ve been a little hasty…s**t’s gone against me again today! But I just found this wonderful post and I think it totally consolidates what I have been trying to formulate in my mind for a trading plan but without much success, so thank you nikitafx!!!:35: and this is what I will be trying on monday morning! http://forums.babypips.com/newbie-island/39634-pure-price-action-dummies.html
I suppose if you look at it in retrospec to what you should learn from most people who mainly say risk only 2% of your account or loss where as you risked more than half of it that is the real boner.
Also the other boner you have is you are basing it off of 1 luck trade.
Generally everyone has a 50/50 chance of getting it right…
You will get a lot of those moments, too many to count by the time your a profitable trader!
Remember what you have learnt about timeframes is only one persons view, I think you can see this, it’s why you’ve put the poll up, it will be interesting to see the results.
Trading longer timeframes does not necessarily mean that you will find it easier to make a profit, it’s just that you need to apply a system that works on smaller timeframes to smaller timeframes and the same respectively for longer timeframes.
I trade a strategy that uses the 1hr, 15m, and 5m, I apply a different method on the 1hr, but I use it conjunction with the other two.
The daily TF is a different beast to the shorter TFs. I think the biggest difference is psychological. When I first started out, I thought the “pros” used the 1M TF and scalped all day. I mean, why else would professional traders sit at the computer all day? Hitting a string of losses would spoil your entire session.
On the daily TF, load up MT4 before the start of the new trading day, take your time to identify any setups, plug in your pending orders and you’re done. I found this style of trading much more preferable. If you use price action, I think the higher TFs provide more clean signals than the lower TFs, which can be influenced by traders doing something as simple as taking a break for lunch.
50/50 chance? really? if that was the case then the wouldn’t the charts be a totally random msishmash with no discernable patterns? you can give yourself a greater than evens odds by playing high probability setups, you just have to spot them; that’s how folks make $$$. I’m not basing it off a one luck trade, I’ve been doing my homework this morning and the overriding consensus from multiple sources seems to suggest that higher timeframe trading is more profitable - because you have a more concentrated opinion from many more people over a longer period in the higher TFs. Chaos and noise have been cut dramatically and you have a far more elavated viewpoint. Jeez! The s**t I’m learning today!!!
It seems to me as a relative newbie that there is a different strategy (and a range of timeframes) to suit different people - different psychologies/comfort zones etc. Just seems that if you are down in the 5 min time frame you don’t know the context in which you are operating.
It’s a very few approaches that do actually work, you can go on about psychology and what suits different personalities, and what time of day you trade and all that, but it’s generally just rhetoric, unless you are using the right kind of methods it dont matter Jack sht how good your psychology is, you will be pss*ng in the wind. You’ll be like you’re driving a Mini in a Formula 1 race, wasting your time, crashing and throwing good money after bad!!
I’m not sure I follow you: when you say “the probabilities only[I] line up better[/I] with…” - is that a technical term? I can’t quite grasp the concept of having a 50% chance, yet with the probabilities ‘lining up better’ if that phrase actually means ‘greater than 50% odds’…please explain further, I’m all for learning you know!
The very first time I tried forex I lost 70% of my account pretty quick, shut it down and like everybody else said ‘Forex is a loser!’ Haha, I didn’t even know enough to know I didn’t know anything! It’s been an interesting learning experience since then. Good luck.
