I’ve saw the Bugatti. Actually thought it was thunder on a sunny day until I looked in my rear view mirror. Not entirely sure I see the point of a Bugatti in Glasgow. But hey, if you’ve got nothing better to do with your millions, why the hell not? Was thinking of getting one myself, but where do the golf clubs go??
Oh, you can have a perfect strategy. It’s not that a strat must give you 100% profit trades. If your strategy is perfect suited for your risk tolerance and your goals, why would it not be perfect? Losers are what in business you would have as expenses. There is almost no profitable business without expenses. Look at it that way and your losses are not that tearing down issue anymore. See every loss as investment. Either into your knowledge or for future profits. Your journey will take time and patience. Like if you are a farmer. In spring you bring out the seeds. In summer/autumn you can earn the wheat. Let it grow. Take losers and analyze them. Try to minimize it. But you will always have losers, as every farmer has to bring out seed the next year again.
Hello The Home Of Golf. Good for you that you learned your lesson now. It was not free for you but compared to some other people you might have gotten away cheap.
Good luck!
ITtrader
Thanks for coming back. As I think I mentioned in my original post, I opened a MICRO account with FXCM. When you trade 1 lot of EUR/USD, ( which is the pair I tend to favour ) each pip is worth 10 cents. So to make $500 a month it would take a profit of 5000 pips per month and however admirable that ambition is, it’s a lot I would suspect for seasoned pro’s nevermind newbs like us. Certainly you could trade bigger lots, thus increasing the profits, but the flip side is you’re also increasing your potential losses.
I also have a demo account which I am doing really well in. Again though, trouble with demo account is that you don’t break into a cold sweat when you’re losing, or snatch at profits when you’re winning. I believe that even people who have a good grasp of FX, still run demo accounts to test out strategies and plans, so you are perfectly correct to run a demo, it’s just that the mindset is a little different when your hard earned is at stake.
One of the mistakes I made, that again I mentioned in my original post, was that I paid no attention to economic news. I’d sit and look at some charts, see the price going up and simply hit buy. Didn’t matter to me if the ECB were due to announce the the outlook for the European economy was pretty poor. Sure enough, I’d hit ‘BUY’, ECB would make announcement and the price would fall and I couldn’t understand why.
So here is a little strategy I have been working on in my demo and also broke my promise not to touch my real account, but has so far worked not too bad. FXCM has a sister site called Daily FX+, which you get free access to when you open an account with FXCM. It gives you all the financial news plus the timetable of economic news and data that is due to be released for the coming week. ( There are loads of these sites, you don’t need to use the one’s I’ve mentioned. ) On a Sunday afternoon I print off this timetable and simply trade the news, nothing else, I am no longer trying to break the world record for the amount of trades made in a single day !! I wait til the news is released, watch for a definite price movement and then trade it. Sure, I’m probably missing the start of the move as I don’t get involved til I’m sure it’s going a certain direction, but I’m winning more than I’m losing on it.
Real account is back up to $168 from $150 using this plan. Also going through school of pipsology on babypips and looking at charts and drawing lines all over the place. It’s NOT a hobby like golf where you can turn up on a Sunday and have a laugh with the boys. You need to put the effort in. I’ve printed off things from sites about Moving Averages, Bollinger bands, Elliot Waves, Fibonacci and anything FX. Thing is I’m finding I enjoy doing this so that’s a big help. ( However my wife has claimed she’s went from being a golf widow to a Forex widow ).
As for the maths part I’m not sure you need to be too wrapped up in it. As far as I can tell so far, it’s more about recognising patterns as I believe a lot of FX patterns, outside of economic news releases, are self prophetising. The pattern says the price is likely to go one way, so the majority of the time it does. But it’s all about learning and survival right now. Keep the account alive, keep learning, that’s all I’m concentrating on right now.
I’m sorry I don’t have skype, but I’d love to keep in touch. It would be great to talk to other beginners to bounce ideas around. Maybe we should start a blog, The Beginner Forexer’s Diary LOL !! At least we always have this forum. Talk to you soon. HoG
[B]“One of the mistakes I made, that again I mentioned in my original post, was that I paid no attention to economic news. I’d sit and look at some charts, see the price going up and simply hit buy. Didn’t matter to me if the ECB were due to announce the the outlook for the European economy was pretty poor. Sure enough, I’d hit ‘BUY’, ECB would make announcement and the price would fall and I couldn’t understand why.”[/B]
Yeap, same here HoG, i hear you exactly on point,
I have learned YESTERDAY of certain reports to watch, and they are most important to Forex retailers,
Non-Farm Payroll Report–monthly, 1st Friday of the month, 8:30 EST
Consumer confidence Report–monthly, Last Tuesday of the month, 10:00am EST
Retail sales Report, monthly, around the 13th, (still looking into this) 8:00am EST
I also learned the Swiss franc ( CHF ) and Gold work together,
So, keep this in mind, USD/CHF will FALL if Gold is rising, just a heads up.
Keep rockin it, and great profits to all this week, ( finger tappin, waiting for the opening signal)
Hey MoneyNVRsleeps.
Thanks for the info on the reports timetable. It’s one of the great advantages of a site like this that we get to talk to, and help each other. Opening not too far away now. Wondering where the Euro is going this week ?? Probably won’t trade tonight though. Best of luck for the week ahead to all.
For me it was making the first few trades on a new account, changing trade/lot sizes, so as to determine the ratio of pips to disappearing monies. A shortcut to having to calculate pip-value from the leverage, lot sizing and account size & risk. Sort of testing the waters. If I closed it too soon, the perception would get messed by the spread (invisible) so I had to place another one…
See its well xplained in school of pipsology. I had the entire school copy pasted into word and printed (A5 on A4, 4 pages per sheet), but just didn’t want to figure it out, until I realized I’m getting nowhere. Its in the very first chapters. I would have found one of the great posts by Shr1k or I on the issue, but I have to go out hustling, maybe at night? maybe someone will come along and xplain it out, but you better aks it as a straight question: “If my account is *,000 and I want to risk only 0.5% per trade, what lot size to use, how is prifit from the trade calculated?” If no-one gets it for you then I will in the evening.
Errr… i stressed out like hell when i lose money in DEMO account, will it kill me when i get to actual account?
So, which broker will take a mini account. FXCM seems to just want you to open a mini practice account to entice you into opening a standard account. I am a bit Leary about FXCM at this point. Why couldn’t a want to be trader practice on free live charts before even dealing with a broker. FX Street has free online real charts with tool boxes. That’s my idea. I think I’ll try that first. In the mean time is there another broker anyone would recommend for mini accounts besides FXCM.
Hey Pingback
I opened my micro account with FXCM. Just do a search for FXCM Micro. Honest truth though is that I don’t know if any one broker is a whole lot better or worse than any other. I picked FXCM because I saw an ad on bloomberg tv for them. Problem with my account is me making bad trades, not the service FXCM provide.
HoG
Viciel
As the old saying goes, " What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger." If I could give you any advice from my short time trading it would be this. DON’T sit in front of the computer and try to make a million trades per day. Learn about moving averages, elliot waves and the technicals and PLAN your trades. I’ve learned that over trading REALLY IS the road to ruin. But the single most important piece of advice I would give anyone now is PUT YOUR STOP LOSSES ON IMMEDIATELY AS YOU ENTER A TRADE. Better take a small loss as spending hours staring at a BIG loss on the computer screen begging God to make it better. He won’t !! He’s to busy organising other stuff to answer the prayers of FX newbies like us.
HoG
@Home of golf
I’ve been demo trading for several months and it does really2 good(i’ll just be frank so someone can asses me truthfully) first few months i can double my demo account in like 2 days, but after i learn a lot of forex thingy my judgement become clouded and i don’t do any progress my account now will look like (5,000 opening balance --> 3,800; 2300; 4000; 5200; 4800; and so on and so forth), my demo account balance is just around there and i think if i can’t succeed in demo account, going live is just suicide…
viciel
Problem with a demo account is that you really don’t need to learn a single thing. Since it is imaginary money you can sit and hit buttons all day long if you feel like it. If you lose the money it doesn’t matter because it’s not real money. But the proper way to use a demo is to first of all LEARN to use indicators ( Elliott waves, moving averages ) then test them out.
Imagine you’ve learned about indicators and then you go back to your demo. Yourecognise a pattern and according to what you’ve learned you reckon the price should go a certain way so you place a trade according to what you’ve learned. Don’t just hit buy because it " looks like " it might go up. If your trade works out it’s because you worked out what was likely to happen. If it goes against you find out what went wrong. Was your analysis wrong? Did some sort of news break that changed the game?
I enjoyed going with a live account but I am the first to admit I wasn’t ready for it. If I do end up losing my first account it will be a lesson learned. However I will come back better prepared.
Well I am still doing a lot of reading about Forex. I want to learn as much as I can before doing any trading. My plan for Forex is to increase my savings, not to get rich over night. I like the idea of better returns compared to just playing the stock market and not day trading. I could put more in an account, but I figure if I can’t make money with a small account then I probably won’t with a bigger account. I like FXCM’s platform, they have a lot of useful tools with there account. But at the moment I’ll need to go small, and FXCM just keeps trying to get me to put more money in an account, now that would be O.K. but at the moment I don’t have that much for a bigger account. I do have other accounts in stocks, but I don’t feel like moving that money to FXCM. I may do better with Forex, but I wouldn’t know unless I actually tried it. If I thought or knew I could profit from Forex compared to just playing the stock market then it would be a worth while investment, but I wouldn’t know unless I actually tried it. FXCM wants larger accounts so they may be out of the question for now.
OMG, it wasn’t just me then!
I am/was a typical not going to read the manual kinda guy and wiped out every first deposit with every forex broker I used.
Then I attended a forex seminar, for the free food wine and thought i wouldn’t teach me much, then I was offered the chance to attend some classes after I made a deposit with a broker.
This seriously was the best move I have made…I am currently up quite a lot from my initial deposit and trading with a bit more sense now.
I suppose I have taken the transition from gambler to novice trader 
After searching a lot of trading system i found several that worked for me, but i always failed because i’m too fearfull to wait for the candle to finish and just closed the market when my order give me “-300” points, frustated, going on another pair, doing the same exact mistake, tired, watch movies, get back several hours later to find out that every analysis i make is right and each going +500 points in my direction…
Just sharing my experience that you actually need to have confidence in trading, it might be one aspects that keep blowing your account +.+
Ps: i’m using mt4 so yeah 500 points means 50 pips just so no one is confused
Viciel,
Just on your PS note about points/ pips,
I woke up one morning to see that my trade was “-200”. I was like “OMG WHAT HEPPENED TO MY STOPLOSS?!”, then it dawned on me…-£200? “OMG MY ACCOUNT IS RUINED!”…then it really dawned on me… -20 pips… oh thats not so bad… hah.
Most dramatic 30 seconds of my FX life… so far.
Haha, because i’ve been confused in another forum before some respectable author with more than 500 pages of reply and one of the post said “his strat make 1000 pips a week ussualy by wednesday” i did my math —> 10,000 points??? The market didn’t even move that much for a full week in one pair! And it turns out he mean 1000 point so well 100 pips, which is still a lot… For me atleast haha
Only if you can’t make your rent/mortgage payment after you lose it. Otherwise, nope. 