I’m trading barely an hour every 1 to 2 weeks now.
My first real round of trading after I bumped up my exposure, I lost a good portion of my funds. Not using rules and trading out of anger. I made like 50 trades in well under an hour. I go short price goes long and hits stop, I immediately went back in long for price to go short, hit stop and turn around again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually raising my positions out of anger with each trade.
Just Last night I had a few minutes to trade. I now have my rules with me whenever I decide to trade. Checked some pairs on the 5-15 TF and found a good situation with some activity. I went long but price petered out at 3pips profit. I’m happy, first profit trade in over 30 trades. Price is showing me that it has more to go. I set another buy stop a little further up in price. Price touched my buy stop then recedes to my stop loss for a loss of 11 pips. After that activity slows down. I was tired and didn’t want to wait for another oppurtunity.
Should I count last night as a loser since I now trade like this, a couple of trades every week or so?
My losses are still 3-4 times the size of my profits due to tight stops, so in the long run I guess I’m a loser. I don’t think I’ve seen more than 2 or 3 pips profit on a position since I began trading for “real”. My stops are usually 10-20 pips. Hardly worth the risk it seems.
I am getting better at getting out or taking profit sooner I guess, but when things turn around, my stop gets hit before I can even bring up a screen to close a position.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with going back to the school of pips and demo accounts. Maybe you need to rethink your strategies, test it on a demo account, treat it like real money, don’t go suicidal.
I do good on demo. Nothing amazing, but profitable. It’s like a switch. I even have trades going on demo right now while I’m live. The demo trades do good, or at least better than 50%. But I don’t watch them, I put on wide stops and let them go with the trend. Maybe a few hours, maybe days. Usually under a week though. I wish I could swap performance between live and demo.
Live I have to have things complete when I leave the computer.
I’ll probably be back to full demo soon anyway. I’ve lost the majority of my $5k account (almost in one night) and it will be a few years before I can do it again.
you said it, you use tight stops on live V.S wide ones on demo. you are not sticking with your plan.
good luck with the demo, if you decide to go live again why don’t you trade micro lots, thats what i have now. so if you loose you don’t loose that much but you’d gain the experience of a live account.
My live account started with 200$ micro lots.
Yes, on live I’m a big chicken to risk anything as far as stop losses go. My demo trades are set it and forget it, but in live, and especially longer term trades, I like to put in more planning and effort before opening a position any longer than a few minutes. But I rarely have the time for the research, so in live I’m only doing minute trades (I guess you could call them), based on what is going on no longer than the past hour or so.
I think it’s hard to be successful when you only trade once a week or so. Each trading session is like starting all over again.
That�s a good one, follow your own rules, that�s how we all have to trade. But I don�t still understand is why you are not using the SL? For me works good, what bad experience you got with it, because for me it the best nest to the TP
I think you need to put the same amount of time and effort into your trades on demo and live. you might want to consider stopping live trading until you master it on demo, and treating the demo as real money.
For your time issue, try to learn how to do long term trades, its gonna need more research!
So it sounds like you have plan A for demo account and you follow it and are profitable. But for the live account you don’t follow plan A. You might not even have a plan for the live account. Is this even remotely true?
The first thing you need to do is to adjust the size of your position so that you can use the same size stops you use in the demo trading in terms of pips, but have it mean a comfortable amount of money.
In other words, if you are using 50 pip SL in demo, use a 50 pip SL live, but size your position accordingly. If you have $1000 in your account and want to risk no more than 2% ($20) per trade, then that trade would use a lot of 4,000 – not any of this standard lot 100,000 B.S. You may need to change brokers to be able to do this, but I think most will let you do multiples of 1,000 these days.
You would then change your lot size as your account grows or shrinks – I change it to keep to 2% of the account on every single trade, but a lot of people don’t re-calculate that often, instead figuring 2% at the beginning of each day, week, or month.
i am tremendously sorry for what u experienced, but it seems to be an uber example of what is so common !
u were prob trading during a period of little activity, and the banks traders, being bored, had a bit of fun with you.
to set TWO stops during that period is the greatest invitation to a trader to “rape and pillage” that can possibly happen — in the future, simply DONT DO IT !
years ago i traded much later into the night than i do now, and i ran into a bank trader who dealt in one currency, which i traded a lot — during the nite we would continuously trade against each other, but finally he/she realized how new i was and began TEACHING ME how to trade, by WAITING before moving, or moving the price to where it was going to go and then coming back to my price to allow me to enter.
what he/she was teaching me was how to quickly analyze the situation and make a profit and to this day i havent a clue as to who they were.
BUT THE LESSONS REMAINED !
enjoy and trade well
mp
[B][I]Within the great hall at Elfinore stands a wondrous coffer, precisely four cubits square and securely latched against the outside world. Inside that repository, shut away from impertinent eyes, abides many an intriquing trading secret garnered from around the world and over the ages !
As a child, i used to watch from the darkness as the secrets were debated and annotated by the elders. No one there held a single thought of my presence – BUT I KNOW WHERE THEY HID THE KEY !![/I][/B]
I hope there is a misunderstanding here. I set a buy/sell stop/limit to trigger my entry as opposed to opening an order on the spot. This is one of my main rules.
years ago i traded much later into the night than i do now, and i ran into a bank trader who dealt in one currency, which i traded a lot — during the nite we would continuously trade against each other, but finally he/she realized how new i was and began TEACHING ME how to trade, by WAITING before moving, or moving the price to where it was going to go and then coming back to my price to allow me to enter.
what he/she was teaching me was how to quickly analyze the situation and make a profit and to this day i havent a clue as to who they were.
BUT THE LESSONS REMAINED !
So is that what happens in the off hours? You could literally be trading against one person?
enjoy and trade well
mp
[B][I]Within the great hall at Elfinore stands a wondrous coffer, precisely four cubits square and securely latched against the outside world. Inside that repository, shut away from impertinent eyes, abides many an intriquing trading secret garnered from around the world and over the ages !
As a child, i used to watch from the darkness as the secrets were debated and annotated by the elders. No one there held a single thought of my presence – BUT I KNOW WHERE THEY HID THE KEY !![/I][/B]
So the broker took advantage of me or could it be another trader? That was one of my most useful rules I had and has kept me out of trades that I didn’t need to be in. I know thats a rule others use as well - entering trades with stops and limits. I don’t know that I could enter stop/limit trades manually. I could see myself getting endlessly requoted if I went to enter a position manually.
Hi have been trading demo for quite a few years. Jump into a real account and loss my equity. Trying a system found on the Internet. The system did not work Realize that I need to find something else. Never found something concrete. Suddenly in the past few months I saw something which has turn my trading completely around. I trade with two EMA’s, knowing how to draw a perfect trendline and most important what I have experienced over the last two months when we have a RETRACEMENT and WHERE the MARKET is going to go. This was my most valuable experience at the moment.
