Hello,
(It’s Monday morning here 00h35 so I’m up to place orders).
I think the ‘register online’ that you’re talking about is for a demo account which, obviously, is not a bad thing to get started while you wait for your live account to be opened. Delta’s platform is proprietary and it does take some getting used to but once you’re ‘good’ with it I promise you that you’ll start wondering why everybody else doesn’t do it that way. There are one or two little ‘funnies’ with it but I’ll help you with those.
Now you know:
(I get philosophical when I’m tired)!!!
I, for one, have always said that this is the hardest way to make a living (at least of anything I know of or have ‘tackled’ in my forty three years).
AND IT IS!!!
There is ONE thing that I PERSONALLY will add to that statement from now on and that is this:
It’s AS HARD AS YOU WANT TO MAKE IT TO BE!!!
I’m not going to go into too much detail here but I was absolutely shocked this weekend when I finally finished ‘converting’ Wilder’s PROPER AND CORRECTLY CALCULATED ADX (Average Directional Index) into an ‘oscillator form’. I cannot even take credit for having the idea because someone actually posted an ADX in ‘oscillator form’ for MetaTrader on the ‘New Concepts’ thread and this is what sparked the idea. (I DO question the validity of that particular MetaTrader ADX Oscillator that was posted because from just looking at the code it’s NOT following Wilder’s calculations or smoothing methods and it’s not giving all the signals that you would get from ADX). I went through all of the different pairs to see the results and I was really shocked to see that with 90% of the pairs available to me for trading: this ADX Oscillator was ‘good’ for TENS OF THOUSANDS of pips over the past few months. People have lost money ‘left right and center’ on the Dow (including myself) over the past few months (trying to ‘call the bottom’ which ironically is what I TRIED to use ‘The Delta Phenomenon’ for). Had a person been using this ADX Oscillator: you’d not have lost even one single US cent!!! And ALL my ADX Oscillator is: Wilder’s 'stock standard as per ‘the book’ ADX indicator which forms part of his Directional Movement System or ‘DMS’. I picked three pairs to demonstrate (GBP/JPY, EUR/JPY, and USD/SEK and I’ve posted the charts on the ‘New Concepts’ thread) and JUST THOSE THREE, (and there are MANY MORE examples), using my ADX Oscillator i.e. Wilder’s ADX, your pip count COULD have been 35 702 and it was ‘good’ for 2 684 Dow points over this same period!!!
Now I’m NOT ‘punting’ my ADX Oscillator because, as I said, all it is is Wilder’s ADX being ‘presented’ in a different form.
The point of this message is this:
And it is a SHAMEFUL point to be making:
My son, who is now nine years old, or my daughter, who has just turned twelve, and who are both highly computer literate, could have done those trades!!! ALL those trades involved was placing stop orders at certain places when signalled to do so and THIS you only had to do over the course of this period a maximum of three, maybe four, times!!! That’s ALL that was required.
Now I’m not saying that’s ALL that’s needed to make money in this business. I mean: money management and stuff like that I don’t think I’d be able to explain to my children (well it would not mean anything to them let me put it that way) BUT I DO KNOW that they could have done those trades PURELY MECHANICALLY and those pips / points would have been the end result as of Friday nights close last week.
The reason this is an absolute CRYING shame is because I WAS NOT IN THOSE TRADES AND DID NOT SEE THEM COMING and there was NO excuse for this. No: I did not have ADX presented to me in ‘oscillator form’ at the time BUT I’ve had ‘New Concepts’ for well over eighteen months now and I believe I could recite the information in ‘the book’ BACKWARDS if called upon to do so. I should have seen those ADX / DMS trades coming using ADX / DMS without question. But I did not. Why? Because I just KNOW at the time that I was too busy TRADING!!! Sound strange??? It IS strange. But it’s true. The reason why letting my children do those trades would have worked is this: they would have BLINDLY, on my instructions as to what to look for, placed the orders, and then forgotten about them until they were required to place other orders from time to time when again signalled to do so. They would not have questioned the signals or tried to finesse the entries or determine that market direction or anything like that. Do you see my point here? The reason this business is so difficult is BECAUSE we (well I do anyway) add SOOOO much into the ‘mix’ until, at the end of the day, we can no longer ‘see the wood for the trees’. Don’t get me wrong: I think I’d have one HELL of time explaining ‘The Delta Phenomenon’ to them BUT I think of candlestick trading for instance. I’m almost sure that if I spent a whole lot of time showing them the most popular / basic patterns they would do better than I would AGAIN: simply because they would follow the patterns without question.
Now I’ll admit that MOST pairs have been trending strongly in one direction or another over the past few months and that made the above trades very easy. Having said THAT though: if you’d have asked me about this last week I’d have told you that the market has no direction and is ‘jumping around’. How many people do you think have not noticed that most of the pairs have been trending for the past few months???
Yes: there were times when the pairs were trading in a range before the now OBVIOUS trends and this would have made things more ‘tricky’ and maybe required a bit more skill BUT EVEN IF you just kept trading the ‘basic’ ADX / DMS system you’d have made at LEAST half of the pips I’ve quoted (you’d have gotten ‘chopped up’ during the ranging periods).
I know this is probably going to be seen as a very controversial post. I’m not trying to ‘belittle’ the many hours and years of work that successful traders have put into this business (I know I’ve done my fair share given the length of time I’ve been trading). But it scares me that after ALL this: when you ‘strip away’ the complications that we as human beings feel compelled to ‘throw in’ all of the time, it would certainly appear that in this business we really can be ‘our own worst enemies’. THAT is why it’s so difficult to make money. Take out ‘the human factor’ and it’s not that difficult!!!
I’ve know I’ve only ‘honed in’ on Wilder’s ADX / DMS here but the above would hold true for ANY of his trading systems although admittedly a little bit more insight and skill MAY have been required BUT ALL of them would have made fortunes if just followed blindly.
(Needless to say: I’ve placed ADX / DMS orders tonight MOST of which have already been executed while I’ve been typing this post and MOST of which are aleady in profit)!!!
Someone coined the phrase: ‘Analysis Paralysis’ on my ‘old’ thread (Parabolic SAR - that’s all!!!). BE CAREFUL of it!!! It CAN ‘bring you down’!!!
Regards,
Dale
(Now that I’ve TOTALLY ‘messed up your thread’):
FOR CRYING OUT ALOUD:
Anyone who knows where to get historical data from anything; stocks, indices, commodities, forex, anything!, give sverigesson a shout.