Hello all. I trade MT4 with limited success using Trendlines and bollingers bands. I was making almost as much $$$ by just looking at charts and buying and selling depending on obvious trends. My Q is are there any reliable websites out there that I can pay to join to get sent signals? As I am sure there are much smarter chart readers out there than me that must be selling there skills in this way. I have seen a few advertised but I am unsure as to there authenticity. Any thoughts welcome. Feel free to call me lazy but I just feel it would be smarter to pay someone to do this for me that knows what they are doing.
Simples - leave well alone.
Stick with it, drop those bollinger bands, stick to trendlines and price action, and I know I sound like a broken record but study the most enduring and most popular threads on this site, they are such for a very good reason.
That, for me, is your key statement. If you have an eye for that, if that is your natural style, then I would echo PPF’s comments and say stick with this. As you refine it an improve then you will find that it brings you consistent pips.
Quite apart from all the regular hesitations over paying someone else for signals, is that really a foundation for a trading future even if (and that is a pretty big if!) you were to find someone successful and reliable? Would you ever feel confident going full time on that, putting serious money behind that? If you put your eggs in that basket, then your signals provider quits/falls under a bus/disappears/loses their edge/whatever, what do you do? If you need to carry on working for someone else in a regular job because you don’t know whether your signals provider will still be there next month, then you really aren’t living the trader dream, imho.
My strong advice would be to build your own expertise and you need never worry about money again, you can trade on a laptop at any time from any location. Rely on someone else, and you are simply worrying about whether they stay on top of things.
ST
Here we go agreeing again! It’s just that you put it so much more eloquently than I do!
Lol I thought that (the agreeing again part, not the being more eloquent part (!)). You might, on occasion, admire my eloquence, but I admire your ability to tell someone something in one short paragraph that takes me three long ones to express! I gave up on ‘punchy’ years ago, but I very much like your ability to give no-nonsense, to-the-point advice that tells it how it is. I tend to cloud myself with waffle… this message being a case in point…
But it’s why I didn’t get very far in Local Goverment, doing things and getting straight to the point just didn’t wash, it freaked people out getting things done!
Hilarious, but with an alarming element - I actually worked in Whitehall for ten years, in Central Government, so perhaps any advancement I achieved was actually simply down to eloquent prose rather than any actual talent for the job…?!? Don’t answer that!!
I left as running my own business, and then this, appealed vastly more than the ongoing waffle-induced paralysis that we often encountered in Whitehall, in spite of working in an area that often required swift action and a no-nonsense approach. We obviously needed more PPF’s!!
Hah Hah, Yes Minister!
Right, sorry cushpill, bit of thread hogging there.
What do you think happened when you went live?
Were you not able to trade just as well?
Did market condition change?
Or just plain old getting too touchy about it?
I greatly appreciate your comments. I will just stick with it and maybe try and apply and really learn a couple of indicators to assist with just looking at charts and buying/selling from them. I don’t want to get silly with the application of indicators so which 2 would you both suggest? Then I will learn the hell out of them and then apply them and see if the results improve. Unsure what changed when I went live? Perhaps I became a bit more bearish in my trades and played it a bit safer. I would really love to make some sort of a career from this forex carry on so all your help is great. PS I made 56pips on EUR/USD today and it was very obvious looking at the charts so I will stick to that for the meantime. Regards Phil.
This really is a great trading method - http://forums.babypips.com/free-forex-trading-systems/21453-1-500-pips-per-month-method-vsa-sr-fibb-etc.html
From that I use the easiest and most reliable setups as per this thread - http://forums.babypips.com/free-forex-trading-systems/40119-15min-trend-continuation-strategy-vsa-easy-way.html
But I get the feeling you want to use an indicator because you kind of think you should, you don’t!, here’s a trade I took yesterday on the 1M chart! just using trendlines and chart patterns!
One really good tip I can give you is to take screenshots as a trading log, for me making a note of a trade and if it went right or wrong and all that is a waste of time, take a screenshot of it, it’s much more helpful, a picture speaks a thousand words, no? A trade log can get tedious, screenshots are easy.
I have an extensive screenshot trade logs and they are proving invaluable.
Yeah, You are correct I am mainly wanting to use indicators as most of the stuff I have read tells me I should. SO If I don’t use any what do you recommend I study? I like the thought of trading reading candlesticks and have seen a few people that do this well but I find it confusing. Again thanks for taking some time humouring this noob. Thanks Phil.
I think what gets confusing about candlesticks is that two similar patterns don’t produce the same results, you need to take into consideration the positioning of the setups, i.e. you need confluence and convergence which means setups at support and resistance areas.
I’ve put a link in the previous post of what I think you should study, obviously the thread is not presented as a course, but the information in there is as good as many.
You’re welcome.
Two points spring to mind, here:
Firstly, people often throw around the statistic that 95% of people fail at Forex. Personally I feel that that figure has gained its own momentum, now, rather than having been arrived at scientifically, but I don’t doubt that the majority do fail to trade Forex successfully over the long term, so: just because the majority of stuff you have read tells you that you should use indicators, don’t assume that you should. The majority is clearly not always right. In my experience, people tend to over-rely on indicators to compensate for a lack of confidence in what they are looking at. The best way to succeed in Forex is to detach yourself from the majority view and learn something that works. All the indications are that following the crowd in Forex means walking in the wrong direction… Personally, I barely use indicators, and I trade full time. The majority recommend indicators, and don’t succeed. So I am not saying that they never work, but I am saying that they are a side-issue compared with what you need to succeed, the stuff you really [I]need[/I].
Secondly, of course you find candlesticks confusing, it would be more surprising if it was all clear to you on day one. But it is worth the time invested - it works, it tells you what Price is doing [I]at that moment[/I], and once you have it cracked you have financial freedom cracked. They confused me in the beginning, now I trade them all the time and the data they offer leaps out. I have been trading under two years.
Thirdly (okay, I know I said two things but I’m a waffler, me) - if you really must have an indicator on your chart, I would experiment with using RSI, particularly the higher timeframes. If you see some divergence then it can give you further reasons to enter a trade. But I took it off mine after a while and my results didn’t change…
Make of all that what you will - that you are asking questions at this stage sets you apart from many!
ST