I would have preferred 3289 entry, but lets see. Also I don’t think this market will yield 125, there seems to be a huge amount of fear, causing people to keep to the sidelines, lower volume, less movement, but then again that is why we speculate.
The Ever Gittin Ready For Lunch VIPER
One more, Yuppie, 132.23 short, something to look at but maybe not trade
The Ever Gone To Lunch Now VIPER
Judging from what I am seeing we would be looking to short it at that level because two days ago the market broke below it, then yesterday it retested that level but couldn’t penetrate it. On the hourly chart, we tested it twice today and it held each time, so it’s likely that level will hold again and we can catch a small move. If I shorted at that level, I would be looking at 131.85 for a target.
Looking at the 5-minute chart, it tested that level a bunch of times so to me that is extra confirmation that this level is important. I would put a stop at 10 pips above that level and if I got stopped out, I would want to get long and ride the breakout (or get stopped out as the market reverses from the false breakout).
Well done 細路. It may not hit that level, but we do not chase, also the other assumption is a breakout, so there is that. I would not flip on this, too many unanswered market questions, it might break higher for 18 or so pips then nosedive back to the mean.
The Ever 老師 VIPER
I guess I am learning something after all 
The yuppie did hit that level and triggered my limit order in my demo account. Let’s see what happens now.
This is where it gets Hairy.
The Ever Scaly VIPER
I decided to flip - I figured worst case scenario is that I lose virtual money and learn a lesson 
Ended up losing 7 pips on that flip. But I made it up with a range trade on EURUSD as it bounced off the daily high, double topped, and then ran back down for 8 pip gain. I got stopped out as I was trailing my stop down with the move down to protect profits.
My last open position is AUD/USD which is a bearish trend trade off the hourly chart.
So far, I think I like trading off the 5-minute chart the best. The moves are smaller, but I can probably get more trades in during my 3-hour trading window once I start trading live. That gives me 36 bars of chart time to watch how the price moves and I can always set targets and stops and let my trades run overnight.
I’ll walk you through a little bit of my thought processes and things I saw as a beginning trader, since you remind me a bit of myself circa 2012.
Question 1: How do people actually trade the markets?
-There was a guy here back then who used to frequent the chatroom quite often. He traded almost purely on 4h charts and eye balling PA. He was DEADLY. He would call out his trades if you asked him with entry/tp/sl. Sometimes he would move his SL but as a 4hr chart trader, he would get TP or the trade would definitely be in his favor within the next day. Very impressive.
-There was one who would basically pyramid his trades through weeks and months. He said the secret was in breakouts and that they are one of the most reliable indicators in the market. If you’re a breakout trader, you put yourself in a position to capture huge spikes (heavy price move in a short time) as well as huge HTF(higher time frame) momentum changes (heavy price moves in a long time).
-There was one who scalped reversals. He said retracements are one of the surest things to trade in the market. Why? When done correctly, you always know exactly where your stop is, and risk is supreme. People who are new frequently ask things like ‘how do I know where to put my stop?’ the answer? When your analysis proves that you’re wrong. It sounds easy, and it really can be. If you’re trading a retracement off a fib, you stop is at the 0 (or 100 depending on how you use it)
-And of course, there’s a guy who trades heavy heavy on the fundamentals. He trades with TA just to get the timing right, but otherwise never tunes his chart lower than D1. Boy you are in for a ride if you pile on a position riding 1.16 to 1.19. There isn’t a need to go too much into detail here but this guy really knows his stuff when it comes to economics, politics, and markets (fx, equities,metals).
The question you need to answer at some point in your career is: what kind of trader are you? Questions that might help you answer this question are things like what your lifestyle is like, how many hours a day you can/want to trade, how you can handle a long term trade, if you can stand staring at a position that is losing (but not wrong) and do nothing, and what kind of edge you really have. I spend a long time developing a scalping system, only to realize later that my lifestyle didn’t really suit it. It works decent (in theory), but would require me to be up at 2-6 in the morning to capture the really great trades. I just can’t do that, for a lot of reasons.
Your style of trade and your edge are the two most unique and powerful tools you have as a trader. You need to know what they are.
I gotta run, but i’ll shoot over another post later today for you really chew on. Consider this the intro
It was one of those Bizarre runs this pair does from time to time, no news, and no chatter, just movement, anywho, it may just settle back down, I have made money shorting this action in the past, since there was no fundamental reason for it, and I hit another high water mark for the year, so I am a bit defensive, and took off my cowboy hat.
The Ever Cautious VIPER
When I started trading, I became the ‘why’ kid again. The curious one. The slight skeptic. I didn’t really care so much about WHY something worked as I did wonder HOW OFTEN something worked. And how did you know? Why is 1.1640 a support but 1.1510 not? Why is this line a major support but that one is minor? How far back do can I go to get R/S lines? Which time frame should I be looking at?
Practically, here are questions and problems I have about your approach.
“Establish a market bias on the daily chart”. How to define this, and what a “trend” is and isn’t turns out to be one of the most argued topics in TA trading. So, I won’t debate it with you, although it is absolutely the crux of your trading. Lets just move on.
Lets say that your Eur/Usd bias is short. Which means that according to your strategy, even on up days, you are only trading short. If you are shorting within a single bar that is a full bull bar (and looking at any D1 chart will show plenty of these), I would bet that you are most likely losing on those days. Even if I could guarantee you that the day would be bull, AT BEST you would be flat the whole day, or scalping with poor R:R (note that there is nothing wrong with trading poor R:R). So to me, you are sidelining yourself out of the game for something like 33-40% of the days in that trend. Which means that something like 2 days out of the 5 trade-able days your trade matrix is something like the following:
losing(likely)
breaking even(likely)
managing a small profit (less likely)
profiting as much as you would on a down day (not likely)
Which means that on days that the market DOES go down, you have very little room for error. You absolutely must catch the major move of the day to both recoup losses and make your gains. As a day trader, compounding is everything and every little pip and mistake is costing you a lot down the road. That just sounds like a recipe for a melt down.
To be fair, it’s very reasonable to think that if you wanted to be a full time trader and flat on most EoDs, you need to trade a small TF to set up and capture the move. I agree with you on that 100%. But I think if your planned holding period is on the scale of hours, it makes no sense to trade on the bias of a daily chart. You are sitting out too many days of the trend due to small reversals
That certainly is me Also the question of why is this move important in the trend and not this move?
If you have followed my thread for a bit you will see that I shift gears often and fast. Right now I feel like I am lost in the wilderness and am just bouncing around in circles and not making any forward progress. At this point, I feel torn between swing trading and getting flat at the end of the week versus day trading and being flat at the end of the day. Both approaches appeal to me.
Swing trading is appealing because I can do my analysis on Sunday before the market open and take all the time I want. I can catch bigger moves. However, I also take on more risk so in the beginning I would likely be limited to one active trade.
Day trading is appealing because I am in and out of trades faster. I see the results sooner. I can get into positions faster. Stop losses are tighter. However, the moves are smaller. When I start trading, I will only have three hours a day in front of the charts.
The next logical question in my mind is why not both? Why not setup swing trades on Sunday using the daily chart for the overall big picture and key structure levels, the 4 hour chart for directional bias and the one hour chart for entries, targets, and stop losses? Then Mon-Thu why not spend those three hours per day day trading using the 1 hour chart for the overall big picture and key structure levels, the 15 minute chart for directional bias, and the 5 minute chart for entries, stops, and targets?
All of this also does nothing to decide how to enter trades. Do I enter trades just using support and resistance levels, ie, buying as price enters support and selling as it enters resistance? Do I use Fibonacci to set profit targets? Do I look to trade harmonic patterns? Actually I can answer that one with a very loud and resounding no. I hate trading harmonic patterns because I don’t see them very easily.
Or do I enter based on a moving average crossover? Do I use RSI, Stochastic, or MACD to enter trades? Do I use 1 or 2 ATR for stops or targets? Do I insist on only 2:1 risk reward ratios or do I try to up my win percentage and take a lower RR ratio. Or do I only take higher RR ratios so I can loss more often?
Every single piece of advice on this says to go with what works for you. How do we figure that out? Should I just go into a demo account and trade it taking screenshots of all my trades and then go back and look for common elements? Should I put together a plan, spend 100-150 hours backtesting it with historical data to generate stats, and then find out it doesn’t work?
Go with your edge. How the heck do I know what my edge is or if I even have one? Should I be keeping a detailed trading journal at this point even though I am not trading a set plan or strategy?
I think I am slowly moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence at this point. A month ago, I didn’t even have those questions on my mind. So I am taking these questions as a sign of progress.
I am going to be on a business trip all next week starting Monday and getting back Thursday. During that time I hope to be able to carve out enough time to finish reading “One Good Trade” and “The Playbook” (I am reading these two books simultaneously). My hope is that by reading these books I can start to put together my own trading ideas and start to formulate a better strategy than what I have shared here so far.
Don’t over think it buddy. As a wise man once posted on Babypips
">"Becoming a forex trader is not an instant process—it’s an evolution. Beginners to
forex do not even know what they need to know. Trades are put on without a plan, and beginning trades are really trial-and-error experiments. Winning trades occur but don’t seem repeatable. The beginning forex trader experiences the market but doesn’t leverage his knowledge. At this early stage, the exposure to quick and large losses usually wipes out the trader within the first month of trading.
The second stage of the evolution of a forex trader is the discovery of indicators and
technical analysis. At this stage, the trader tends to use too many indicators. The trading results are not much better, but this stage is characterized by hunting trades. The trader overtrades due to a desire to put on trades as often as possible.
The final stage in the evolution of a forex trader occurs when the trader has sharpened his tools and has acquired an ability to let the market come to him. This is achieved when knowledge and experience combine. While the biblical adage that there is no wisdom without pain still rings true, much of the pain that new traders experience in unnecessary losses can be avoided. The best traders in the world lose perhaps 40 percent of the time but are still able to become profitable." (Abe Cofnas)
There are millions of trading possibilities - but only one you.
You are your Trading Edge - you just don’t know it yet.
The more you trade and try different things & think - the more closer your goal will become.
You will also become the most frustrated you will ever be!
I have accumulated a few good Trading quotes but my favourite is:
As you get better at trading it gets easier. Don’t wish trading was easier - get better
If it was easy everyone would be doing it!
Stick with - you will work it out
Ok, here comes another lengthy analysis…
On the daily chart, it looks like we reverse from a bearish trend to a bullish trend on 12-20-2016. The overall trend moves up 596 pips over 130 days. However, trading on the daily chart means that positions are open too long for my liking so I will just draw the trend in and drop down to a 4-hour chart. I also marked the mean price for that period at 1.06288.
On the 4-hour chart I see that the mean is acting as a strong level. When price action is below the mean, it comes up and bounces off the mean several times before breaking through to the upside and repeating for a total of 6 times during this period.
Here is the same time period on the 1 hour chart (well, as much as TradingView will show me)
Here are the key things I am seeing:
In the above chart, the blue line is the daily trend, pink is the 4 hour trend, and red is the 1 hour trend. So now I see that getting the overall picture from a higher time frame should tell me which moves will be the largest. For example, when the daily chart is bullish, the bullish moves on the 1 hour chart are larger than the bearish moves.
@TradeViper, did I learn the intended lesson here or did I miss something?
Ok, here is another chart at trying to apply what I have learned so far…
For the last several days price on EUR/USD has been bouncing back and forth between 1.1660 and 1.1590. Those zones are represented as the colored boxes on the chart. These boxes were drawn from the high and close of the bullish candles and the low and close of the bearish candles on the daily chart.
The 4 hour chart shows we are currently in a bearish move down towards the daily support zone. On the hourly chart, price action looks like it is weakening (lower highs) but still testing the resistance zone. My play here in demo is to set a limit sell at 16.532 (bottom of the resistance zone) with a stop at 1.16650 (top of the zone) and a target at 1.16060 which is the top of the support zone.
Risk reward is 4:1 if I get filled. If price stops me out, then put my hands under my butt as there isn’t really enough structure to make a long counter-trend play. If price moves into support zone without filling my limit order, then watch for a potential short as the support should become resistance. This would be with the 4 hour trend but I would need price to close below 1.15724 before I can act on this play.
It’s a fairly simple plan but it seems intelligent to me.
Tonight’s practice session yielded one trade. I saw AUD/USD trading in a range on the hourly chart so I entered a sell limit order at the top of the range. Price action came up and filled the order. Now the trade is playing out. The trade is offering a risk reward ratio greater than 10:1. Risk is 7 pip and reward is 81 pips.
The range trading strategy seems to be working for me, so I will keep trading that in my demo. I suppose at some point I should start gathering some statistics on these trades.
yes - but you’ll know when “It’s time…”
I’m going to share something that is not very popular around these parts. It’s a thought process. You can already see dissent actually. People who say to not make the market “too complicated” or that things “will come to you”. Or to “practice”. I used to think these were people who were guarding their secrets. Now I believe these people just didn’t know what they were talking about. If I’m right about you (and so far I have been), you ask yourself many of the same questions I did. I certainly shyed away from any pattern that I deemed “too subjective”. I want my trading controlled. I want to know what I’m getting myself into.
What exactly am I supposed to practice? There’s no difference between being in the market and being out of the market, in the context that I am not big enough to move the market. Trading is not a complete skill in the sense that as good as you are, you should never expect to be 100%, or anything close to that (if you R:R is close to 1:1). So how could “practice” make you better over time? Shouldn’t I have a predetermined, mechanical trigger to initiate a trade? As it turns out, I can pretty easily find the perfect trigger to enter a swing when I have the flexibility to change time frames. It might be a resistance on the 4hr, an ABC on the 5 min, a pin bar on the 1hr, a wedge, flag, indicator divergence, etc etc. And I don’t need “practice” to tell me or show me that.
At the end of the day, there are plenty of legitimate questions to ask of the market, but there are valid questions and there are lazy questions.
We both were looking at this chart. At the time I captured this, I was long, and still am, while you are/were short. We both knew we were in a bit of an “action zone” that price would make a decision on.
I’m going to end slightly “cryptic” if you will - an explanation and one of those cute little quotes that traders love to make a motto of. Again, this isn’t to wow or ooo, it’s just to get your head thinking a little if you want to take a look into what I consider to be true technical analysis.
I used an indicator to make this call. It’s not CCI, volume, or any candle pattern. It has nothing to do with the lines above price marked in green. I could have made this call on the 5 minute chart, the 1hr chart, or the daily chart. One of the key components to this indicator was that the peak was on Tuesday. My call specifically was that the high at the time of ~1.1660 would be broken within the next few days. I knew that with roughly 82-87% accuracy. Numbers are numbers, and imo you can never have enough of them.
There is so much information about the markets that you have the power to know that you choose not to know. Why ask of the market when you can know.
Til tomorrow.
I’m not here to be popular, I’m here to learn how to trade profitably. 
Exactly my struggle - I may execute a trade flawlessly and still lose, so there is no feedback on whether my skills are actually improving or not.
Glad to see you keep your word
I’ve been trying to figure out what indicator you are using, but I just can’t figure it out. I want to say it is a momentum based indicator based on the -100 to 100 range.
I’ll never shy away from new ideas.
Open your mind. I didn’t use any indicator that is available with a stock version of MT4, or any other platform you would use to trade. Perhaps I should clarify and tell you that I use the word “indicator” quite loosely compared to most. To me, an indicator is anything that can reliably tell you something useful about the market.
I’ll give you a nudge. You’re a programmer by trade. You can export data or download it. You have power.
I’ll be around monitoring this thread, and if you have questions you can always ping me here or message me. But I’ve said what I wanted to say. Good luck
