Alright, here is my story. I am a college student who is interested in day trading/scalping.
I have went through the Pips School, and have demoed for about 2 months.
Recently, I made the switch to live trading because I realized that I would risk way too much in a demo account being that it was not my real money on the line. Saying this, I opened an account with Oanda and funded it with $25. I understand that I will never make major movement with this size of an account, but that is not what I am looking for. I am simply looking at live trading and calculating my winning trades against my losing trades. So far, I have not been doing so well.
I have been trading with this live account for about two weeks, and it seems that every trade I have made has ended up being a losing one. I have read a ton of material, tried many strategies, back tested them and everything, but when it comes to applying them in real time, I always lose.
my advice is if you’re looking at indicators, then STOP.
indicators only cover up how price actually moves. Only use an indicator if it strips away layers and reveals something more about the market. (ex. I use a tick volume indicator because it helps me see when a candle is significant and when orders are piling up on either side of a candle)
dont use any indicators that you wouldn’t be able to program yourself, aka you know how it works perfectly and you know why it would work
and try to gain an understanding of what actually drives the market, aka order flow, who is buying, who is selling and then from that you can build a system
lastly an easy one is look at higher time frames, as I am also a college student I know you can’t always be watching the markets so a higher time frame gives you slower moves, and slower profits but once you have a proper system up and running (and by system I don’t mean MT4 expert advisors, I mean rules that you follow and a deeper understanding of the system) it doesn’t take up a lot of time.
Scalping and day trading are not easy, you really have to know what you are doing. Start with swing trading and learn how to trade using support/resistance and Price Action.
There is one virtue that is essential in FX: [B]Patience[/B]
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” he writes about the[B] “10,000-hour Rule”,[/B] he claims that greatness requires enormous time.
I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think you’ll find most successful traders have put in at least [B]10,000-hours [/B] sitting in the #2-seat before earning their captain’s bars.
So don’t be surprised if it takes you 2 to 5 years to become a competent trader, or learn to play a musical instrument, build a house or train to run a marathon.
