Hi ToJas… no insult taken… this experiment is not aimed at the brokers, just FX as a viable income.
My hypothesis is that chance dictates market direction and set at a fixed level (2:3 RtR), a trader should be at break-even or close to it?
I am currently profitably scalping but would like to put less screen time in, so have been trading the higher time frame charts (with crap results).
I have found that for newbie’s picking market direction and an exit point (volatility) prior to entry is possibly the biggest issue. Hence the discussion on the distance of a SL. So to take the guess work out of direction I have substituted the dice as the traders decision process.
It could also be shown that a 30pip TP is to big to be effective against a 20pip SL. The week before I ran the same experiment on a smaller batch sample with a TSL and the results were roughly the same with far less dollars lost… I didn’t track the results.
The fact that you mention neutrality is where I would expect the results roughly to be, but the experiment is showing that this is far from the case.
I agree that the batch size of 30 trades I have used this week is to small to show anything conclusive, so I will continue it (after holidays) for a few weeks just to see where the data goes.
Had the price gone 1 - 10pips past my SL I would have gone yep… OK… But the fact it took out the stop by .00001 in one 5m (11.1pip) candle and then moved away an uninterrupted 55pip’s… Not buying it…
I have just bought the winning lotto ticket, staying inside so I don’t get hit by lightning…
You’ve made some good points about competition trading vs. teaching safe trading. Many thanks.
You’re obviously far more experienced and knowledgeable about trading than I am, and I’ve learned to value your input, so please don’t hold back. I am not a Nial Fuller groupie or a groupie of any other teacher. I recently thought I’d be ready to trade live, but more recently realized that I am not. After studying all the basics and the math and all the magical indicators (though some are useful), I realized that I need to learn price action, and that’s what I’m concentrating on, and Nial is obviously a price action guy. Over the last couple of years - I have very little time to do forex - I’ve studied, more or less, Kathy Lien, Sam Seiden, Nick Bencino, Dale Woods “the forex guy,” Casey Stubbs, etc. - not that I’m looking for someone to parrot, but for principles and techniques I could learn from each one. I’ve come across some whose attitudes are snotty, condescending, impatient, curt, exploitative, etc., and various combinations and permutations thereof; but I haven’t rejected them because of that. If I did, I’d have to reject the entire human race - except for myself, of course! I learn what I can and go on.
Now, please don’t hold back. I’m far past retirement age, and am still working. I’ve got a small sum I can invest in forex, and I’m on a roll to learn it as fast as I can and earn as fast as I can - yes, I’ll do risk management! - so I can earn something to have a retirement on. Now, if you will, please tell me what you think I should know about Nial Fuller so I could avoid some pitfalls. Don’t hold back - about Nial or anyone or anything else. Also, if you have some aces up your sleeve about good teachers you could recommend with lots of FREE lessons on their websites, or any other advice, fire away!
This might be correct but only if you had zero spread…As I’ve indicated in my previous post, whenever shorting a pair you must add the spread to your SL level… So, unless you have zero spread, in theory (and under normal market conditions), your stop will always be triggered at a price point BELOW your SL level (SL level minus spread). In other words, when in a short position under normal trading conditions, market price does not need to equal or ever move beyond your SL level to take you out of a trade .
In your case for example (assuming no price and spread manipulation), your SL @ 0.04793 with a 2 pip spread would have been triggered at [B]0.04773[/B], with a 1 pip spread at [B]0.04783[/B], 0 at 0.[B]04793[/B] (exactly your SL level).
Hence I’ve made the point - while agreeing that the higher market price on your platform may point to broker shenanigans - that unless your spread was anything less than 0.5 pips, your stop would still have been triggered even if the high of the candle on your platform was 0.04788 as opposed to 0.04794 - due to the fact that your SL @ 0.04793 would have been positioned just 0.5 pips away from the high of 0.04788.
So in a nutshell, if at the time your spread was less than 0.5 pips then yes, you may have good reason to feel aggrieved as your loss may be attributed to the higher market price on your broker’s platform. But if your spread was greater than 0.5 pips then the difference in high price on your broker’s platform in this particular instance compared to say, Oanda’s, is of no consequence…
Lol, haven’t we all … (and importantly from my own perspective, I know that on occasions I’ve come across that way, myself, partly through having Asperger’s syndrome and being insensitive, partly through not being nearly as well-suited to forum-posting as you’d very reasonably expect given my post-count here, and partly through not always taking the care I should … but I digress :8: ).
I’m not familiar enough with his work (by comparison with that of other authors) to comment intelligently, Norm, but that’s “self-selected” in that I wasn’t impressed with the things I’ve seen. Personal opinion only, of course. But hearing that he was a big competition winner certainly doesn’t endear him to me, and increases my suspicion-level significantly for the reasons I mentioned above.
Here, on the other hand, I ought to be able to help you (being entirely a price action trader, myself, too).
It’s the “free” that makes it a little hard.
I can recommend several really good non-free sources in the form of books (from Amazon, or wherever - I don’t mean self-published “books” at inflated prices - just normal “book prices”, so let me know if those recommendations will help.
For “free” … there’s some information on the websites of Joe Ross (tradingeducators.com), Al Brooks, Bob Volman and Lance Beggs.
There’s a PDF available of a substantial chunk of one of Bob Volman’s books, from his site (it’s his “promotion”: he gives a big chunk of the book free hoping that it will give people enough of the flavour for some to buy it, but the “free sample” itself is genuinely valuable.
Lance Beggs has free information on his site.
More importantly, he has a huge (really, really huge) free PDF available, which he calls his “lost blogs posts” (strange name: I can’t quite remember the story behind it), which is pretty good. As I remember, you do have to supply an email address to get it, but he’s not a spammer and that’s perfectly safe to do.
There’s a little free information on Al Brooks’ website (his textbooks are excellent but really heavy going).
There’s a free PDF called “The Law of Charts” by Joe Ross which is more introductory but still good (it’s a great explanation of “1-2-3- formations” and “Ross Hooks”, both of which I regularly trade myself from fast charts and both of which regularly give me good profits) … you can download it here <— Note: this link directly downloads a 25-page PDF, it’s not just a link to a “page from which” you can download it.
There’s also Ross’s free “Traders Trick Entry” PDF here (again a direct-download link).
I’d suggest to you not to be put off price action information that may not immediately seem relevant to the kind of trading you do in terms of instruments or time-frames. For example, Bob Volman trades fast-moving forex from tick charts, but everything he teaches also applies to time-charts; Al Brooks trades index futures from 5-minute charts but everything he teaches also applies to forex charts, etc. etc. “Charts are charts”, and they’re mostly fractal anyway, so context isn’t always quite as relevant as it seems.
Anyway, the Lance Beggs “lost blog posts” PDF will certainly keep you busy.
Sorry not to have links at the moment for the other things I’ve mentioned, but I expect Google will produce them, anyway.
I recommend Lance Beggs as well, I occasionally comment on his twitter postings or reply to his emails and he always responds even though I haven’t paid for any of his courses.
Id like to also recommend tradeciety. Excellent free stuff on their website. I dont think they charge for anything. The knowledge they have and the videos they put out is really brilliant. I get the impression that they do it for the love of the game and because they really want to help other traders.
Thanks for that great list. I will definitely follow up. In fact, I’m printing out the information sections of this post and tacking it to my wall, and will also copy it to file.
If my “free” stipulation has caused you to hold back on any non-free sources, please don’t let that stop you; and yes, please do name those books. It’s just that I’ve learned to keep my defenses up so as not to spend all my forex money on books, courses, etc., and then have no money to trade with! But I’m willing to consider recommendations from traders I respect of which, I have noted, you are one. So, let it rip if anything else comes to mind.
Merry Christmas, Santa, and have a Happy New Year!
Norm
Well, what that tells me he has going for him is the ability to trade with extreme risk, an emphasis on profit-maximisation, and almost no regard at all for money-management; and honestly those are all strong negatives, for myself. I know my perspective probably sounds unusual or even a bit weird, but seriously, knowing that he won a big competition [U]actively[/U] puts me off him, because of what it suggests to me about how and why he wants to try to promote himself as an “educator” and what sort of customers he wants to attract.
I suspect you may not know about the “pedigree” and antecedents of that site and its compiler, Norm? Call me biased (which I undoubtedly am) but I put no credibility at all in anything on that site. I do have reasons for this attitude. Generally, I deeply mistrust the site, and specifically, the few things I’ve read on that site have made me despair: appalling reviews of something I know to be good and ethical, and glowing reviews of things I know to be scams. I’d [I]almost[/I] go so far as to say that a good review there would instinctively put me off anything (because I suspect they may be paid-for reviews), but that would perhaps be slightly over-egging the pudding. It’s really important, in my opinion, to bear in mind that what’s online, on a commercial website, is there because the site’s owner wants it to be there, and his reasons for that may not always be apparent and one shouldn’t, perhaps, make too many otherwsie reasonable assumptions about them.
The specifically “price action” books that most helped me, and enabled me to trade profitably, were …
Understanding Price Action: Practical analysis of the 5-Minute Timeframe (Bob Volman - its contents apply also to other timeframes!)
Forex Price Action Scalping (also Bob Volman - not really so much about what I’d call “scalping”, myself)
[I]Naked Forex: High-Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators[/I] (Alex Nekritin & Walter Peters)
[I]Daytrading[/I] (Joe Ross) (this is an updated re-issue of an earlier book - “Trading by the Minute”, I think it was called)
[I]Trading The Ross Hook[/I] (Joe Ross) (I keep coming back to this one again and again, because it’s simple and logical and helpful, and the whole concept is based on one of the soundest principles of price action trading, namely “buy the dips in an uptrend and sell the rallies in a downtrend”)
Trading Price Action Trends - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)
[I]
Trading Price Action Trading Ranges - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader[/I] (Al Brooks)
[I]
Trading Price Action Reversals - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader[/I] (Al Brooks)
Al Brooks’ set of three textbooks is kind of badly written and very badly edited (especially considering who the publisher is), and pretty difficult to plough through, but their content’s excellent, so those are a kind of “mixed recommendation”: I think his online video course is actually much better and more helpful and more approachable than his textbooks (very unusually: the opposite is much more common!), but it’s also a [U]lot[/U] more expensive ($250, I think - but that’s still very good value, though, in my opinion, for about 37 hours of instructional videos): [B]https://brookstradingcourse.com/[/B]
Indeed … which is quite easily done; I hear you there!
Thank you for your recommended books. This list, as well, I’ll save to file.
You wrote, “I suspect you may not know about the “pedigree” and antecedents of that site and its compiler, Norm?” Are you referring the the site I found the Nial Fuller review on? If so, you’re right. I don’t know them. Care to clue me in in summary form?
I think it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to run down another site in detail, using this forum to do so (let me put it this way: if I owned this forum, I probably wouldn’t want what I’d say about that site on the board), but I’ll dig out a link or two and send you a private message over the next day or so, Norm.
