Hi, i ve lost all my account in 2 weeks. I want to ask what i did wrong? I usually trade EURUSD on 5 min chart using pivot points , heikin ashi.
I buy usually MS1 or S1 line or S2 with a target DPV (daily pivot points) and i sell by MR1, or R1 and so on with the same target. My indicator of pivots is correct - it s from THV -system and i get the information which levels will be for the trading day at 8:00 am local vienna time or at 7:00 london time. The previous line is become resistance when it was support etc. sometimes it works just fine, but on the long term it s actually a losing strategy. i usually place stop 10 pips.
So i worked with this strategy quite a lot. But the thing is, it doesn t work. Because every single trade is just loser. When i buy, it starts to go down strong and when i sell it starts to go higher like crazy.
I lost my 500€ account in just 2 weeks. I played 0,5 lot or even mini lot 0,1.
Also i bought a book Bob Volman “Understanding price action”.
And i want to add also: if i recognize the trend , then it s too late. Because if i jump for a trend its the end of the trend - so it s just impossible to predict when the trend begins on the market. When i jump in the market hoping that the trend will continue it starting to reverse right away! It s just crazy. And i lose lose and lose. So i really start to lose interest for forex because it s impossible to win here.
please can you help me to find another strategy or forex is just like a lottery and it s not for me so better forget?
Welcome to the forum.
Sorry to hear about your account. I’m sure you’re by no means alone.
I think you may have made the first four of the five very common mistakes mentioned here?
I’m guessing, a little, in suggesting that … but (for example) it isn’t really possible to blow an account in 2 weeks without having used inappropriate position-sizes, etc. I’d strongly advise you not to expose more than a maximum of 1% of your account-funds to risk at a time, for at least your first year.
I think the Bob Volman book you mentioned is excellent, and I found it very helpful indeed when I first read it, but it seems to have nothing at all do with the way you’ve actually been trading?
I suspect the fact that the method you’re using has no edge is a big part of your problem.
And surely you should be trading on a demo account, rather than on a real-money one?
- book of Volman is in English, but my mother language is russian and i know german better as english, so it s hard for reading really for me . No translation avaliable
- i traded 0.05 lot also (1% risk) with a 10- pips stop and found that it brings nothing. No sence such a small position.
- i traded demo also and also been losing. I tried everything: i tried THV4- system with an Ishimoku cloud - no good, i tried Alligator with 3 EMAs - strategy - no good. i tried GOG-tool (center of gravity), Scalp.inc - strategy with TMA-channels. I tried divergences. No good. I tried pin bar price action. No good! I tried also the RSI, MACD, other indicators. But, NOTHING works. Daily pivots are maybe the one good thing - but it comes out that it doesn t work as well. I tried the real money, because i dont think the demo makes sence. I dont know what to do, frankly speaking. Better to exit from the game probably. I dont understand which system do you use for profitable trading and how i can find instructions.
If my wife will find out that i just lost 500€ on **** forex she will just kill me. She has told me that this market is just like casino. Also friends in Austria told me the same.
it is like a casino - “when treated like one”
I’m sure most people would take $500 to the Casino for a night out. I wouldn’t expect to make much trading using that same balance. The fact your trading a 5M chart really doesn’t look very attractive either; the lower the TF the higher the noise you will encounter.
As a new starter I would suggest scrapping all strategies that ‘teach’ you a fixed technique and focus on learning the basics of the market.
It makes no sense learning a strategy when you don’t understand why it ‘should’ work.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Forex-trading is difficult, slow, time-consuming and has a big learning-curve. It’s when people try just to “copy something that ‘works’,” that most of the “accidents” arise.
Which fixed technique and which basics? I learned everything. Please speak preciser
My broker had a webinar last week. There is the following setup: on M1 chart are Heikin Ashi candles. You look first to M5 chart to define what kind of trend is. For example, it is current uptrend in Dax. They have a zigzag indicator on M5, ok? Next. They wait of a small green heikin ashi candle in M1 chart (or dodji) and buy. This live trading webinar durated 2,5 hours is on youtube online now. But there was 5 or 10 losing trades and only 2-3 winning trades. So what kind of setups or “basics” we are talking about? If a try the same strategy it s a risk that i will burn 100€ in 2 hours cause every trade is losing. So my question is: what strategy do you use? Because i can t study, can t sleep , cant normal live without this market. The game is so addictive that people want to win back the money they lost. In internet there are tons of information and strategies. Engulfing strategy for M5 chart for example. You buy or sell after engulfing candle. He promised on youtube it s proven profitable strategy. In case the people write in comments it s a weak one! And frankly speaking, i doubt that something works . I don t need 100% working strategy. I need at least 51% and can t find such normal system.
My friend is a chess champion and tells me that only few people understand how in works - because on the opposite everybody would play this. But it s impossible. If i won on forex, somebody has lost. This is what it is
If there was a guarantee winning system then the people with such algorithmes come and take all $5,3 trillion from the others. That s why nothing works.
And now your talking about analyzing 1M candles - this is just delirious.
Do you wonder why your broker suggests this? Think about it, the lower the TF the higher the number of trades. What does this mean…this means your broker receives multiples of the spread you pay every time you enter a trade.
As for being precise about what to learn - that’s a pointless question.
Trading is a huge area of study, basics first and work your way up.
One thing I can say for sure though is that by focusing on what color a candle is, what pattern they might make or other mysterious magical illusion they present is not the way forward. Do you think the people who earn good money from trading say to their colleagues “oh look a 1M green candle with a one third wick just happened, im going to short 50 Lots”.
And here is a 50% winning system for free.
Heads you buy, tails you sell.
No, my broker doesn t have spread. The spread is 0 or 0.2 pips during London session. He takes commission 6.0€./ 1 lot of course. So if i trade 0.03 (3 microlots), then it s not so much profit for the broker.
But i don t think M1 is crazy. I asked you a question, which strategy do you use? Can you answer with not just bla-bla?
Good luck being handed everything in life which others have worked relentlessly for… you my friend need to take a step back and learn to take advice.
Less than 5% wins day trading consistently they can make huge , its tough why and how where you find one would come to teach
Yes; I understand the method.
It’s based on a sound, underlying principle, and if you did the same thing persistently and methodically and repeatedly on M60/M15 charts, instead of on M5/M1 charts, you [U]might[/U] have a reasonable chance of some [I]collective[/I] profit over 300 trades.
But there are (at least) three problems with what you’re saying, there …
(i) You’re looking only a statistically insignifcant number of trades (it isn’t possible to tell from 5-10 losing trades and 2-3 winning trades what the win-rate is: you need a few hundred trades to measure it);
(ii) When you do this with M5/M1 charts (instead of something longer/slower) there’s a lot of what people call “noise” in the charts, and this randomises the results, making it both (a) not so good, and (b) difficult to measure whether or not it ‘works’;
(iii) The Dax is actually one of the [U]least[/U] suitable instruments for trading this kind of system.
This opinion typically belongs to people who are losing money.
Most people who are making a living think the opposite.
Is there perhaps something for you to learn from that?
You don’t, at all.
You’re confusing win-rates with expectancy, because at the moment you haven’t yet learned the basics (in spite of your protestations to the contrary and your self-belief that you have.)
What matters is that you win more, collectively, on your winning trades than you lose, collectively, on your losing ones.
If you slowly and carefully read a couple of beginners’ books like Michael Harris’s [I]Profitability & Systematic Trading[/I] or Van K. [I]Tharp’s Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom[/I], you’ll find explanations of why [I]most[/I] aspiring/beginning traders are [I]very[/I] likely to find it easier to make profits from systems with much [B][U]lower[/U][/B] win-rates than 50%.
Both those books are available online in PDF format, and your English is [I][U]clearly[/U][/I] adequate to read and understand them without Russian or German translations.
If you’re already determined that “nothing works”, then clearly those of us who are making our livings this way clearly can’t help you, can we?
But I have a question for you, anyway …
If that’s what you think about algorithms and “why they can’t work”, then why do leading financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse First Boston pay people large, 6-figure salaries to research and develop them?
Could it [I]possibly[/I] be that some of your beliefs are mistaken??? 
I wish you good luck, and I hope you’ll excuse my mentioning that in my opinion, a fundamental change of attitude and belief will be more helpful to you than answers to the questions you’re currently asking. I’m not trying to offend you, but the combination of “asking for help” and “announcing that nothing works” really isn’t an easy one to respond to [I][U]helpfully[/U][/I].
I know it’s not what you want to hear, and I’m sorry about that, but Jezzode is right, there.
Well , the banks like these you mentioned sure don t trade currencies! And salaries for analytics will be paid for research of course, but in other areas: property buying in London or commercial property. That is how the banks making money, they invest in property. But they don t play 1 lot of EURUSD for sure!
Why do you reccomend quite expensive books? The first one costs about 100€.
Can you suggest any trade system? Why you can not tell which trading system do you use personally???
I would suggest the main reason is because most consistently profitable traders are not trading 100% mechanical systems. They usually trade with a greater or lesser amount of [I]personal [/I]discretion concerning entry, exit, position size etc based on [I]personal [/I]experience. Traders will also interpret price movements on multiple TFs before deciding whether or not to act on certain signals, also on what time of day, what day of the week, what data releases, Central Bank meetings, etc are imminent and so on. This kind of trading method would be impossible to transfer as a “product” to someone else.
Trading systems which are possible to trade purely mechanically without personal input are usually EAs and BOTs.
I trade mainly on short TFs and I would say that it is [U][I]extremely [/I][/U]difficult to be consistent. You have to learn [I]only [/I]to trade the very best signals, which means you can sit for hours waiting for one to occur, and then your timing is [I]extremely [/I]critical to get into the trade quickly enough for it to generate a profit. I would say that, as a rule, if you are making more than 2-5 trades per day on 5 min TFs then you will probably lose everything you make and more…
Sorry - I recommended them without knowing the price. :8:
I agree that 100 Euro is very expensive for a book.
I read them both a few years ago when I was still at high school, and my father bought them for me, anyway. They just happen to be good ones which will help you. There may be other equivalents that are less expensive, but I don’t know them.
As I mentioned above, you might find PDF copies of them online.
Yes, easily, but that isn’t the point.
You’re going to think I’m being rude or dismissive (and I very much want to avoid that, because it isn’t my intention at all) but the reality is that if someone gives you a system that’s profitable for them, like one of the many described in one of the books I recommended, you won’t make profits with it anyway, because doing that requires [I]skills, and lots of education and experience[/I], and you don’t have those yet. It [B]isn’t[/B] a criticism of you, in any way: it’s just an observation. There’s nothing wrong with it - it’s where we all started. Nobody was born knowing how to do this stuff. The (very few) survivors are always the ones who came to terms with that, respected it, and [I]stopped looking for short-cuts[/I].
It’s said that in online trading, 95% of people fail and only 5% succeed (some people say the figures are 98% and 2%) - I don’t know whether that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me, at all. One thing I can tell you fairly confidently is that the 95% (or 98%) includes [U]all[/U] the people who looked for short-cuts.
As I was explaining above, in a post you’ve perhaps not seen, it’s when people try to bypass the necessary stages of education and patience and discpline and practice and just “copy something that ‘works’,” that all the “accidents” happen.
There isn’t anything that I (or anyone else here, or anyone else in another forum) can do to change that.
That’s the way it [U]is[/U].
It’s [I]objective[/I] and [I]factual[/I].
If it helps you, in my opinion these are the mistakes that you need to learn to avoid.
It isn’t easy. These five things helped me to do it, myself …
(i) Reading well-recommended, well-established, mainstream, orthodox trading textbooks, published by well-recommended, well-established, mainstream, orthodox publishers (i.e. “peer-reviewed” and “quality controlled”) and [B][U]avoiding[/U][/B] internet “information” of the type you’ve been talking about, above, when you mentioned a “system” that actually has three [B]big[/B] problems with it, which [U]you lack the experience to understand[/U];
(ii) Getting in thousands of hours of screen-time after understanding all the basics of probability and statistics that any trader has to learn, to become profitable (so that my first 3 years’ experience was genuinely 3 years’ experience rather than the same one month’s experience repeated 36 times over!);
(iii) Not trading with real money until I’d proven, repeatedly and exhaustively and exhaustingly, on demo accounts, that I could avoid all five of those classic mistakes linked to just above;
(iv) Remaining aware, at all times, that in a field of endeavour with a huge turnover of participants very few of whom ever achieve profitability, most of the readily available “information”, and especially the apparent consensuses of opinion online and in the “trading service industry”, are always far more likely to be misguided than helpful;
(v) Having expert tuition available (from a successful family member in the trade - unfortunately not duplicable by most people).
It took me many years (and I don’t imagine that you start off with all the advantages I very luckily had).
I can, but it won’t help you, I’m afraid. Mostly for the reasons Manxx has explained, just above. 
I [I][U]will[/U][/I], anyway (just so you don’t imagine that I’m being unnecessarily secretive about it!): I trade futures from constant-volume bars, using price-action techniques of which the underlying basis is (a) to enter with-the-trend positions right after retracements, and (b) to identify and trade potential intraday reversals efficiently, and © to jump into localised breakouts (normally [I]after[/I] their boundary has been retested once by prices) in the hope of sometimes catching the beginning of a small or even not-so-small intraday trend. It’s all about risk management, really. Now you’ll perhaps (very reasonably) ask how and where I learned to do all that, and the answer is - more or less - “start here”. It’s a long, slow process. It took me many years. This isn’t helpful to you, I know, because you just want to “copy something that ‘works’,” and you want immediate results.
I probably can’t really help you with that.
(And neither can anyone else, probably. I’d be careful, if I were you, with the people who say they can, because they’ll typically have some incentive for what they’re telling you.)
No, i pay attention what you say. But why i can t trade a 100€ or 200€ account live with 0.03? (3 microlots). I think it s much more better as demo. I will be ready to lose 100€ anyway.
You reccommended online course to purchase or what? I don t understand.
I also traded break-outs and looked for a intraday reversals. Sometimes i have won. Should i publish here my month statement? You will see that sometimes i have won 100-150€ for a trade. I read that the volume is not so important on forex , as the forex provides a lot of liquidity. I dont trade asia session. I trade 8:00am - 23:00 Vienna local time. Also i exit when news comes and i ignore lunch time 11:00-14:00 london time.
No; you can do that. (I don’t really disagree with you: I also think that a small live account is better than a demo, if you can afford it). You’ll need to use a broker that has almost infinite granularity of position-size.
Trading 3 microlots (of EUR/USD, for example) will represent a pip value of $0.30 per pip. If you have a stop-loss of (let’s say) 20 pips, that means that your risk-exposure will be $6.00 per trade. You would want that $6 to represent no more than 1% of your account (I hope!), so you’d need a $600 account, to do that.
With a [B]€200[/B] account (that’s about $225, isn’t it?) I suggest you should trade [I][U]one[/U][/I] micro-lot, not three.
Just my opinion.
No; I wouldn’t, really. (The Al Brooks video course I mentioned in another post, after a list of books, definitely isn’t for complete beginners. It’s for later, [U]maybe[/U] - only [I]if[/I] and [I]after[/I] you decide that you want to trade the way he teaches.)
That sounds good, but scary, with a €500 account.
With a €500 account, for myself, I would have a maximum risk-exposure of €5 per trade, and I wouldn’t expect any €100-150 wins with that, so I suspect your position-sizing is huge in proportion to your account.
That all sounds very sensible (ignoring 12.00-2.00 London time, rather than 11.00-2.00, for “lunch” is ok, too).
If you’re trading the “majors”, during the currencies’ regular trading hours, then you don’t need to worry about liquidity, I agree.
(I just happen to trade futures because I like to use constant-volume bars rather than “timed” bars, but that has nothing to do with the rest of the conversation at all, and it isn’t a suggestion!).
Of cource the position size was huge - 400:1 leverage i was able to trade 1.0 lot with a 500€- account. I wanted to accelerate to 1000-2000€ to play with normal adequate risk later. But i ve lost instead.
Yeah, I’d say that is the most difficult trading experiment that I know of, start with a small live and resist the temptation to over leverage.
The thinking is always later, I’ll build it up quickly and then play by the book later.
I know because I’ve done it countless times - the only thing that I can offer is that it actually becomes possible after a time, but you need absolute concentration, you have to hit the exit when you have a win just as quickly as when the number is minus.
I’d say that your post reflects perhaps the enemy of a small a/c, i.e. I want the trade to go into even more profit to build up the balance, then when it hits negative hit the exit - the absolute opposite, I have found, works better - for a small a/c on short t/f - hit the exit in profit - no waiting for more.
The concentration has to be on immediate direction, as soon as you hit the button the trade has to be in profit - the key is to do this without chasing.
Forget everything such as let your winners run and cut your losers short, instead, take the profit and forget about what may or may not be left on the table.
Rule no.1 - a bird in your hand is worth ten in the bush - most often those 10 will fly away 