Martingale or No Martingale

Nice. Gotta know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em :slight_smile:

:cool:

Tassie - as in small cup?

Yes - poker and fx are very similar - poker is very time consuming though.

Tassie - as in from Tasmania

One problem for fx over Poker. fx is taxable ā€¦ Damn :slight_smile:

Need to make a profit first :slight_smile:

Very true. I am in profit. Been on real money since November. Nothing too much to brag about though. Hardly enough to worry my taxman, but I have gone 6 months without losing, so am happy. $2k up while still learning is enough for me to know forex is the place for me :slight_smile: Just got to keep the discipline and patience. it is crazy market out there at the moment. Would love to find normal conditions again :slight_smile:

Poker is taxable too.

With the adding of positions or Martingale. Both will cause high drawdown in your account.

There are exceptions, but if you have a good system to start with, you do not need to add positions.

It can be very hard to come to terms with, but if you are in a losing trade, YOU ALREADY HAVE LOST THAT MONEY. Waiting to see what will happen or adding positions is gambling. There is a big difference between Gambling and Trading.

The difference between gambling and trading is definately huge. Certainly agree. Problem is that so many people think they are trading when, in fact, they are gambling due to the nature of their actions while trading :slight_smile:

Invest time an effort in your education, and it pays you back handsomely :slight_smile:

Poker isnā€™t taxable in the uk fortunately.

As for averaging into a position - Iā€™ve now limited my Zulu trade signals to one trade per currency so thereā€™s no way can they open multiples and average into a position - and if I see then doing so then Iā€™ll close my single trade - for me averaging is a sign that things are going wrong and more often than not itā€™s best to get out.

Betty Boo

Well Iā€™m quite handsome so hopefully itā€™ll pay me back :slight_smile:

BB

Arguments about Martingale vs avg down aside, any time a strategy is based around a ā€œ50/50ā€ result I donā€™t get why people want to use it. Especially since the market trends longer much easier than coin flips. The odds of the FX market going 10 pips, or even 100 is a lot easier than 10 heads flipped or 10 spins coming red on a roulette wheel. Those other items are not predictable in the same way that you can understand how events and fiscal policies weigh on each side of a currency pair. If you knew which side of the coin was weighted slightly more than the other before the next flip, you could then start to make educated and mathematically based bets. I hope after a year on here I didnā€™t spend the time trying to find sillynanny strategies and instead took that time to learn actual economics. Think about it! You could actually know a lot of the same stuff the people who do this for a bank know! They went to school for 4-8 years, 2 of which were filled with generals like world history and chemistry! So at a minimum, they took 4 semesters of econ/finance related classes, which is probably 4 hours a day 5 days a week. So spend 2 hours a night studying for a year, along with watching the real markets, youā€™ll double up on experience and learning, and it wonā€™t take very long before you have a good base of skills. Thatā€™s my plan at least.

Just throwing in my 200 pipsā€¦

Anyway, you asked about books, apologies for (yet) another ramble. Well I did not learn from books, so I was already trading when I read my first trading book, and it does rather depend on the type of trader you seek to be, but for me there is a clear, two-pronged recommendation:

  1. ā€˜Market Wizardsā€™ and ā€˜New Market Wizardsā€™ by Jack Schwager. These are just a series of interviews with successful traders - mostly non-Forex - but they really helped me, particularly in two areas: firstly, they showed that trading can really work. Secondly, they showed me that it is okay to disagree with the majority. One drawback of BP is that it is easy to read othersā€™ posts and suddenly doubt a trade idea. These days, I donā€™t mind being a minority of one, I trust my own analysis, and these books helped me get there. Great for psychology, imho.

I am in the middle of the first book now, and have the other one waiting on my shelf. Great reads for sure, even if they are 20 years old the advice is timeless. So many of the same things are mentioned by these traders; stops, getting out of bad trades early, not trying to chase losers, risk management, etc. The best part? [B]I GOT THEM FOR UNDER $1 EACH THROUGH AMAZON[/B] They are both used but in solid condition.