I am lwaziben live in south Africa. I have started learning babypips school in June 2016 introduced by my friend I started demo trading as well on that month. 2 months later I opened live account and started with 120 dollars. I was just throwing money away as I didn’t know a lot of things. I went back to babypips school and continued to learn all the grades. Then around october i went to live trading with all the information i have learned. I put more cash it didnt work so well. I got confused i started putting indicators on to help me. But i lost even more as i was told im using very small time frame. Last week i just had the biggest lost of them all and i just feel down and i dont know what else i need. I am 1000 dollars total loss whivh was my only budget to trade with. I just hope i will learn more on the forum. Thank you.
Lots of successful traders have started with losing an account - then another, sometimes then another.
We don’t see what exactly you are doing wrong (or right) so the best advice I can give is to make things simple as possible. Don’t use any indicators - or maybe just use one to confirm what you have decided about price (e.g. RSI or MACD, plus an MA or maybe 2 to confirm trend). Price is the most important “indicator”.
Slow down your trading so you have more time for decisions - maybe limit your trades to one at a time, once per day. Define in advance what you must see on the chart to make you buy / sell: do not make a move until you see what you have planned.
Basically, if price is going up, find a place to buy, if price is going down, find a place to short. Put your stop where the reason to buy/sell disappears an make sure your possible loss is only a small fraction of your account - this will be more difficult with a very small account.
Indeed with small account is very difficult as i deviate away from lot size. Thank you for the advise tommor. I’ll slow down and give it more time until I get it right.
This is about the best short, simple advice you can ever find … it’s absolutely basic (and essential) that you look for long entries in an uptrend and for short entries in a downtrend. Not something to get wrong: no successful traders started off by looking for “trend reversals”.
As a rule of thumb, I’d advise you not to have more than 1% of your account-total exposed to risk at a time - and make your position-sizes small enough to allow for that 1% risk-capital to cover a decent-sized stop-loss so that a small fluctuation/correction/retracement doesn’t stop you out of what might otherwise be a profitable trade. Don’t try to “chase your losses” quickly.
But you should probably be trading on a [I][U]demo[/U][/I] account until you’re confident that you have a genuine edge and are winning more than you’re losing, so that your practice doesn’t cost you any more money?