I am not a fan of high-maintenance trading. For me - and many others - it is stressful, and it makes me feel nervous, and rushed.
How can you learn to trade, or make consistent profits, when your charts require almost constant supervision, and your trading is stressful?
You simply cannot.
Which is why I prefer a low-maintenance price action based trading strategy.
Before you keep reading about my strategy, and before you commit to watching the six hours of videos below, you need to ask yourself one question:
Should I trade low-maintenance price action and do I really want to?
My low-maintenance price action strategy is designed for people who cannot - or don’t want to - spend several hours per day monitoring their charts. It is based on the idea of trading profitably with as little as thirty minutes per day chart-time.
How can you trade profitably in only thirty minutes per day?
The answer is large time frame charts.
What do I classify as large time frame charts?
[ul][li]4 hour charts
[/li][li]6 hour charts
[/li][li]8 hour charts
[/li][li]12 hour charts
[/li][li]Daily charts[/ul]
[/li]
If you are trading a 5 minute chart, a whole trade can trigger and be over in just in ten minutes. This means you need to monitor your charts almost constantly to catch trades.
But more importantly it means you need to rush into trades.
On 8 hour charts trades for and trigger much slower. It is like trading in slow motion. It takes a minimum of 16 hours for a trade to trigger, and be over.
This means that you have at least 8 hours to plan your trade when a set-up forms.
It also means if you are busy, you can fit Forex around your schedule. To catch a trade on the 8 hour chart, you only need to check your charts two to three times per day.
The chart below shows a recent GPB/USD 8 hour chart trade.
This chart could have been spotted, planned, entered, and closed, even if you only checked your chart once every 8 hours.
[ul]
[li]8:00 am - Check your charts and see sellers heading towards support.
[/li][li]4:00 pm - You check again and you see some indecision forming on the support area. You could place an entry order at this point.
[/li][li]12:00 am - You check again and your trade has not triggered. A new indecision candle has formed so you pull your entry order down a little.
[/li][li]8:00 am - You check your again, your entry has triggered and your first target has been hit.
[/li][/ul]
As you can see, you had at least 16 hours to plan this trade. At no point are you rushed into entering. You can think the trade through in detail. You can make a logical and relaxed decision about entering.
This is why I LOVE low-maintenance Forex trading.
So, enough about why I trade the way I do. Now let’s take a look at my free price action strategy.
My Price Action Forex Trading Strategy
I recently held webinars covering my price action trading strategy in detail. Below you will find the webinars.
My price action strategy is incredibly simple, and incredibly effective.
Part 1 - Candlestick Analysis
Candlestick analysis is a vital tool in Forex trading. I am not talking about simply knowing the list of patterns showing you dojis, morning stars, and hammers. When I talk about candlestick analysis I mean understanding the price action behind the candle stick.
Do not skip the webinar below because you feel you already know candlesticks. This is the foundation of the entire strategy.
(unfortunately I am only allowed to include one video per post so I need to add the other videos as responses)
[B]Part 2 - Support and Resistance Areas[/B]
Next I show you how I spot and identify support and resistance areas. Support and resistance is vital in Forex even if you aren’t using my strategy.
Why is support and resistance vital?
It shows you where buyers and sellers are grouped. This means that you can predict with a high degree of accuracy where price will stall or reverse.
[B]Part 3 - Trading Reversals[/B]
In the final webinar I show you how to combine candlestick analysis and support and resistance to take reversal trades.
[B]Questions?[/B]
If you have any questions or need any clarification, please ask below. I will answer all questions.
[B]Resources[/B]
Here you will find extra resources such as articles, videos, and webinars.
Ok Cool. Yeah, it’s almost four hours of video. I get a little off track at the end of them as I am answering questions. The first hour is pretty good content though.
Hey NickB, almost watched all the vids. great stuff. thanks!
just a quick question:
when after a indecision phase the bulls are showing that they control price again by making higher highs, your webinar movie (@ ~11:00 minute) suggest to immediately start a trade. right?
by enter the trade, do you mean placing a “buy stop” at the new high (+ some pips) or immediately buy at market to maybe start a little lower, gaining some more pips if the trade works as expected? normaly not a big difference, but a pendig order may come with the advantage that a trade is not triggered if the sellers are taking over control for whatever the reason is. what is your opinion?
hope you get my question, english is a foreign language for me…
Depending on your own specific goals, I’d pose the following question.
In trading, we all know (or some have yet to learn) that what you put in is what you get out…input = output.
Do you confidently believe that allotting “10 minutes every 4 hours” is going to lead you to a level of professionalism?
I appreciate feedback on my thread. In future could you please be direct with your critique? There really is no need to veil your criticisms by formatting them as answers to somebody else’s post.
There are a few flaws in your argument.
You suggest that what you put in is what you get out. In some ways I agree, however, that adage does not properly encompass Forex. I prefer the quote from Thomas Fuller to describe Forex.
“All things are difficult before they are easy.”
This quote is simple but profound, and it sums up Forex trading beautifully.
Forex is very difficult to master. It takes a long time to learn to trade Forex consistently. I have seen some people take as long as four years. I rarely see anybody become consistently profitable in less than one year.
Why?
Well. Forex is difficult until it becomes easy.
[B]You cannot learn to trade Forex with only thirty minutes per day[/B], that is not what I am suggesting. However, once you understand price action you can limit your trading to thirty minutes per day.
You need to put in a lot of hard work (input) to learn price action (output). Once you have learned how to use price action effectively, you can trade Forex around a busy schedule.
You bring up professionalism…
… To me professionalism is about competence and efficiency. Spending eight hours per day looking at large time frame candles is not efficient. There is absolutely no need for a trader to watch at an 8 hour candle if no valid setup is forming. Wasting time is not professional, input is not always equal to output.
I usually set a pending order to get me into the trade. Generally the pending order should be place around 2-3 pips away from the trades trigger. The trigger is usually the high or low of indecision.
Pending orders are generally a better way to deal with entries when your first start trading. New traders tend to jump the gun and enter early. I would stick with pending orders until you get comfortable with the strategy.
All things equal, most would agree that trading is a never-ending-learning-process. No one really “masters” buying/selling instruments, because the market will quickly remind those who feel they’ve attained such a level of competence. At no point would an individual be considered a professional if they simply wash their hands of the learning process and toss the need to remain resiliently dynamic to ever changing market-environments (i.e. the evolution of trading) into the wind.
That term “consistently profitable” is one which I’ve been moving away from over time. It’s an empty buzzword thrown around by everyone, yet, no accepted definition exists. Does the phrase factor in drawdown, risk of ruin tables, sharpe ratio, and a myriad of other key metrics which ultimately provide insight into a system’s ability to generate returns?
At what point does the term consistent get busted? Traders can experience multiple consecutive days, weeks or even months of losses (depending on strategy obviously), which in the longer-term perspective of their trading career may just be mere blips on an upward slopping curve.
The most important part of the learning process in trading is interacting with the market (i.e. taking long and short positions). In other words, “doing”. You can read 20 books, watch 30 hours of youtube videos and make 200 posts on babypips, but until emotions and live capital are on the line (where the rubber meets the road) no “real-learning” has occurred- the brain needs to make neural connections to solidify new concepts. Emotions play a major role in cementing those experiences in. (i.e. INPUT= enter a trade too soon, didn’t follow your trading plan, tried to hold on to the position in hopes of it turning around and took an over-leveraged 10% loss in a day…OUTPUT = Anger, sadness, disappointment, hope to not repeat the same mistake).
On the flip side of that experience, let’s say you executed according to your strategy, and netted a nice profit whilst learning something about you as a trader, and your trading plan. The output would be positive on the heels of an emotional and monetary reward for the proper behavior/actions taken (pure psychology). Eventually, you get to a point where emotions aren’t involved @ all, and 8 or 9 times out of 10 you’re executing accordingly due to pure classical conditioning.
Clearly, [B][U]the learning experience and actual experience of trading walk hand-in-hand[/U][/B]. You literally [I]can’t[/I] have one without the other, because as market dynamics evolve, you as a trader need to evolve alongside it or get burned. The input will always be equal to the trading experience coupled with non-stop continuing education.
Here’s what I’m getting @, and I’m not trying to levy any type of attack. I understand why people trade H4, H8, D1. What I don’t understand, is how people (generalizing here) think that 30 minutes a day is all which is required to become a successful trader who [U]earns a living[/U] from the markets. Just read that sentence out-loud. It shouldn’t sit right. (I know this wasn’t mentioned specifically, I’m just bringing the topic up for discussion. At the end of the day, why do any of us trade? Of course we want financial freedom in the form of being our own boss!).
Trading goals are going to differ from person-to-person, but the majority on mostly any forum are there because they want to quit their job, trade for a living and be their own boss. Well, head down to Wall Street, or the Merc in Chicago, or any other major trading hub and ask someone outside smoking a cigarette why they work 60, 70, 80 + hours a week doing something which some individuals try to claim should only cost 30 minutes / day…catch my drift?
Please share the contact info of any professional independent trader who makes a solid income solely from the markets, and only sacrifices 30 minutes / day. I’d have a million questions to ask him/her.
Who would spend 8 hours / day looking @ a chart which changes 1x / day?
Who would spend 8 hours / day even looking @ chart which changes 2x / day?
I understand your method calls for the use of H4 > sized candles. So, I’ll concede that once you have a legitimate strategy, you may be able to allot less than an hour / day to trading. That’s completely possible.
However, I’d follow-up with this.
I’ve already made the argument that trading is learning and learning is trading. Input will always equal output.
We have roughly 250 days / year to actively trade these markets.
Let’s look @ the below hypothetical:
Person A spends on average 30M / day interacting with the market = 125 hours / year in other words.
Person B spends on average 4H / day interacting with the market = 1,000 hours / year.
Person C spend on average 8H / day interacting with the market = 2,000 hours / year.
It’s commonly accepted that to “master” (your term, not mine) anything it requires roughly 10,000 hours of emotional experience and direct interaction.
Person A attains “mastery” in 80 years
Person B attains “mastery” in 10 years
Person C attains “mastery” in 5 years
A variable would be if Person A only risked live capital during those mere 30M / day trading, whilst using something like FOREX TESTER to test their strategy 1-3 hours / day.
Side note: Don’t take the above hypothetical too literally. I’m just trying to illustrate the point that interacting with the markets only 30M / day (even if you’re “consistently profitable”) is not going to be conducive to maintaining such a status in the long-run.
I can read every single book about golf, watch Tiger Woods swing a million times, buy the best golf clubs and gear- but, if I’m not hitting balls every single day at the range, and playing at least 3-5 rounds each week, I’ll never have a chance @ making the PGA tour.
Take that chip off your shoulder and try reading properly.
I ONLY SPEND AROUND 10MIN EVERY 4HOURS LOOKING FOR PRICE ACTION AT SUPPORT AND RESISTANCE LEVELS.
I know what im looking for, have my levels marked. All Im looking for is a confirmation signal to enter thats why it takes 10min when new candle opens to make my decission.
I surely hope that did not confuse you too much.
Too answer you NickB, my trading was up and down untill around 2 years ago.
You were levying an attack. You did it in a sly and underhanded manner. Instead of criticizing me directly you criticized spongebob76. You made snide remarks (directed at me) and veiled them as helpful advice.
I find it hard to respect people who act in such an underhanded manner.
Most of what you wrote simply does not warrant a response.
Are you really trying to compare a Forex trader who trades in his pyjamas to a Wall Street trader?
The Forex market is completely different to other markets. You cannot compare working hours between Stocks and Forex. People working on Wall Street are working in a different environment to at-home-traders.
One has modest goals of having some freedom while earning enough money to live comfortably. The other wants a $100m mansion and will screw over anybody to get it. In a cut throat environment where everybody is trying to screw you over, you have to work 80 hours per week.
Something that is commonly accepted is not necessarily accurate. It was commonly accepted that sea monsters existed a few hundred years ago… now we know they are myths.
