Hello everyone,
I’m a brand new trader. I haven’t traded anything before, including fantasy league basketball players. I found this beautiful website from Quora. Somebody asked Ali Al Shamsi if he learned the basics of forex trading from babypips.com. His response was “I wish it had been around when I was a newbie”. Thing about Ali Al Shamsi is, he’s regarded as some kind of an economic genius mastermind in Quora. I don’t know how good he actually is, but he’s at least a profitable forex trader. A profitable forex trader speaking highly of a website about forex trading that has newbie content? Definitely worth checking out. That’s how I came here.
Some about me, I’m a software engineer from Turkey. I see myself as a rising star in my own profession. Before I bore you guys even more with why I would like to get into trading, it is safe to say that my income sources, as a young engineer, consist of my engineering skills. I don’t know much about economics either, but I still know what income diversification is and I know I need to diversify my income sources if I want to make my income even more steady and future proof. Another thing, I graduated from Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the best university of my country. My department was quite math heavy and I’m a math and algorithms savvy person, so the obvious choice to diversify my income sources, aka my skills? Trading.
The reasons I picked currencies over stocks and/or futures? Apart from the comparison of forex vs stocks and futures in the school of pipsology (I guess that was in Kindergarten), here are mine:
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Quality of free data: I’m a math and algorithms guy who writes code for food (and shisha) and I think that I can actually differentiate myself from the remainder of the traders using my engineering skills. My algorithms will require loads of backtesting, which is a lot easier in currencies in comparison to stocks because free data on currencies is lightyears better than free data on stocks. Ernest P Chan talks about the problems with free data on stock market in his book: Quantitative Trading, How to build your algorithmic trading business. Most of those problems don’t exist with forex data (like survivorship bias).
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Finding brokers with APIs: Again, because I’m going on full automation, I need a broker that allows me to automate my trading. This again is easier to find in forex in comparison to stocks because the competition between stock brokers is basically non existent vs forex brokers who are in a cut throat competition.
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Less regulations over algorithmic orders in currencies market: Again, I’m an engineer. My algorithms will thrive and I don’t want them to get blocked by some nonsense regulation or other.
In order to teach how to trade to a computer, I first need to learn it myself. I don’t think I’ll go purely algorithmic though. I might want to feel the rush from time to time. Or not. Depends entirely on how much money the desire to feel the rush will make me lose.
When I first checked out the school of pipsology, I got immediately hooked up to its no-bullshit attitude. I started reading through everything in babypips website when I found more than a few minutes of time. I got through to 80~/310 in the school of pipsology in a matter of days, while reading all the news and articles in the front page. I’m planning to graduate from the school of pipsology asap and start demo trading. I also would like to finish “Trading in the Zone” and “The Disciplined Trader” from Mark Douglas.
I still have trouble making connections between the data and the actions. I guess that’s called reasoning. Also, I still don’t know which news sources I have to follow (except babypips.com of course, I get my news here). I guess two other websites are bloomberg and reuters. I don’t know how to interpret the importance of the articles there either. I’m open to suggestions.
Anyway, that’s all of my boring content, for now. Thanks for reading thus far (or scrolling all the way down to the last line without reading anything. I can settle for that too. Until I get mad pips. Then I will demand more respect).
