I signed up at Oanda and opened a demo account. I’ve been trading for the last three weeks. I have had exactly one, count 'em, ONE, profitable trade.
I’m clearly swinging with my eyes closed. I’ve only lost 10% of my demo account balance, but I’m stopping until I get a better idea of support, resistance, entries, take profit, and stop loss.
I dont think you need to suspend yourself 
- thats exactly what demo trading is for, and ANY demo trading is worthwhile, in fact what you have just done is great. now start a journal, and start recording exactly what you have been doing and why, and gradually as you learn you will see your success rate change.
Post a link to your journal so we can see what you are doing.
You haven’t stated what currency pair, how many trades per day, how many trades in total and what stop loss you used on your trades.
And then of course the obvious question - based on what information did you enter any given trade.
I will say that I’m impressed with 1 aspect of what you have said, and that is your risk management - the fact that you have lost on so many trades and yet only lost 10%, that tells me you have a pretty good start on trade size and risk management. keep it up. Its almost better to have failed in your first weeks than succeeded greatly, for if you had, you would have thought that it was the norm, decided to go live and lost your capital.
Go for it!
Happens to us all, esp at the begining. Without losses there can be no progress.
Demo trade, take your losses, learn your lessons, then repeat over and over again.
Traders learn what works by learning what doesnt work first.
Good luck.
Since I work, I can’t sit at my computer all day monitoring my trade. So I focus on finding One Good Trade ™. I log in about 45 minutes before the New York open and try to find a single, high probability trade that I can “set it and forget it” until I get home from work and can review.
I’m trading the major dollar pairs, although I’m limiting myself to the Euro, Canadian, Pound, Swiss, and Yen in that order. I’m using a 60 day SMA, and I check to see if the pair is trending in the 4-hour, 1-hour, and 5-minute time frames. If the pair is trending in the same direction on all three time frames, then I will look for an entry.
100% Three Ducks.
What I’m looking for is a trend that formed during the London session that I can hop on to and ride for the first few hours of the New York session. Provided it continues.
Several days I saw that none of my pairs were trending in the same direction on all three time frames. And that’s fine. Sometimes you get no trade signal. “When there is nothing to do, the correct thing to do is nothing.” Tomorrow is another day.
Where I think my problem lies is in timing my entry, and setting my Take Profit & Stop Loss.
One clear mistake I noticed myself making was not having a good Reward:Risk ratio. For example, if my buy price was .xx50, I was setting my Stop Loss at .xx35 and my Take Profit at .xx65. 15 pips each way. That’s a Reward:Risk of 1:1, and that’s just DUMB. I know I need to be at 2:1, hell even 1.5:1. 1:1 is just ignorant. But I did it. More than once.
My goal was to try to make 20 pips a day. But I was also trying to use Support & Resistance to set my Take Profit & Stop Loss. But I noticed that many times on the 5-minute chart, and even the 15-minute chart, Support & Resistance were only 10, 8, sometimes only 5, pips away from the price. This is suppose to be a swing trading strategy, but 5 pips is a scalp not a swing. But I know I really should be using Support & Resistance to set my levels. But reviewing my trades shows me that clearly I am not, so this is another area where I am a mess.
I don’t really want to scalp, but one of the things I’m currently evaluating during my self imposed suspension is if I should consider scalping set-ups. OK, it’s not that I don’t want to scalp. The truth is I really DO want to scalp.
“Wooo wooo wooo wooo! Lookit me! I’m Injun Joe!”
Ah hem… Anyway, in my studies to date several independent sources have commented that scalping FOREX is a high risk strategy, with perhaps inconsistent ROI. Again, I’m researching.
One moment I do remember is I looked at my charts, saw a trade signal and placed a trade. Then I got up and made breakfast. I checked Metatrader after breakfast and saw that i was already stopped out. “It’s still early” I thought to myself. “I’ll place another trade.”
I reached for the mouse, and then I stopped myself. My plan was to place One Good Trade ™ a day. “Set it and forget it.” I told myself that I wasn’t going to trade emotionally, and I wasn’t going to overtrade. FOREX will still be here tomorrow. I felt good about myself as I closed Metatrader that morning.
I feel like if I have any edge at all, it is that I have good, strict money management, and firm emotional self-possession.
One of the milestones I have set for myself is “Six consecutive months of profitable demo trading before going live.”
Please don’t suspend yourself. It doesn’t happened with you only. It happens with all of us who are using demo account. Demo trading will help you to have the experience of live trading. And live trading business is very risky and it has loses more than demo account. Without losing money you will not able to succeeded. Demo trading will help you to learn forex trading process and by losing you will get experience of how to avoid loss in business.
If your plan has been 1 good trade per day, and you’ve had 1 winner, but 14 losers over the 3-week period, then its possible to reason certain things are happening.
You must be entering when there is little or no energy in the market to move in your direction. Certainly not enough to reach your TP within the same day. Why are you entering a market that’s asleep?
If all your trades hit their SL, your stops must be very close. Are your stops just based on counting pips or do you use TA to find the best place to set them?
If your trades are not hitting their stops but simply being closed as the day winds down, then go back to the point about energy in the market: where’s the momentum?
But more fundamentally, why are you intra-day trading, why are you setting a TP, why are you setting a SL in a random place on the chart?
You’re on demo so you’re not losing any actual money and it’s only been three weeks. Forex trading is not a skill one can learn overnight. In my opinion, quitting trading altogether is your decision to make, but I think that maybe focusing a bit more on the theory of trading and following an exact strategy when you trade (on a demo, obviously) wouldn’t hurt. Either way, I wish you success in whatever it is you choose to do.
I’m not quitting all together. This is a self-imposed suspension, not a rage quit. The purpose of the suspension is review of my trading, finding the money leaks, tweeking/improving my system, or scrapping my current system and building another one.
I think you opened your demo before learning the basic of Forex trading; it’s a skill based profession, knowledge is the power house of success! So, learn more but you can keep continuing your demo practice in a time!
Imagine this:
Today at your trading time cable was heading south, there was a clear break of yesterday’s low which was 3012, so imagine you sold at 3009 - maybe the ma’s are not in line but last few days have been GBP negative and Eur/Gbp is on a march up.
So a reasonable expectation would be that cable having made a poor show at bouncing yesterday that the least it would do would be to reach the 80 figure, so a 30 pip TP.
A SL above yesterday’s high would be reasonable, if price, having broken yesterday’s low were to revert back above yesterday’s high then something has upset the flow, buyers would have to have entered the fray.
Point I’m making is that the SL represents a change of circumstance, the TP represents a reasonable expectation.
Thanks for the feedbck. I’ve already done the babypips school, but I’ve got this on the way from Amazon:
I figure on restarting from the ground up.
Well- you did a fair analysis, so heres a few thoughts for you
You are in an experimentation phase so you might as well experiment with different things on different demo accounts.
I am also using Oanda. You can create any number of demo accounts, so why not add a few more so that you can do different things in different accounts - but you have to do them consistently so that you can judge results.
Theres nothing wrong with checking in once a day - in fact there are advantages in doing that but I wont get into that. So lets say that you have 4 accounts and you will check them once a day and record the results of each accounts trade, as well as what you learn … keeping in mind of course that real learning only comes from judging results over days/weeks/months.
6 months of successful demo trading is generally considered good practice, so yes, start counting the successful trade days as you progress towards 6 months experience.
when i say 4 accounts, I also imply that they are on the same currency pair, whatever you feel was a good one. but dont change during this refinement period. what you are looking to do is judge your success purely on strategy changes - not on changing pairs.
Now on 1 of those accounts, dont use any take profit. on other accounts use different stop losses. And yes - if you felt there was no trade to be made - then dont make the trade - thats part of your planning.
Using tight stop losses will only work if you had perfect entry - or at least good entry with a trend.
Using no stop losses is also fine - if your intention is to do manual exits
Being biased to sell trades or buy trades is something to be aware of - just note whether you have any tendencies - otherwise just carry on and record your daily gains and losses on 4 accounts if that’s what you feel like doing - or just the one if its too much hassle . Hope to see you getting slightly better than break even soon.
By the way - you can also practice with entry orders - just in case the price that you would have wanted to make an entry is in fact reached during the day while you are not at your computer/phone.
Thanks for the reply, Henry.
That makes a lot more sense and is a very reasonable approach. I hope it will help too.
As I said above, you’ve traded for a short amount of time and it’s normal not to be successful at first. Take your time, learn, review what you’ve learned, keep learning and you should see improvement. I wish you success.
Hi, ive been retail trading about 3 years with small real money account. Honestly just about breaking even. Still learning alot. You sound like youve been trading longer than 3 weeks but thats good. I trade from support/ resistance and not really looking for pips but more rr ratio of 2 2 1 minimum. Can i recommend checking out Rayner Teo, a succesfull trend follower.
The biggest thing i find with trading is the psycology. But what has really helped has realising that that no one or no algo or anything knows where the market will go next… end of.
When you accept that it becomes a numbers game and based on probabilties. It takes away the bad negative deci§ions you THINK you made.
As to stops getting taken out, as youre on a demo still can suggest putting in an order for where you think your stop should go. If to you a stop should go where you think it should go, how many traderds do you think can see where all the stops will be.
If stop hunting exists then where is the price heading next?
My only advice is that has helped me is reducing leverage so you can further your stop where it needs to be using atr rather than just beyond structure.
Anyway good luck and dont give up. Its not you its the market. Get used to it!
I totally and absolutely empathize with how you feel dude.
Take a break from forex is sometimes necessary to re-balance our brain homones.
Do some physical workout and increase your endorphin hormones.
You should feel better after some physical exercise.
Too much trading really destroy our health sometimes.
Took me 7 years of trading before I became profitable.
Demo account is not only for practice the live trading process at your beginning of forex trading or currency trading. You can use this for your live trades also. You can use your demo trading account for back testing your strategy to check it is going good or not. So, I do not think someone need to suspend themselves from demo trading.
My man, there’s totally nothing wrong or dumb in doing a 1:1 reward to risk ratio sometimes. I’ve watched professionals do just that when the probability of success is high. I also do that and win it more than I lose it. What’s more important is that you remember to move your stop loss to break even either manually or automatically by trailing the stop. That way,.you play with house’s money and when things go south, you get stopped out without losing a dime.
Secondly, 20 pips is too freaking tight for a swing trader. A medium impact news release would snuff out your stops like candle flames. Think 80 - 100 pips. That’s what a swing is. It’s not how long a trade stays open (alone) that makes it a swing, it also how much breathing space you give the market between your entry and your stops.
Finally, my man, if you’re gonna setup a trade that’s gonna last a whooping 8-10 hours, you got no business checking out the 5 minute chart. Roll with the 1hr, 4hr and Daily timeframes. Swing traders roll mostly with the daily and 4hr charts.
Finally, finally, if you’re a trader at heart, you can’t truly quit or suspend yourself . I demo traded 10 years with gaps of several months in between but I never gave up. I’m glad to say I’m a live trader today, and a well educated and productive too.
I wish you many green pips.
keep faith in yourself we all made same mistakes coping with psychological barriers as well as lack of knowledge. Your patience will be rewarded just keep trying and use your mistakes for learning.