Relying on trading income as their primary source of income and living the lifestyle they seek.
I won’t post a linkback to my thread demonstrating it, but myfxbook shows that about 89-92% of myfxbook retail traders fail to make profits. Of course, I expect that traders who don’t bother analyzing their stats do worse, so the 95% figure is actually a reasonable estimate.
Don’t take this wrong way, but, your posts are always very negatively led. I’ve noticed this in a few people on this forum. Do you think this hampers your personal trading?
Just to be clear - this is a question. I’m not looking for a bum fight!
I think that people have that impression about me yes, because I think that my way of thinking is different from theirs. Its not that I am being negative, its because I believe that ‘positive thinking,’ ‘faith based trading’, ‘gut instincts’ have no place in trading, and I believe that statistics and real world proof are the bottom line.
I think this is where I am disliked by people in babypips, because people here like the “I can do it attitude” and ‘PMA’ - I simply don’t believe that it makes a blind bit of difference. I look for numerical proof and trade through my own analysis rather than through hope.
As for my own trading, I have encompassed lessons from myfxbook to build a reasonable framework and target for my own trading based on realistic statistical proven expectations. I think this is a great enhancement to my trading and far better than basing expectations/goals/targets on ‘hope,’ faith’ and ‘anecdotes’ which appears to be the majority of retail traders.
When I constantly talk about statistics I am trying to move peoples way of thinking away from ‘anecdotes,’ ‘cherry picked situations,’ ‘fantasies and daydreams of making millions,’ ‘fantastic spreadsheets of targets’ and into the real world of making money.
Instead of regarding me as a negative person who talks everyone down, lets take this example. Imagine this was a forum about running coffee shops. Lots of people here have wild ideas of making millions running their own coffee shop. Won’t it be great to run your own coffee shop - friendly environment, daytime work, and $2 on a cup of coffee/cake that you sell. On this forum there are lots of people who are trying to offer you franchises, offering you courses on how to run your own successful coffee shop, and offering a lot of ‘you can do it advice.’
I am the forum poster that is collating the profit/loss statements of different coffee shops and giving you a fair idea of what to expect. It might not be the rosy picture of dreams selling coffee and making $100 000 a year pouring coffee into cups, but it is important to get an idea. After all, what advice is more valuable? “Oh, you can do it - you can make your own coffee shop and make $100 000!” or would you prefer to hear “In your region the average coffee shop makes $54 000 per year with a standard deviation of $20 000 in a sample of 112 coffee shops.”
I am trying to help forex traders not base their trading on hopes and dreams but in real world statistics. It can give you more information on how to trade profitably.
edit: just looked at your join date and realised that I have wasted more time replying to akakaemai/ICT again… I should really check out who I reply to in the future.
This thread is scary… but maybe it should be, people have got to be extra cautious when investing in commodities such as currency. And I think that’s where most of the experienced traders posting in this thread are getting at.
I’m just hoping that the time and resources I’ve invested in learning the business will be worth it. The only time I do not study/trade nowadays is when I’m at the beach or sleeping (which I hardly get because of excitement). I keep goals on top of my head every, single day and that’s gaining 5% value growth every day.
Recently saw on line that on most ( not all) currency pairs traders win more than they lose. However their losses are greater than their gains. The article explained that it’s caused by allowing losses to build too much before exciting. i.e. stop losses are too low and/or traders watch their losses mount convinced that any second/minute now it’s going to turn around so they can regain their losses. But it keeps falling…
Moral of the story was to get out of losing trades fast(er).
I’d be interested to hear others thought on this!
IF your losing, your preparation was incomplete before making the trade.
You can’t prepare for every eventuality in trading, nor can everything be quantified. Therefore the initiating stages of what closed as a losing trade could still have had all the green lights you required. Just my two cents
Hi JM,
I just want to make clear I do not dislike you, as I dont know you, so I won’t make any misconceptions on that front.
I too agree that PMA / faith based trading are highly unlikely to work, sometimes, maybe a gut instinct can provoke a little deeper analysis but should definitely not be traded on in isolation. Also cherry picking helps no-one to pick a future move as price will never completely react in the exact same way.
I also believe that there is no mathematical formula to success.
I have mainly focused on day trading in my early career (trading breakouts) and have done reasonably well at it, but trading this way, I am prone to giving portions back when I don’t admit that the direction has changed, even though it’s blatantly obvious and continue on the wrong side. I am now along with keeping the day trading going, looking at position trading, as this (for me) is where I believe the real money is made, by taking a position and holding it, while scaling out along the way.
Sounds easy, but I know it wont be. Taking a position trade is hard to know when to get in, but like many markets how often I have looked at a market and thought “it’s gone without me” and then thought I can’t trade it now, only to see the market carry on in that direction for weeks on end. Take the DJIA for example, people have called the top at 13000 & 14000 but look on at it still as it continues above 15000.
People get obsessed with trying to pick a top or a bottom as thats the only way they think they can trade.
So yes, I’ll be relying on my own analysis, no-one elses and trading this way for the next 12 months to see how it works for me.
The hardest thing in trading for me is cutting the losers short and not taking profits too early that I end up closing out too soon.
Ill also be looking at more pairs with much smaller positions than my day trading which I currently only look at 2 pairs.
Unfortunately I can’t use myfxbook as I trade on a spread betting platform which is not available on myfxbook but on the flip side it will allow me to trade indices and other commodities at smaller price increments.
Ref: akakaemai/ict - I can’t help there as I do not know that username.
Good luck!!
EDIT: Maybe I’ll find somewhere to post my positions, does anyone find this helps?
Hello Everybody !
I simply don´t understand why new traders don´t use Demo-Accounts until they´ve found a system that works and see for themselves what´s going on. Nearly all Forex-Brokers do offer this possibility and it´s free and you don´t risk to loose your hard earned money.
The second point I don´t understand is why people don´t use stop-losses or why they use stop-losses with more than a hundred pips, I don´t get it.
I demo-trade since a few months and after blowing the first two I´m starting to become profitable and I´ve found an interesting tactic that seems to work : I look for major news-announcements, install one-click-trading and get about half of the big move following the news, sometimes in a matter of minutes. This week my demo-account grew more than 20 % with this more than simple method.
What are you thinking about this it ?
Greetings
Parsifal23
P.S.: Please excuse my not so perfect English
I kind of gather it like this. Since Forex is pretty much an open market, where you can put up little capital to get started, the Retail Brokers are gonna suck you in to get your money. In commodities you don’t need a lot of capital to get started, but since I don’t mess with commodities I don’t know much about it, then there is regular stock. Here for day trading you need at least 25000 dollars to open an account with a broker and you have to maintain that 25000 dollars, making it much harder to get into. So I think Forex is a way for the brokers to make money from you, the Forex Trader since it is so cheap to get into.
For starters, you do not trade in a demo account and most who fail did trade in a demo account until they found a great strategy (or so they thought) which worked for them in a demo account. There are plenty of people who have a good performance in a demo account and then blow their account as they have not learned to trade. You can place your stop loss at 20 pips and still blow your account as a stop loss without a proper trading strategy is worthless, it simply means that you can lose more trades over a longer time period.