Repeating 13 consecutive losses in one day’s trade with completely differing FX pairs. Taught me that while FX trading is simple it is far from being easy.
2 Likes
Trying to back test a certain sets of indicators thinking that someday I would find 1 combination that would have at least 50% win rate and risk:reward 1:2. Wasting years of my life doing that. 
2 Likes
I did not start when I felt like I knew that I really liked it. I lost 5 years just not getting started. My work was too easy and paid well.
1 Like
Why did you go after these specific conditions?
I think I did something similar to that. But it was more about fear and not going live earlier. On demo, there’s no risk at the end of the day.
I mean I guess it depends on how you look at it. You lose time. You lose learning from real trading.
I didn’t really start learning until I went live.
2 Likes
Trusting a strategy without backtesting it personally. The principles were good, but turned out that I had to change some details to adapt them to the market I was interested in. Luckily I am still a newbie and I trade with very small sizes for now, so I lost really little money and I learned the lesson without much hurting (it hurt psychologically, anyway).
3 Likes
Adding to much to losers. Mean-Reversion works, until it doesn’t.
Increased potential to have a big losing day or even a blown account!
Trying to be a day-trader with the 5m TF (though apparently some folks around here make that work).
Now I’m looking for trends on 1D, 4h to set entry and exits, and check 1W for possible reversal.
2 Likes
oh my god. ms dos, floppy drives ,command lines, and 1mb of RAM 
Win3.1 and that ugly UI but wait it was so beautiful at that time. 
time goes by so quickly 
3 Likes
- after some winning trades you opened a new position based on your foolproof strategy with extreme confidence but
1- market starts moving toward your SL then
2- oh man ,let me move that silly SL a bit further away from this damn price I am sure that market will return soon, i need just a little more space. i hate losses.
3- IF your account not dead yet THEN goto step-1
ELSE goto 4
4: GAME OVER , TRY AGAIN
2 Likes
Well, back then in my early years, it seems like the right thing to do. If you ever watch profitable traders being interviewed on Youtube or in a podcast, these are the things that they always spitting out. % of win rate and so and so R:R. What do I know back then. Hahaha.
For me it was just a matter of distraction and not getting started. I think that you come home from work and do those things that you think are necessary and when you look at getting set up on trading, it seems way more complicated and time consuming than it really is. I guess further research did help me to avoid some pitfalls. But it probably would have been smarter just to dive in and take the screw-ups because they were less of a penalty than procrastination.
1 Like
now you’re showing your age - im very much an “older guy” and even i had 4mb of RAM … 
1 Like
I remember it clearly. most of our university’s computers had such great amount of RAM.
in fact first two years we were working on Mainframes and UNIX-based mini-frames terminals.
you know I belong to Dinosaurs age 
as a wise man said "The bad news in life is nothing lasts but the good news is also nothing lasts " for me life is all about trying my best to live good and trying my best to help others to live good.
I spent a good chunk of my learning years leapfrogging from strategy to strategy. Although it was something that stretched my familiarity and mastery of trading, ironically, I owe the same mistake my appreciation for my progress and where I currently am.
Not all mistakes deserve some space in our book of regrets.
So, you did none of that and directly went live?
1 Like
Wow, usually people regret that they didn’t spend enough time on demos. I guess you’re the first person to say something otherwise. 
Yeah, it is one of the most occurring mistakes among traders. You know it’s all about emotional management.
In my opinion (others’ too) unless you proceed a swing or carry trade, it is not the best idea to open 2 positions. The right way is planning and size accurately the trade, possibly a price action and collect your expected and planned reward once, that is a clear intraday trade. There’s no need for bothering two positions.
And you clearly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about! I have two independent consistently profitable trading strategies and you wish to tell me that one or other is a waste of time.
It is precisely this type of junk, meaningless “advice” that maintains the constant failure of over 90% of traders.
I never said that my two strategies were day trades or swing trades and gave no details of either strategy or what they are based on - and yet you find it necessary to conclude and publically declare that one or other is not worth bothering with! 
FYI one regular, fixed-pip strategy is a “bread and butter” trade that typically hits either SL or TL within 1-24 hrs and has an 80% success rate. The other open-ended strategy is a swing-type trend seeker and is open as long as a trend continues which is more than a day but with no typical duration since all trends are different. And its results depend entirely on when there are trending markets or not.
Both strategies have the same opening criteria but differ greatly in both purpose and character. Which of these, in your great wisdom, are you suggesting "There’s no need for bothering" with?
I am so tired of this amateur and superficial perpetuation of the same meaningless, even damaging, advice and myths that have been circulating here on BP since eternity began and where the blind, the ignorant and the naive continue to lead the rest of the blind, the ignorant and the naive into doing the same mistakes that do nothing more than exacerbate the extortionately high failure rate in this industry.
You will not, naturally, like this post, but you can take comfort from the fact that your glib advice did achieve one positive result: This post is now the last post and last visit I will ever make to this site. 
3 Likes