Hi Ali,
Nice trade. Did you make any pips during LC close today (Monday)? I had 2 trade one lost 10 pips and other made 10 pips, result break even 
I think need to work on my emotions. As soon trade goes against me 10 pips, i cant help but close the trade. Same with profits. Any suggestions how can i control my emotions ?
Regards,
Hey Fx,
Iām dealing with the same impatience you are right now. I am getting better day by day but it is taking time. Everytime I close a trade early and it goes to profit, it gives me a little reminder, or if I close a trade early at 20 pips, and it goes to 50, another reminder to be patient. The trades you take that immediately go to -10 is a good indicator it wasnāt a good entry. ICT once said you will know when you made a good entry because it will be profitable almost immediately. Remember that one, it helps me alot when making an entry. Iām also learning to trust the system the more I use it, which is also helping, If time and price donāt line up, it may not be a good trade anyway. You never lose money when you donāt make a trade.
Hope this helps
I am interested to know which pairs you traded.
Cable was moving up to ADR but it was short on my platform and it didnāt put in an OTE.
I spent some time yesterday making up a spreadsheet for USD index ADR - I figured stop being lazy and just manually input the values if you canāt find the right software! USD/CHF easily passed ADR, but the ADR(5) was not met on the USDX and so I let it pass.
So no trades for me last night - just spent the evening making all my log sheets look cool and dynamic with pretty colour schemes :rolleyes:
So you closed out when it was ten pips againstā¦did the trade exceed the high that you pulled the Fib off for OTE?
This is the way I look at it now: If you place your SL 5 pips on the high, and enter at the sweet spot between 62% and 79%, you should actually be considering 3 or 4 different reaction points before taking your losses.
Possible Reversal 1: Sweet spot where you enter. This would be a perfect trade.
Possible Reversal 2: 79% retracement just above your sweet spot entry.
Possible Reversal 3: The high at which you pulled the Fib from for OTE.
Possible Reversal 4: Two or three pips over the high - a slight run on the stops before reversal.
OTE is a low-risk strategy because it gives multiple opportunities for reversal within a short range. Added to this the time zone factor i.e. the likelihood of London traders taking profits, and you just have to accept that you have an edge. Once you start seeing the winning trades build up, I think then you will start to relax a bit.
As documented, I started to feel a little nervous when I had four losers in a row. Looking back at that now it seems ridiculous because the run up to that gave me 12 winners out of 13 (a 5-in-a-row winning streak and a 7-in-a-row winning streak), and no market is going to allow a chump like me to get away with that :58:
After the losing streak I put in 1 win followed by 2 break evens, followed by my last winning streak of 4-in-a-row. I guess my point here is that you need to give it time. With time comes experience, and with experience comes confidence in your ability to trade successfully without emotion.
Before the losing streak I had confidence, but it was a confidence based on unrealistic expectations. I thought that as long as I kept taking the set-ups as I always had done, the market would always give me winning trades. I needed to go through that losing streak and successfully come out the other side in order to know that you can do everything right, but still be denied a winning trade. I now know what to expect from a drawdown period, and this gives me added confidence.
I think most people can relate to the fear of ānot knowing what the future holdsā. Will I still have a job this time next year? Will my kids be OK when they start school for the first time? Will my favorite team win the points it needs to achieve this or that? Well trading is no different. You just have to have confidence in the knowledge that you have probability on your side, just as you have to accept that you do a job to the best of your ability, your child doesnāt want to be a failure, and your team has the talent it requires to produce a win. It is not possible to control all of the other variables (and the market has billions of them!), and so why stress over something you canāt control. Take the set-ups that present themselves, stick to the rules, and then give the technique the chance to prove what it can do.
Sorry if this is far too long-winded. The short answer would be: Demo trade this set-up 30 times with little or no money on the line, and then if you still have problems with emotions, maybe you should be asking yourself if trading really is how you want to make a living!
Regards
Holy crap! These long posts do not make me want to write my social diploma tomorrowā¦
Back on track, I took a look at all my trades using ICT setupsā¦ Found some interesting figuresā¦
The two months where I didnāt post my trades netted me an average of 34.6% ROI a monthā¦ While the last month where I did post my analysis and trades gave meā¦ 7.1%ā¦ coincidence or no? I will take a lookā¦ I didnāt think that me thinking at loud would affect me so muchā¦ I am not sureā¦ I am trying to figure out why this has happenedā¦
Regards,
Clark.
Here is your Asian trade of the day. Risk no more than 20 pipsā¦profit potential of the swing: 70 pips. For those that didnāt pick up on it, the low or high made two days prior can be just as strong as the previous dayās high or low. Price was short of the pivot by 6 pips, but you should have been more concerned with natural support anyway, so itās a good set-up.
Regards
You made an average of 34.6% over 2 months! I donāt care if you donāt want to post anymore, because I donāt want to read them anymore;)
Was that just on LO trades with 2% risk? OK, so I said I didnāt want you to post anymore, but maybe you would consider setting up that hot line I mentioned between our computers:D
Forgive the instrusion, but I used to struggle with this, and while there is no hard and fast rule for how to overcome it, I can share what worked for me (as you made an open invitation for input).
It boiled down to two things - confidence in the strategy, and not babysitting trades. Both come from experience, basically. Once one has been trading long enough to see that a strategy works over time, then as long as one is only taking good setups, and sticking to the rules, early closing of a trade is obviously a bad thing. If the setup was good, and the correct Entry/Stop/Target levels were set, then the fact that the strategy works over time should give the confidence to leave well alone. This is where experience comes in - once I had been trading a year, I saw that the strategy worked, even though there were losing trades. Individual losses do not matter within a successful overall strategy.
The second area is babysitting trades, which obvously stems from the first part. In my experience, it is a bad idea to sit staring at a trade once it is up and running. If the strategy and setup are sound, then there is no reason to mess with the trade (other than trailing Stops etc for longer-running trades). Sitting at the screen watching it simply invites worry and the desire to adjust the trade, responding to short-term Price fluctuations. Price very rarely simply moves in a straight line, so there will generally be retracements within an overall move. I was taught that once a trade is placed, either move on and look for the next setup, or go do something unrelated. Simply staring at the trade play out makes the psychology harder.
An example of this from one of my recent trades (forgive me, this one does not follow ICTās strategy, but it is an example of what I am talking about here hence the deviation from the trading style from this thread, I hope that that is okay). On 9th June (last Thursday) I looked at AUD/NZD, I had been following the chart for a while, saw Price on the Daily falling towards a rising trendline I had on there, that coincided with a horizontal level of Resistance, as well as some Fib lines, so I thought I would look for a Long entry. The Daily wasnāt giving me anything, but I saw that over that lunchtime (GMT) the Hourly chart was low-testing into the same level (around 1.2800). So I went Long, simple trade on break of the high of an Hourly low-test. I was triggered in, but you will see if you check the chart that for the rest of the day Price dragged along that same level, a couple of times coming within a few pips of stopping me out (my Entry was 1.2842, my Stop 1.2790). I was off washing the car or something, but even had I seen that, I would still have had confidence in my overall reason for being in the trade. I risked 1% on that trade, I do on all trades, I know that over time that pays, so I can take the odd loss as long as I keep taking the setups.
Then Price moved in my favour and hit my TP which was just below the significant 1.3000 level where Price is currently stalled. 52 pip Stop, 149 pip Target, put nearly 3% on my account on that trade. Had I been babysitting it, I might have been tempted to take it off the table when it moved 47, 48 pips against me. Would obviously have been the wrong call.
So I am very sorry for rambling, particularly when I did not, on this occasion, use ICTās method, but I think that this is a key point. Once one has confidence in the strategy, it is easy to leave the trades to play out. So donāt worry overly about finding that discipline in itself - develop a mechanical strategy, and practise getting the entries right, and the confidence to let the trades run will come, no matter how unlikely that seems early on.
Hope that helps, apologies for extreme length and apologies for briefly hijacking the thread.
ST
Sit. Rep. After a 5% May the first 10 days of June had 6% back, in part due to me working with turtle soup set ups with limited success basically following āStreet Smartsā methodology. I can see great potential here but Iām having execution problems, any insights greatly appreciated especially from the main man.
With a little frustration I took every standard ICT set up available for the last few days on E/U, G/U and E/G. Happily that was four winning trades and a boost in confidence so I can calm down a bit.
And so to the point, is there a cheat sheet for use of the SMT or can some kind body produce one. Iām looking for an unambiguous directional bias (yeah me and the whole world lol). Iāve been looking for divergences and seeing if I can back test the out comes but I get confused with other noise factors like news and S/R and canāt define what Iām looking at.
This is just approaching LC. Not much on the horizon at this second (6420 GU for a short scalp entry maybe) but that said what is this divergence telling us about the two pairs?
Iād say youāre seeing the result of not great UK data, lower CPI than expected combined with some short covering in the Euro. GBP had recovered from the June 7 drop quicker than EUR as EUR was more in the limelight thanks to Greece and others. With the risk on play today more Euro shorts will be getting out.
Edit to add: Not sure how much youād be looking for with a LC trade but with equities well up on the day and oil up a decent bit also Iām not sure Iād be looking to short either of them.
Thanks PB I always appreciate your fundamental analysis. Mine goes as far as looking at the forex calender and looking for better than/worst than figures and chucking a bit of bias at me trades. Iād love to be able to correlate some of these factors, for pure interest if nothing else.
The LC short was purely a technical, which I didnāt take.
Obviously I watch factors that may influence interest rates but the smart money is so much sharper and better informed than me do you not find the train has left the station with regard to trading fundamentals?
I hope you take that question in good faith mate as I fully intend to tackle fundamentals at some point :57:
EDIT: Sorry PB you havenāt even said you trade fundamentals but Iāve read your posts and you have an enviable grasp of the subject so I guess you use it for something
Finally figured out how to highlight the bars when they enter the Kill Zones. I now have dull green bars for normal hours, but once time enters the Kill Zones they turn to bright green. I didnāt like the vertical lines clogging up my charts and this is an easy way to get rid of those. Any using TradeStation I would be glad to share the coding with.
(Iām expecting the chart image to be butchered by the time you guys see it, but hopefully it will still be clear enough)
Do we get to see your screenshots of the four winning trades? I, and this thread, need to see something other than LC scalps for a change:44:
Cheers
<a href=āhttp://s1086.photobucket.com/albums/j459/Deckard33/?action=view¤t=June.gifā target="_blank"><img src=āhttp://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/j459/Deckard33/June.gifā border=ā0ā alt=āPhotobucketā></a>
This might be easier (for me lol).
I should keep better notes but I think on the 6th I was just twitchy after a bad run and was getting out when I BE. Then decided to give the tools a run, couple of losers then back to reasonable results.
This is on a Ā£5000 demo account. I normally allow myself 1.5% risk on a single trade but if I like it I can increase my pip value and reduce my distance to S/L and if a great set up occurs on an other pair Iāll allow another 1% on the table. Iāve only done this once.
EDIT: Ali I know I said I have over trading issues under control and this screen shot kind of puts the lie to that. But my current thinking (this week lol) is Kill Zones, OTE etc mean I will not usually trade this much but I will take a set up when I see one. I Donāt even really count pips until the end of the week, is that a bit mad? Iām quite sure some weeks I wonāt find a single set up so Iām happy to make hay whilst the sun shines.
EDIT 2 Just noticed the two trades that went over night or over the weekend were both losers. Does anyone remember the film āThe Evil Deadā catch phrase ādead by dawnā might make that one of my trading quotes :43:
Hey!
Well, then Iāve got my trade from today for you Entered on previous support and Fiblvl confluence and took profit on fib projection and 80 institutional level, netted 66 pips. 30 Pips Stop under the CPP, 2:1 RRR. As I always did, I drew my fib from the low which initated the swing that broke through the last pivot. Oh, and it was NYO KillZone 
To add something additional: take a look at the fib from the high of June 10th and the low of June 13th OTE in NYC KillZone? But Iām done for today, so Iāll sit on my hands and wonāt trade it hehe
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greetings 
I donāt really buy the whole smart money concept personally. I think itās a bit of a bogeyman that retail traders make up to explain why price goes a certain way sometimes like itās some single entity pushing things around for their sole gain. The forex market is made up of a wide variety of players with different interests and who are looking at different timelines. Thereās sovereigns, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, clearers, speculators, models, central banks, corporates looking after big company hedging, custodies, etc. Thatās a bunch of smart people operating in a market and looking to use it for their own ends.
Definitely those organisations above have an advantage with fundamentals as theyāve got research teams working on them day in, day out but fundamentals are changing all the time and keeping abreast of the news and reading a variety of sources helps you make up your own mind. Fundamentals impact price all the time - as oil has been rising ME sovereigns have been diversifying out of USD and into EUR, as Asian economies have been intervening in their currencies theyāve been diversifying into EUR as well, etc., etc.
Though having said all that I donāt necessarily trade off them. I prefer to use just horizontal lines on my charts for S&R zones and thatās it. But I like to try understand why things are things are playing out the way they are on the charts. If nothing else I donāt think I could just sit at charts watching them go up and down for years and not get bored out of my mind ultimately. Thereās a pretty interesting world going on behind in the charts in my opinion!
I know people say not to get too bogged down in fundamentals so you paralyze yourself with information overload but I donāt think it hurts to have the current big ticket things rolling around in your head. That and having an idea of where the order book for the day might be, where barriers might be in play and what the big players in the market might be up to and why is a help for me personally. Iām sure itās not for everybody and I know plenty who do very well for themselves just trading off charts. But since Iāve worked on adopting this approach for me Iāve found good consistency and a steady weekly return over the past 16 weeks. Anyway, enough waffle from me - suppose it all just boils down to finding what works for each person.
Wow, great to see all the activity on this thread. Work has been super crazy lately so i havenāt been able to put any serious time in looking for setups. I have been keeping up on the thread though and enjoy watching everybody move to the next level with there trading. Hoping to find a little more time to actually get my feet wet in the near future. Keep up the good work and thanks ICT for all the great info. Seems you have your own little community helping each other out here;)
Hello, PipBandit
You and I havenāt talked directly very often. But, I try to read everything you post.
Iāve often said that there are about a dozen people on this Forum who are worth paying close attention to. You are clearly one of them.
I agree with almost everything you said in your most recent post on this thread ā everything, that is, except your comment about āsmart moneyā. You seem to contradict yourself.
Or, possibly, your definition of āsmart moneyā is different from mine. Here is part of your post:
To my way of thinking, that short excerpt of your post is a pretty good summary of the ICT market analysis methodology. And the portion which I have put in bold type describes pretty well what the term āsmart moneyā means.
Do you see it differently?
Thanks FX! Donāt forget to remove the āmantafxā tag when you get up to 50 posts and start posting screenshots that are viewable on the thread :58:
No problem Oh yes, forgot to remove it -.- I wonder why we should remove it, everyone reading this thread might want this tool too anywayā¦
Hereās the trade that I mentioned in my last post. See how price was trying to push back above the OTE line when it was on itās way down? I set a 20 pip SL, because I thought that if this good resistance is broken it might go for ADR high, no need to widen my SL. Price also went through R1 and then stopped to move fast, which was an indication for me that it will drop below again. TP was the support were I entered my last long trade. I did enter on the first touch of the OTE, which was LC KillZone or extended NYC. Ofcourse I have problems with my patience because I said I wouldnāt enter it, but it was a good setup 
Anyway this trade netted 71 pips for me and finished my trading week Iāll still watch setups and post them if you want to ;D
Thanks for the kind words but honestly Iām just some forex noob with not even 2 years experience yet. I do have about 10 years experience in the financial industry but not in an area related for this side of things so itās probably best to to take what I say with a pinch of salt as itās all just my opinion!
In relation to āsmart moneyā the definition I usually see bandied about is that itās a single entity who are gaming the market somehow and taking all the ādumb moneyā to the cleaners. Thereās different big players who are playing the market in different directions every day. You might have hedge funds buying in the morning until they suddenly run into BIS selling, you might have smart speculators looking to break past a barrier thatās being defended by China. You might have Bank of India buying dips in cable and halting a decline instigated by model sellers. You might have corporates buying cable as part of some M&A deal going through and once theyāre done the price falls sharply again. Retail traders might look at that last case of āsmart moneyā distributing at the top and then selling when in reality it was just the order book being filled by a lumpy corporate order at prices that nobody else really was interested in.
There can be a lot of āsmart moneyā pulling in different directions on the same day so I guess having an appreciation of who these market participants are and what their objectives might be is something that I find helpful personally. Iām not sure to be honest if thatās part of ICTās approach - from what I read before it looked like a more chart based approach which looks to have worked out very well for him. Itās probably looking to arrive at more or less the same conclusions in slightly different ways as the actions of these groups can be seen on the charts and itās fairly easy to see the zones that have particular interests to groups.
