The first OTE entry after the fractal that you used for the base of the fib, was about three hours before your entry. Hence ‘second chance’ OTE for your entry. That’s not a real trading term. I just made it up hoping it would be descriptive. 
Once you use the fib to find the OTE entry, you can draw the fib backwards, interchanging the 0 and 100 levels, so that the higher fibs (127, 168, etc) point in the direction of your trade. They can then be helpful in choosing target levels.
And SMT Divergence as well.
Looks pretty good.
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You mean like this?
I drew the fib from the top to the low, backwards like you said and got the 127 level, it coincided with a previous high
So this is a good tool for deciding target levels to set your TP? But in this case the 127 level was outside the ADR high, in those cases what do you do?
And thanks for clarifying about the OTE !
Right, exactly.
There’s alot of guys on this thread who can help you more than me but I’m just trying to help. For the record, I’m still demo trading.
One last thing, of all the trading tools you have - recent high/lows, pivots, fibs, market flow and structure, fundamentals, etc - any one of them by itself doesn’t mean very much. It’s when they start to agree that you should start looking for a trade. Again, sorry if you already knew all that.
Went short fiber at NYO, planned the trade perfectly, best one for ages but i closed the trade at 20 pips profit after seeing what i thought was an OTE long forming, then a big spikey candle. Should have trusted my analysis, couldnt help feeling disapointed but a profits a profit i guess.
We’ve kinda already got three of the pictures (although granted, ICT’s only released one) one’s a z day which we all know and love and the other is the opposite (sell instead of buy) of the one we’ve already got. Which only leaves the mysterious forth picture
I’ve been reading through this thread and trying to learn as much as I can. I noticed some posts by ICT that he is holding all of these webinars and they all seem to be very good but since I’ve just started reading this thread I have missed all of them. I was wondering if anyone has all of these recorded and if so could share with me. One I am really interested in is the one he said he was going to teach how to make 20 pips a day. Not sure if anyone has this or if nobody does could someone explain what he went over. Thanks and it would be much appreciated.
I also use Alpari UK.
Here are my screenshots of the Monthly pivots (mine and ICT’s macro) plotted on the Daily chart, and my Weekly pivots (mine and ICT’s macro) plotted on the H4 chart.
Monthly pivots
Weekly pivots
Although the levels on the Monthly are quite different, it is nothing compared to the Weekly where each pivot is about 800 pips apart!
Any comments from people keying off the ICT_Pivot_Macro?
Regards
Ain’t that the truth - this is a key point that, in my opinion, often gets overlooked in favour of focussing on the right Strategy and Entry. Not letting winning trades run sufficiently can undermine the overall profitability of a Strategy, but equally letting winners run too far can result in them bouncing back against you before you have grabbed the cash. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle but is, as you say, arguably one of the most discretionary areas of trading.
For instance, I currently have an open Short on GBP/JPY (well, several of you might know by now that I trade a lot of Pairs!), which is quite a choppy Pair (put it up as a candlestick chart and check out how long the wicks are compared with many Pairs, if you don’t trade it yourselves). I am currently something like 1.5% up, on it - I shorted at the beginning of the week, simply enterered off the Daily - but my TP is just above the 124.00 level, so a fair way more. I don’t want to trail a Stop too close, as this Pair can bounce around en route to its final destination, but equally I don’t want to leave it over the weekend with a Risk still on the table (currently still my original 1%), particularly with the BoJ lurking. So my mission for today is to pick a safe-looking spot for a new Stop.
I have been full time for a good while now, I have absolute faith in the overall profitability of my trading, yet my trigger finger is still twitching with a little indecision. Don’t want to leave too many pips exposed on the table, but equally don’t want to trail too tight and lose the bigger run - it’s something like a 3.5:1 trade if it hits TP.
The Entry leapt out at me, I didn’t hesitate, the scan for the setup took five minutes, the Stop, TP and Entry levels were mechanically dictated by my Strategy and experience of the Pair - comfortably the hardest bit of this trade is judging the extent to which I let it run, and how close I place the weekend Stop.
So anyway, this has become typically rambling, for which apologies. I am not canvassing for opinion (although feel free!!) as it has to be my decision, anyway, and I’ll come up with an answer this lunchtime. But I thought that couriermike had made a really key point there, buried at the end of his post, and wanted to comment on it. A trader can spot all the best Entries, but if their trade management is off they will struggle to make any money. Thought as I had a current example of that on my account I would post this in case anyone found it helpful.
ST
lol, you guys are faster than me again ;-), believe it or not yesterday evening I was thinking about the same thing, that everybody is talking mostly about entries, but only few about targets. And as you said it is very important thing, in my opinion probably more important than entries, because this is the point where you get paid.
So yes I fully agree with you and here is kind request for ICT, if he could focus more on tools and techniques how to find exit points. Thanks
Quite - it is quite possible to develop a straightforward set of rules to govern Entries, which then work as long as the execution is mechanical. Exiting a trade has a lot more subtlety to it, and in my opinion requires more experience.
ST
Hi,
I think ICT has talked alot about where and how to exit and taking profits and how to manage a trade…in general everybody seems more keen on where to enter a trade.
I’ve just tried the Pivot Macro on a Forex Ltd chart and the results are similar - Weekly pivots are just way off;the monthlies are not bad - up to about 10 pips off on cable,20-30 pips off on EU.
There are two differences between Forex Ltd and Alpari UK that I can think of:
Forex Ltd server time is GMT,while Alpari is GMT+2
Forex Ltd charts show Sunday candles,Alpari doesn’t.
The fact that the Pivot macro doesn’t work satisfactorily on either and there is no means of offsetting time differences, suggests to me that it was written for one specific chart provider.
I’ll stick to calculating the pivots manually,it’s safer.
I chucked up 4 different Monthly Pivots and got 5 different answers!!!
Oh alright I lied about 5 different anwsers but they did differ on some I think the problem is some people calculate High+Low+Close+NewOpen/4 and some just the high+low+close/3 also it would be pretty easy to use old Open instead of the new open if you were’nt familar with pivots there’s also different ways to get the s&r levels, even though these can produce close enough results there might be a knock on effect that produces way off pivots.
Wally
best wishes to traders and ICT and hoping ICT is safe throughout all the weather problems and so.
I’d say ICT entries can make great exits! You probably saw that GBP/JPY just put in an OTE LC trade within a 4H OTE;)
By the way Simon, you are one of the few on this thread who are full time traders, so I would be interested to hear how your first few years of trading went. Was it a struggle, and how did you come across the technique that you are currently using? I fully understand if you don’t want to share, but I thought there was no harm in asking!
Regards
Thank you Wally and Dess for playing around with this. It is something that has been niggling away at me for a while. I accept there are different ways to calculate the pivots, but would the weekly pivots really be that far apart? One thing that I have just learnt is that all the time I have been inputting the ‘open’ price on the calculator, it has never actually been using it! It doesn’t matter whether you put the open as 0 or 16350, the pivots don’t change.
Regards
Ali
P.S. That Bernanke dude really knows how to move the market, hey
Fiber trade
Like alot of the pairs, fiber had a ‘dollar up’ market flow on the 4 hr and 1 hr, in contrast to a ‘dollar down’ market flow on the daily. It also looked like fiber was due a big day and needed to fall quite a bit in order to catch up with cable. So, despite it being Friday and despite Bernanke’s speech, I thought fiber might follow its recent pattern and make a slightly lower daily high, before making a big move down. (It’s also interesting that fiber appeared to be bouncing off the top of a bull flag wedge on the daily and monthly.)
As always, comments and criticisms welcome.
Did anyone anticipate the huge spike up near LC? What made you think that? From the timing, it looks like it was caused by Bernanke’s speech, but that seemed kinda blah.
It was all in the technicals 
Hellogoodbye4201 and I called it a couple hours before LO. Unfortunately, the Cable didn’t make an OTE during LO, and when I woke up everythng moved in our direction. Even the reversal was near exact.
The sell off hit the Daily OTE for the Cable, as well, the Trader’s Trinity tool was showing an extreme. Pivots were in the sell zone as well.
Just wish I could stay up for NYO sometimes, I see some really nice setups during that Kill Zone.
Regards,
Clark
Yes, big drop on GBP/JPY this afternoon. I was in a Short, so nice way to end the week for me, but the Japanese PM going did speed things along!
No problem at all sharing my background, if you’re interested. I am full time at this (at least insofar as it is my principal income), but have not been at it as long as people on here might assume - I have been trading nearly two years. I had a previous career for ten years following university (unrelated, though - British Civil Service), then stopped that a few years ago to run our own own business (again unrelated) and be around more as kids had started turning up (we have three small boys). My wife suggested Forex trading to me a couple of years ago, she has a ‘proper’ career with a big blue chip company (hence when kids turned up it was my salary we cut to develop our business lol!), has been there 15 years since uni. We wanted to give me a new challenge, give us a fallback should Mrs Templar ever want to leave work, and bring in a good chunk of money to have a nice lifestyle while we were (comparitively!!) young and had the kids around. We hoped that I might have some aptitude as I travelled a lot with my first career, worked in and have always followed international politics, speak some languages so have always followed currencies and international events, and my wife’s work gives us access to a lot of quality market analysis. Through my first career I worked alone a lot, including overseas, so had learned to rely on my own judgement and make quick decisions. I’m a pretty analytical type, so we thought it was worth a punt.
To answer the trading part of your question: I went a route that is sometimes frowned upon on this site and went on a training course. I then took a year’s coaching with the same training provider. We were fortunate in that, because we have a pretty hands off business, and my wife has a corporate salary, we could afford for me to put in full-time hours to my trading right from the off, knowing that I would not be profitable right out of the box but that this would be the fastest route to finding out whether I could make a go of this long term. So we were able to pay for the training/coaching, fund a trading account and have me not produce an income for a while - I am very conscious that this put me in a very unusual and lucky position. We decided to give it a year and take a view then on whether the idea had legs. We have made various other investments over the years, mostly in property, and not all have worked out, although overall we have been lucky. So we treated it like a business from the outset, noted all the expenditure and decided how much time and money we could invest before we would want to see a return or pull the plug.
The first six months were a steep learning curve. The course and ensuing coaching meant that I did not make as many missteps as I might have had I been self-taught, and meant that I probably got to a higher level more quickly - initially, I just traded the strategies they taught me. The flipside is that we had invested a few thousand at this point, when you tot up the tuition, my trading account and my time. I made all the usual rookie errors, some of them several times, and lost money in five of my first six months, I was losing a few hundred (GBP) a month on my trading. Struggled a bit with the psychology, found myself pulling winning trades early, while losing trades would hit my Stop as I desperately hoped that they would turn around. I overtraded, too, quite badly at first - risking 1% per trade I could still be risking 6-7% at a time if I had too many open trades. I also traded too many variations on the strategy all at the same time.
Then slowly I learned to focus on only a couple of the strategies taught, execute mechanically, not let losses get to me too much, limit my market exposure at any one time, stay out of the market if I felt it was unclear - lots of other things, too, that have been discussed on this site. I have made most of the mistakes at one time or another. I never blew an account, and never lost my overall faith that I could turn it around, although there were a few bleak moments… I was obviously very fortunate to have a wife who was prepared for me to take a chunk of money out of the household finances without any guarantee that I would be able to put it back, and then fund us on a day-to-day basis while I figured it out. Trading took a lot of my time out of our regular business (my wife has a career job, after all), so I used to feel pretty bad on a Friday evening, reporting another week of losses. My coach was invaluable at that point in keeping me focussed, improving me, telling me which bits were good and which bits were terrible. I told him early on that I am a big boy, I would rather he be blunt. And he often was lol! For a while, his favourite phrase seemed to be ‘why did you do that?’.
I did notice a steady improvement while continuing to lose more often than I won, then after the first four or five months it suddenly clicked. I had lost a few thousand in bad trades, but we were fortunate in being able to seed my trading account again at that point sufficiently well that we were optimistic, once things had clicked, that I would be able to make the money back on a sensible timescale.
Sometimes I look back and kick myself for basic errors I made. For instance, I started with a £5000 account, so was risking £50 per trade. So the learning trades were costing us real money. Would have been less painful, perhaps, to risk £10 per trade on a £1000 account. However, I am not sure that it would have worked as well for me, as I learned an enormous amount from that period, my psychology basically started out on the right path. I have always needed a little pressure to perform best. I never bothered with demo trading for that reason - figured I would treat it too much like an arcade game.
Overall I am very happy with the route we took, delighted with it, it has been life-changing. Although it was very character building, all of the dark moments help me now. I make a nice income from Forex, I sit down to trade confident that I will be up on the month, and although I don’t enjoy losing trades they really don’t get me down. I was 35 when I started, I am 37 now - I have a long time ahead of me in Forex, and it gives a very good return on investment. The losing period of my Forex career was only one summer. My gains now are dwarfing my losses then. Which is why I often pop up on this site encouraging people to stick with it, as I do believe that with a lot of hard work (I have put in some serious screen time) and a bit of a feel for it there is nothing to rival it for freedom, flexibility and return.
This is also why I occasionally champion training courses on this site - we all learn in different ways, but I was a profitable, full-time trader under six months after I first took a course. Prior to that course I knew nothing! I still trade the strategies I was taught there, with a few extra twists that improve profitability that I have picked up along the way.
Apologies for the appalling ramble, I might have broken my own record. Just thought that if I was going to answer that question it made most sense to give a full answer!
(Anyone not interested, apologies for the lenth of this post, just skip it and apologies to ICT for hogging such a chunk of this page of his thread.)
ST
