Thanks everyone for the congrats on the new little one in my family. I will be a little busy from now on since my oldest daughter is 17 months and now we just had a new baby girl. Yes a house full of women, this might drive me up the wall, but as of now everything is going great.
PerchTird,
I would like to see others comment on your way of entering in the market also. I was thinking about doing something like this before but it always seemed like if I lost, my loses would also be more than my winners. I guess one way to find out is take some trades and see if the loses start knocking down your profit faster then you can make it.
I agree with PerchTird, although I am also guilty of scaling into trades as well. It is all about patience, or in my case a lack of it. Scaling into trades is a sign of a lack of patience and not wanting to miss a trade. Sometimes those trades are better off missed. The LC seemed a bit awkward today so I had resigned to not making a trade. Then price on the Cable came up to that magical level and I entered at 1.58301- about as good as you could get. It was a good reminder that patience is needed. Many days I enter early so as to not miss the trade and price immediately moves 10 pips against me. I have also been stopped out of many winning trades because I entered too early, got stopped out by a few pipettes, then price moves in the direction of the trade. Not to say I wonāt do it in the future because it is difficult to overcome, but if you continue scaling in, you will also struggle as I do at times
Just a little inspiration to add to the thread. Banked 58, 73, and 91 pips today on 3 trades. Better than average day but still done with everything Iāve learned from ICT and this thread. Been very busy lately, hopefully Iāll be able to post trades more often. Anyways, GLGT.
Thanks for sharing those pips buddy. Whereād you dissappear to lately? Banked 95 pips, finally caught up in school so I can start trading more often now
Thatās great Wade (itās Wade right?). I canāt wait til Iām trading on your level someday. Iām a little frustrated right now and could use some encouragement though. Iām done with all of ICTs videos and Iāve been trading forex for a little over a month now. I started with a real money account, which is perhaps frowned upon. The only reason being that I felt I would be more disciplined with real money, and I used an insignificant amount of cash that I wouldnāt really miss if I lostā¦anyways. After a month (currently in my 5th week), here are my trade stats:
So I feel like Iāve made some improvement since I started, but I guess whatās frustrating me is that I feel like I can find a justification for almost any trade, like thereās almost always 3 reasons I can find to make a trade in either direction. Due to work I can really only trade the NYO, and every morning I wake up and feel like I need to make a trade, being that Its my only opportunity of the day. I know that I should only take a trade thatās really set up well and be able to sit out for a whole day if it doesnāt line up, and thatās something Iām working on. I guess I just am able to convince myself that thereās a great trade setting up most daysā¦
This morning for example, I feel like there was good justification for a long AND a short at NYO. On one hand, I had 1h,4h, and Daily MF bullish, LO made a bullish move and i know NY tends to follow the direction of the london move, and there was a nice OTE from the recent fractal low to highā¦
Traderās Trinity sell zone, Daily Pivots sell zone, right at R1, 1.5800 figure (which has been key S/R in the pastā¦obviously), and price had just rejected off of yesterdays highā¦
So with all that I went long at 1.5796 and got stopped out pretty quick.
Many of you were profitable today, so where did I go wrong? Obviously I could wait for the perfect trade in traderās trinity sell zone, pivot point sell zone, 1h, 4h, 1D MF down, OTE, S/R level, SMT divergence, etc but I donāt think those trades come along all that often. So how did you guys who went long in NY decide that way. Am I giving to much strength to certain factors? Am I missing something, or is there something in my analysis that is backwards? I didnāt see any SMT divergence during NY, should I not do any trade unless I get SMT confirmation? I donāt think thatās an ICT requirementā¦
Any thoughts? Do I just need to be patient and get more experience? Obviously I know the more I do this the better Iāll get (hopefully), but I donāt know where I went wrong this morning, so I donāt really know what to learn from today. Thanks in advance for all your helpful comments : )
Hope you are having a wonderful and profitable Forex week!
I suppose many of you are wondering how am I going about this āMillion Dollar Challengeā? What Trading Plan am I employing and what are my goals for the week and month? I think a video tutorial is in order for this and an ICT Checklist you all so patiently have waited for. :5:
I will be producing this over the weekend and will have a video online Monday night detailing how I will be trading this live account and how it can be an illustration that you do not need much to make wealth. In fact, I spent the better part of the year flipping a coin and trading this account at GFT to illustrate a ātypicalā newbie trader and even put in additional funds to āresetā with moreā¦ and added moreā¦ and added moreā¦ which is what many unlearned unfortunately do in the beginning. Iām sure GFT probably thought I was reckless this entire year lolā¦ but there was a method behind this madness. Who else would purposely toss $18,000.00 USD into an account to āgambleā on making money flipping a coin? I donāt know anyā¦ if you doā¦ you have some wild cowboys as associates.
Seriously, I built in a handicap to factor in the psychological ākickerā of $18,000.00 drawndown to $2500.00ā¦ actually I let it dip down to $2440! I figured I had it as close as I could possibly get it to in terms of āstill possibleā. When I hit the switch, I began taking the trades this thread details and a few others it has yet to reveal. I made three trades in the NZD/USD that were actual screw ups on my partā¦ aside from thoseā¦ I have had zero losses from that point. Pretty much what the videos have shown all along and the septics, I mean sceptics, doubted the validity of it all. Remember it might look like hindsightā¦ but Iāve put real money and real statements online to document it.
Today, I was surprised to discover I am being followed by GFT on Twitterā¦ and I thought, thatās cool. I trust if anyone from this point onā¦ wonders if the account is legit when we get to the crazy levelsā¦ a few short months will seeā¦ GFT can or could verify my statements. Iām warning you right nowā¦ itās going to be obscene folksā¦ I know itās a yawn away from boring thus farā¦ but give it time to do itās thingā¦ and mine.
For those looking for inspiration and or just simply wondered if you can trade profitably and consistentlyā¦ this is for you. I do not want to appear as a braggard or show offā¦ however, I guess at some point this is pretty much an Oximoronā¦ seeing how I want to openly build a million dollars in front of the entire worldā¦ :30:
Either way, I just wanted to chime in and inform you that I have every intention to be more transparentā¦ and I will. I just want to make sure nobody gets hurt trying to trade my trades and suffer financial loss as a result. I canāt stress this enoughā¦ I am not giving a signal serviceā¦ and I do not want the CFTC breathing down my neck over something I have worked so hard over the last year to protect you from! So I trust you understand there is a certain measure of risk I take on by doing this and I want to be completely honest and clearā¦ I do not want āShadowsā on this journeyā¦ and if you thought or think this is going to be your path to richesā¦ I am trying to hinder that travelā¦ intentionally. Not to be mean or selfish but completely the contrary.
I have purposely dropped information at a snails crawl on here to FORCE you to take your time. To make you determine if you really wanted thisā¦ to test your patience and mental limits. I know some if not all of you wish I would just spill it out here and be done alreadyā¦ but itās not what you need. You need discipline and self control. If you canāt make money with the tools and concepts I have shared thus farā¦ you wonāt with the material I have held on toā¦ think about that one. You have a million dollar trading plan right in this threadā¦ and tips and tactics to locate low risk high probability setups. What have you done with this material at this point? Moreā¦ wonāt fix it for you, if you havenāt applied the gift you have already.
Iām done ranting and have climbed down from the soapboxā¦ and return you to your regularly scheduled Babypips thread entries. :57:
I have an ideal I want to propose. I know there are several questions about analysis alone and some donāt want to post in here for whatever reason. I am thinking of creating a skype chat room for the sole purpose of analysis using ONLY the tools ICT has thus far laid out. This would not be a trade room but analysis only room and we can incorporate a neat screen sharing program I know.
I think this could be beneficial for people to join and contribute live during certain times of the day, say after markets close, after asia etc. I know I do better when talking my analysis out with others, both in honing in my thinking pattern and finding things donāt sound as reasoned when said aloud to others v. my internal voice.
Michael, if you are opposed to this ideal please post and Iāll remove it.
I feel your pain. I am also struggling to get these trades down correctly. Everytime I look at the charts it seems like I can find a trade that seems to have everything going in my favor, but nobody else seems to be taking them or if I watch ICT he seems to be taking the trade in the opposite direction that I was looking for.
To me it seems like when I take a bad trade I am suppost to learn from it but if I donāt know it was bad trade how can I learn from it.
I am currently going through the whole thread and videoās very carefully again and making as detailed of notes as I can and making a checklist, hopefully I missed something that will give me an āI get it now, duhā moment.
Nice post and I can wait. I always follow you and never take the trades to call out but yet try to follow along in my charts to see if I can see what you are trying to trade. I am hoping during your journey I start getting the hang of finding these trades all by myself. I really wouldnāt care if you just posted an image and small detail of the trades you took for the day after the fact. I try to find the trades before I look at your tweets and see if I am looking for the same thing. I do gotta say some more detail would be nice, but I do understand your risk that you have on your shoulders.
I do think it would be nice to have some videos of you going from the start of your day to the end of your day on the routines you do each and everyday. I know you have wrote this out in the material so far but an example would be really nice. I just donāt know how you would go about this because that would be one long video.
I am going back over everthing again since I am still clueless after a couple of times going through all the material so hopefully one of these times I go through everything I finally get it.
First, many thanks for giving a clear and detailed report on your trading progress so far.
To be absolutely candid with you, I think most of us are in the same boat as you, and our thoughts should probably therefore be taken with a pinch of salt. What concerns me is that there is no real way to qualify advice given on this thread without some idea of the consistency and profitability of those offering the advice. Iāve been keeping a sharp eye out for who really has the proven performance to back up their opinions, and (just as importantly) how close the advice they give actually matches what they do. This is key, in my view. Iāve absorbed a good deal of the ICT methods and can regurgitate my interpretation of them at will, but I am keeping my own counsel until I can demonstrably show I am walking the walk - and getting where I want to go.
Just like you, I can see arguments both for and against trade ideas at all stages of the day. In retrospect, the positions often look absolutely clear, but that applies to practically everything, not just forex When I see people showing charts of their trades, listing the reasons for taking them, I often wonder why they do not also list the reasons for [U]not [/U]taking them, and why they disregarded them. This, to me, would be just as instructive. If anyone is prepared to take the time to do this, I would certainly appreciate it.
Iāve shared some of your journey, too: literally waiting days for all the criteria for a good trade to line up (I have a list of more than 20 preconditions to look for!). This has resulted in trading perhaps only once in a week, and even then being able to see reasons not to. I figure that even at this rate I can lose a good 40% of my trades, just by putting too much weight on one reason, and not enough on another, and at the end of it still having to deal with the caprice of the market. One trade a week, with less than certain consequences, seems too slow a learning process to me, since it does not embed the practice well enough. So, my response has been to take trades that I know were questionable, and the result is that week after week I have ended close to where I started; wins and losses cancelling each other out.
If I had to pick one aspect of my trading that seems to need the most improvement, it is taking profit. Most of my losing trades have been at least 10 pips profitable at some stage. If I had taken one of these per day, at the right moment, I would be averaging over 50 pips a week, and very happy, despite the bigger winners I might never get to see. Unfortunately, I have no way to know when to take profit. If I hang in there for the targetted 25-30 pips and more, I rarely seem to get there. I wonder if others are taking consistently smaller profits than ICT seems to aim for. I was very interested to notice that in his live trading reports there are quite a few trades closed out at single figure pips. While reading through the material, I had formed the impression that the SL was there to give your trade room, that you had to be disciplined and not give in to fear when price went against you, even if it went 20-25 pips the wrong way. I get the feeling that, in practice, this is not smart, and most traders donāt do it. I am also surprised to see that when other traders do publish their account records on this forum, they are full of very āscalpyā trades not at all like the big moves they talk about. So, when to jump out seems really critical.
As does when to jump in; scaling in was recently brought up on this thread. To my way of thinking, if scaling out is advisable, then scaling in is too. The profit you make is equally dependent on your point of entry and your point of exit, so what applies to one should apply to the other - unless someone knows a good reason why not. To scale in can have the effect of improving your average entry price, without committing all three lots at the very first moment of entry. There have been quite a few times when I have waited for price to hit the exact middle of the OTE, only to see it turn around short and then reach my projected targets leaving me high and dry, but just as often I have jumped the gun, entered at 61.8%, and had the price move all the way across to 78.6%, often with sad results.
Scaling out reduces your profits dramatically, if your trade does actually go well. Scaling in, by the same token, reduces your losses dramatically, if your trade goes poorly. I am undecided, though, and given my lack of experience, I am currently placing a single lot at about the 70% OTE point and hoping for the best.
So, hats off to those consistently making big 30-pip, and more, trades; my trades seem to be getting smaller and scalpier as time goes by. This is the opposite of what I had hoped; my reason for investing so much time in following the ICT material was in order to make big trades more safely. Not there yet
Thank you for sharing all these tools, Michael. I took note of what you said in last nightās webinar and noted the previous 3 days session high/lows for each of the following: Asian, London, and NY, in addition to the weekās high/low. Itās really interesting how price bounces off these levels like S&R, and how many confluence of price levels exist with respect to Asian, London, and NY high/lows. Iām posting the levels for these past 3 days (October 17, 18, 19 - inclusive of today since the NY session is over):
The way i understand it is this. We place stop losses on our trades to give ourselves a little bit of room as you correctly say, when we enter our trade.
However, once the trade has moved in our favour, maybe 20 or 30 pips, then we tighten our stops to break even thus reducing our exposure to risk.
I may be wrong, and ICT please correct me if i am, but its possible that when he closes those trades with under 10 pips, its because he has moved his stop loss to break even and been taken out of the trade unintentionally, all be it with a small profit, rather than taking the profit manually.
Did you by chance take notes on the material he went over in the chatroom or record it. It would be nice to look over this material so Iām not missing anything.
Yes I had considered this possibility, but it leads me to wonderā¦
After closing out a proportion of your once-profitable positions at breakeven, your mean profit per trade is dragged down. I wonder if just closing out completely at 25-30 pips, whenever you get to that point, would not be better in the long run.
Lol, just been busy with school and working out really. Oh, and a new gf. In other news though Iāve reached a new personal goal of mine (in weight lifting), 5% body fat. I am now as lean as a body builder in their off season
Yes, my name is Wade :p. Itās good youāre live with a small account, itāll help you learn more discipline for sure. I also know the feeling of thinking that there are always trades lined up but Iāve been trying to keep myself to only taking trades with OTEs within OTEs. This has reduced my over trading a lot. Perfect practice makes perfect. Set goals, set rules, set guidelines and keep yourself to them. You could be giving too much weight to a certain element but this comes with practice and experience. Iāve been at this for over 2 years and am starting to really grasp it so understand it may take some time but being that youāve started with ICT I imagine your learning curve will be much shorter than mine. Iāve wasted so much time with the super trend 5000 and what not. Honestly I wish I could forget all the bs Iāve learned along the way and only remember the stuff ICT has taught. I think thatād make me a much better trader. I donāt really use SMT live much. Iām not that good at it yet but I look at it occasionally just for practice.
What I do personally is I look at the daily chart and try to establish the current trend / where price is going. I then look for S/R on the daily, then the 4hr, then the 1hr. I look for OTEs forming off the daily/4hr/1hr that are in agreement with the trend I believe is occurring. If I believe we may be at a turning point I may check the COT/USDx data as well and see where we are there. Once Iāve got my direction established I plot the higher TF OTEs on my chart and zoom down to a 15m/5m and look for OTEs in the same direction and inside of the larger TF OTEs. Agreement with traders trinity and pivots is a bonus but I wonāt completely throw out a trade just because they donāt agree. After everything Iāve learned I really donāt see any other way to trade. Youāve really gotta be paying attention to those factors, especially higher TF trend and S/R.
If you really want to establish discipline and patience only take trades that are OTEs within OTEs. These donāt come around every day so you wonāt be able to trade every day. Also, set weekly goals and start small. Once you hit your goal, even if its just 20 pips/week stop trading. If youāve got any questions ask away! There are quite a few of us on here that have come quite a long way with ICTs methods and Iām sure youāll get an answer fairly quickly.
Just thinking out loud - Iād like to go about this the ārightā way. So I am not trying to diss anyone - but mathematically - if I am to enter 1.5% right at the 61.2% level and it goes to a S.L. -
A) If I would have entered say .5% at 61.2 then .5 at say 70%, then another .5% at 79% all with the SL value - wouldnāt I save a few pips at least, by getting in at a progressively better price.
B) If itās going to hit S.L. anyhow - what is the difference where I get in?
Again not being confrontational - just trying to know the best route. Like I said, I can easily change it.
Yes, I took notes. Hereās what I managed to write down, hopefully others can add if Iāve missed anything since my notes are very brief and it was quite a long webinar:
-Keep an eye on known daily session highs and lowsā¦ that is: a) Asian b) NY c) London
these are the best day trading levels you will find intraday trading aside from PDH and PDL (Previous Day High and Previous Day Low)
-switch to GMT pivots at 5pm Eastern Time
-switch to NY pivots at midnight NY time
(good to monitor both though)
-have NYO levels from previous days trading in mind too
-best trades unfold at or shortly after 7am (<-- for NYO trades, I believe)
the intraday resistance that banks will respect daily are Asian lows and highs
ICT usually avoids trading during NFP, speeches
Question posed to ICT: āso if youre trading into the daily bias, and youre doing the siwng projection, youre going to take 80% of the 200% Fib projection?ā
Answer: āIf we are in higher timeframe direction on the trade yes, otherwise I use old low and scale off 70% and leave 30% on for 128 extensionā
Recap with main points:
The highs and lows made during the session openings, these are critical
Asian Range
London Range
NY Range
These levels will impact trading in the future all timeframes
-Use the higher timeframes to determine killing groundsā¦ or S&R levels
-Wait for a Kill zone or time of day to trade
-Wait for your OTE
-Manage
-Bank
Homework to do daily, everyday:
Have on your platform a chart you determine session highs and lows intraday and monitor
Keep at least last three days and a week if you can manage your screen space right (just short trend lines, no other notes on the chart)
