Other than your trading platform, what else do you use for trading tool-wise?
Like I know some of you keep an eye on the news and calendars. Some of you follow certain signals or use an EA.
Special journal app or website?
What’s the go-to tool you absolutely need, or maybe something I should be looking at?
I have built a spread-sheet on which I can mark the Bullish/Bearish indications for each forex pair from both daily and weekly charts. Its easy then to track across and see which pair has the highest total score of Bullish or Bearish markers. The pairs with the highest score are the ones I most urgently want to get into: I continue to avoid pairs with very low scores.
The tracker spread-sheet also means I can see the quality of each open position as time passes. Its always nice when a positions starts to show a higher and higher Bullish score. But if the score starts to drop significantly, I will often exit early, now wait for the stop-loss to be hit. I possibly spend more time on the spread-sheet than with the charts.
Do you include R:R in your trade selection? Or are you not concerned? For me, it’s a no. I am never sure what the market is willing to give. It could be a 1:1 when I get an exit signal. It could be 1:10 (fingers crossed). I just take what the market gives.
Yes, I don’t even calculate r:r after trades are exited. If the trade is trend-following I take the position, and almost never set a TP.
How do you come up with this? Like looking at trend on the daily and weekly charts, or using indicators to give you that info?
I note the TA features I am looking for on both D1 and W1 charts which would suggest the most perfect trend. If you’re looking for your own entry set-up you probably have a number of features you look for - if they’re all present its the perfect set-up. some of them will be more important than others.
Just start with an idealised picture of the perfect set-up. List the features that make it perfect and mark them against each pair. If the pair is scoring 6 out of 6 or 10 out of 10 or whatever your criteria say, you must try to get into that trade asap.
Of course, if you’re in a position and its not making money and the score is starting to trickle downwards, or the most fundamental positive features are disappearing, you might then think about an early exit.
Simple and methodical.
Each month I seem to get caught out by the US inflation announcement, which happened again earlier this week.
It throws currency pairs right out of whack, but they seem to retrace over the following days.
Any other announcements that people are most wary of?
To be honest, nothing. I don’t even bother reading the news anymore and I pay zero attention to calender dates/ interest announvements/ farm-role-thingy. It’s never helped my style of trading. My only took is my calculator and a piece of paper.