A calm yet welcoming presence on our forums, QuadPip enjoys greeting new members and watching the BabyPips community continue to grow. He has been with us from the very beginning of his forex trading journey in 2017, and now, he hopes to inspire newbies to pursue their passion for forex trading, and discover more about themselves along the way.
He started A Simple & Effective Method to Ride a Trend that he also learned from other people. He is very positive that this may encourage newcomers while they explore and learn.
Today, he stands by his love for continuous learning and improvement as he shares most of the things he has learned that made him the trader that he is today. This is only the beginning, and weâre certain that weâll see more of him in the coming years.
Without further ado, we give you @QuadPip!
1. Tell us something about yourself.
What are your hobbies and interests, etc.? Iâm of Asian Indian descent. As a child, I was exposed to Indian classical music and that has been a passion of mine over the years. My mother used to play the Sitar (the instrument that Ravi Shankar plays). I play two instruments and I sing semi-classical compositions. I like listening to Jazz too because it allows expression through improvisation, much like Indian classical music.
Iâm an avid reader, I like watching movies and learning new things. Other interests that I have are related to health and self-healing and a perpetual quest for self-development.
2. How did you get into forex trading? Whatâs the story behind the name âQuadPipâ?
A few years ago I came across some studies conducted by top-name universities and well regarded consulting firms like McInsey, that stated that we will see a drastic decline in jobs as technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics mature. Machines will be able to do much of what requires a human to do currently. This, combined with the fact that Iâm not growing any younger, made me look at alternate sources of income generation.
I settled on forex since I donât have to deal with setting up a business and hiring people and such and I can make my own hours. Itâs also something I can do while traveling.
Study Says 800 Million Jobs Will Be Lost By 2030 To Automation YouTube
I considered the equity markets but was daunted by the high capital requirements for margin accounts and the commissions charged per trade. Also, there are literally tens of thousands of companies to choose from. Figuring out which ones to trade is a pain in the butt that I was not willing to endure. Trading commodities did not sound too appealing to me. I do want to explore trading ETFs in the future but for that, I need to grow my forex account large enough to diversify my portfolio.
I joined BabyPips some time ago. I had read about the availability of some indicators, perhaps on Reddit or some other online social forum. All I was interested in was to get those indicators, which I never did find BTW LOL, and I picked âQuadPipâ out of a hat just to create an account. Sorry to disappoint you but it has no special meaning.
3. What is your trading experience, prior to trading the forex market?
I had no trading experience before this so to speak. Several decades ago I had paid for a forex futures trading course but gave it up after a month of losing every trade I got into. Those were the days when you had to call the broker to place an order. When I decided to become a spot forex trader I was starting out pretty much from scratch like any other newbie. I did not remember any of my very short experience in the futures market.
4. Do you have any preference when it comes to the currency pairs you trade?
I like trending pairs so I naturally gravitate to the CAD (when itâs trending) and the Guppy. Other than that I also trade the Yen, Aussie and, very occasionally, the Euro. I donât like to trade the British Pound. GBP, and EUR to an extent have some very strange price moves that I find irksome. Sometimes I will trade the DKK but donât like to trade pairs with large spreads in general. I will also look into other crosses with smaller spreads in the very near future.
5. Youâve mentioned in your story (This is My Story (QuadPip)) that youâve been trading since 2017 but decided to take a break. What were your first strategies in forex trading? How are they different from your strategies today?
I really never had any strategies early on. I was too reliant on indicators and trying to figure out the perfect settings and confluence of indicators to use for entries and exits. I soon realized that indicators are not the way to go. Then, for a while, I got caught up in the London Open hoopla only to realize later, once I learned price action analysis, that the London Open or NY Open was really non-events and that PA foretold all that in advance. The same applies to News.
I settled on learning price action. I would stare at the charts at all waking moments and watch the price as it unfolded in real-time. Slowly, I began to see the patterns and things started making sense to me. By patterns I donât mean chart patterns or candlestick patterns but rather price patterns. That is, how price moved, where was it volatile creating inefficient moves and where it made dense moves and how these movements would affect the future market. Also, what made price turn and where it turned became of interest and an area to study further.
Price leaves tons of markers on the charts that you can train yourself to see, regardless of whether you use time-based charts, tick charts or range charts. Itâs almost like youâre seeing large blinking arrows labeled âsell me hereâ or âbuy me here.â
PA will work for you whether you want to scalp, day trade or swing trade. At times these signs are so very clear and at other times not so much. Or perhaps itâs my lack of knowledge that prevents me from seeing them just yet. I never use Heikin-Ashi or Renko bars or Point & Figure charts since these do not show a pip perfect price movement, and therefore they hide all the myriad tell-tale signs that price leaves behind in its wake.
Iâm constantly evolving my analysis techniques. Currently, I use supply/demand concepts along with price action. The only reason that I mention supply/demand is that when price prints a bar that is opposite to the previous bar and then it continues along the previous path, that âreversalâ bar is what forms part of supply/demand. Only, supply/demand states that you need 3 or more congestion bars for it to be called a supply/demand region. I disagree with this. I think that a single reversal bar can be just as powerful in turning price, depending upon where it exists in the context of the larger PA. PA really contains supply/demand material and enhances it manyfold as well as providing a level of precision that supply/demand lacks.
Iâm also not a purist, in that, while I donât use indicators, I will sometimes use the RSI to determine where price will turn if Iâm not sure which supply or demand areas will affect price. I use the predictive elements of the RSI, such as overbought or oversold and divergences. I donât use it to signal entries or exits because those signals lag in time and I can get better entries and exits using PA every time. Having said that, you need to learn to read the RSI correctly and in the correct direction for it to provide the information that youâre looking for.
6. What made you decide to come up with your own forex trading methodology? (A Simple & Effective Method to Ride a Trend)
This is not a methodology that I can call my own, per se. Iâve used knowledge about price action, that Iâve learned from other people, to come up with a simple way to trade a trend.
I was hoping that it would enable newcomers to get some early quick wins so that they might get interested in learning more about price action based trading and to explore the more precise trading methods that price action enables.
Many of my entries have a 5 pip or less drawdown and Iâve posted some of them in the forum. I donât do this to show off. In fact, I donât consider myself to be an excellent trader at all. Iâm still developing my skills and Iâm a long way from declaring myself to be a superb trader - âmiles to go before I sleepâ :).
I post these entries to get people to want to be able to make these sorts of entries for themselves. Watching someone do this on a YouTube video is what got me interested in learning price action. Iâm hoping that my posts will inspire some newbies to experience the wonders of PA based trading.
Price action allows you to analyze exactly, to the pip, where price will turn. I allow 3 pips for variance and 2 pips for the spread if Iâm trading the majors and thatâs how I manage to get these precise entries many times. This allows me to keep my risk down and to trade a larger lot size. It also allows me to move my SL to BE much quicker, thereby protecting my account balance with a lower probability of getting stopped out of a profitable trade.
7. How has trading changed your life and what have you learned about being a forex trader?
I believe that everyone should learn how to trade, whether or not one intends to develop trading as a profession.
Trading teaches you a lot about yourself, it teaches you patience and most importantly, it teaches you to think in terms of probabilities. It also provides you with insights and skills that you can use in any endeavor that you decide to pursue in life. I see it as essential training for self-development.
Your psychological makeup is an important aspect to developing your trading success. Trading forces you to introspect and keeps you honest. If you lie to yourself you will get nowhere, therefore, you are forced to accept your failings and to attempt to improve or at least ameliorate your detrimental habits.
You can only blame the market, or whatever else you decide to apportion blame to, so many times before you realize that you and you alone are responsible for your trading success or failure. The more you conduct these introspective exercises the more you learn about yourself and, over time, you begin to change yourself for the better. This self-development helps you in all walks of life.
8. Have you ever thought of investing in cryptocurrencies? Why or why not?
The underpinning of cryptocurrencies is the broader concept of distributed public ledgers. Iâm in the IT software industry and I used to be a software developer. As such, distributed ledger technologies (DLT) are of interest to me from a technology standpoint.
However, I see Bitcoin as a socio-economic experiment, or at the very least as a trial balloon, and for this reason, Iâm a huge fan of Satoshi Nakamoto and his Bitcoin. It makes people think about what money really is and to understand money at a fundamental level. Most of the worldâs currencies are not pegged to gold or other precious metals as they used to be. They are fiat currencies, which means that they are decreed to be the national currency by law.
Having unpegged currencies from an underlying limited asset, the central banks get free reign to print any amount of their currency as they deem fit and release it into the economy. This causes inflation which is really a hidden tax that we all pay. The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 unpegged the U.S. Dollar from gold and inflation has been rising at an alarming rate ever since. In 2006 the Federal Reserve decided not to publish M3 anymore.
See: Goodbye M3 - What is the Government hiding?
As traders, I would highly recommend that you read the book, âThe Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserveâ by G. Edward Griffin, a great thinker and author. You can also find many of his talks on YouTube. This book will shake the foundations of the fundamentalists.
Sadly, I donât think that Bitcoin will be allowed to flourish. It represents too much of a threat to the hegemony of banks which, if Bitcoin (or another crypto) is adopted as a mainstream currency, directly threatens their role as intermediaries in the financial system.
Banks have been buying up BTC for some time now and, IMO, the creation of a futures market for Bitcoin is a harbinger to its eventual ruin. For this reason, among others, I do not trade Bitcoin. Having said that, I believe that Bitcoin has spurred an interest in people to develop distributed ledger technologies that address some of the shortcomings of the current DLT-based cryptos, namely, scaling or low TPS (Transactions Per Second), security, ease of use, and 100% Async Bayesian Fault Tolerance.
As it stands today, the banks pretty much do as they please and even when they are caught red-handed perpetrating a crime, nobody ever goes to jail for it. They will, of course, bring forth a fall guy to take the blame; the lone gunman syndrome. There is no accountability (Iceland is the only exception). By creating a robust DL technology we can let computers enforce the rules so that we are never subjected to blasphemous criminal acts from financially irresponsible actors. An example would be the Libor Scandal. This could never occur in a DLT regulated world.
Libor Scandal: Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the worldâs most important number | Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch | Business | The Guardian
IMO, money (and religion) are the bane of humanity. My hope is that perhaps someday soon, we can eliminate at least the need for a monetary-based economy altogether. In the words of a wise forum member, @anon46773462, âMoney is not a motivator nor a meaning of life. But a lack of it is certainly an inhibitor.â Eliminating the need for money altogether from our world will mean the end of our trading careers for sure but it will free humanity from strife and its current hamster wheel situation; free to create and be creative, as we were meant to be. There are forward-thinking and visionary people working toward this end. Please feel free to contribute to this effort if you are able to do so.
The Venus Project: https://www.thevenusproject.com YouTube
9. Which among the BabyPips forum threads (that are not your own) do you find the most interesting? Why is this so?
There is no single thread in particular that I find more interesting than another. What I do find interesting is how forum members interact and react on the forums. I also like reading the introductions of new BP members. It brings nostalgic memories of when I started my journey in a state of total confusion. I would like to give each one a big hug and to point them in the right direction, except that there is no one path that fits all. One of my hobbies is people watching and online forums are a sort of people watching too.
10. What advice would you give to a newbie who wants to make a living out of forex trading?
I strongly suggest learning price action analysis. I cannot stress this enough. No matter what other methodologies you decide to use, you can always use price action to improve your trading.
Also, price action analysis does not change with changing market conditions. You can also use it to trade other markets besides forex. Price Action is king. Hunker down and inhale it until it becomes second nature to you. If you do, your chances of success will be greatly improved.
You donât need the plethora of indicators or to bother with news or any of the fundamental stuff. Price succinctly and unpretentiously tells the whole story. Learn to read it and you will reap the benefits. I would also caution you against being overly vested in any one methodology, including price action analysis.
If you believe that you are in possession of the holy grail methodology then you will stop looking for something better and you will miss the opportunity to find that something better if it exists out there. Keep an open mind and learn every methodology out there. Then use it and see what works best for you.
Continuous learning and continuous improvement should be your mantra. Becoming a cracker-jack trader is a journey, not a destination. You need dogged determination and a willingness to endure the long haul. Use what works and throw away the rest. Trading is really simple if you think about it. In a non-stagnant market, price either goes up or down. Your job is to ride on its coattails. Donât overcomplicate this. You can do it!