Yeah, once in a blue moon, Oanda throws a huge spike on the Sunday evening open that catches a lot of traders to stop out or get into a bad position. However, they're pretty good about fixing the problem, and contribute it to their automated ...

Yeah, using a stop loss order far away, and not touching it until the trade ends, is one way to help such a bad habit. In fact, that was the original intention of a stop loss, but too many traders use it as a "lazy man's exit signal"

Yep... just think of all the people who still held on to their dot com stocks in 2000, thinking "it will bounce back up", while the NASDAQ plummets and half their portfolio files for bankruptcy.

Yep. Just running a SAR and MACD (?... at least, that's what it looks like). Keep it simple. My old sig block said that if you trade with more indicators* than articles of clothing you wear on a typical day, then something's wrong. * And yes, I ...

Ye gods... what a terrible piece of software. The only thing that made any sense was the large red/green circles showing volume balance at certain prices. I couldn't understand what all that other crap was in the background or even what it's ...

Yep. I use a 1 min as a "longer term" chart (most people see this as "shortest term"... lol). When you're scalping off the 5 sec, a 1 min seems to take forever to change, so not only does it give you perspective, but you really don't have to refer ...

Personally, I like to look at a weekly %age goal of around 5%-10%. The reason why is some days, the market just isn't there, and if you try too hard to hit a daily quota, you just wind up losing money and getting frustrated. There are 52 weeks in a ...

I found that, yes indeed, they are approximately the same most of the time. The exception is if there is a big upward/downward price movement on the longer term chart, or a price spike on the shorter term chart that is calculated into the MA. If I'm ...

I was going to say the same. At the very least, the third trade could've been avoided by paying attention to the price region where it stopped and turned around previously.

I look at the 1 min. for a longer term trend, and trade off the 5 sec for scalping... seriously. I got rid of candlesticks and just went with close price because candlesticks just get in the way.

My definitions of a trend: -- I like to use the Martin Pring guidelines that Kiwi_trader pointed out. -- A string of bars, where most are C > prev C, or C > O for uptrend (opposite for downtrend). Should be obvious when using candlesticks. -- A ...

I'm not sure exactly what it is, but IB offers it, so here's their explanation of what it does.

The last hour of the US stock market (3:00-4:00PM EST) is when the big guys put in their trades before the end of the day. I imagine that they do the same for the futures and forex markets during this time. The old adage is that the first hour of ...

I'm more of a left brained person, but I think the rainbow universally works for scalping: the reason why is your right brain reacts much faster than your left brain. The right brain is designed to pick up patterns in the environment right away, ...

That would explain why the correlation begins around Jan 2004, as this was around the time that the carry trades became very significant with corporations.

Huh... interesting correlation. I wonder if the intraday is the same. I was thinking of getting into the Dow eminis during US market hours.

I tried exponential progression of a factor of two (ie: one MA is twice a previous MA). Didn't like how it looked, and went back to linear progression. However, that square of numbers doesn't look too bad.

$2.50 is their minimum charge per order. When you have order sizes past 125k, it's only 0.2 pips per side.

That comes in handy. I try to avoid the market about ten minutes before a high impact announcement, and get back in when it settles down (usually 5-10 minutes afterwards). At that point, you get some nice trends in the 5 sec time frame, while those ...

Exactly. I'm a math geek, so I've taken apart every indicator that I come across, and became disappointed when I realized half of them were repetitive or close enough approximations to other indicators, making them worthless. Not only ...