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Attachments: The Trader's Academy - by Traders for Traders
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The Trader's Academy - by Traders for Traders

It is truth of traders life theory is quite different from practical , Traders need only practical theory is just market product to sell
Neither a Bro Nor a Pro I am I
Quoting C-12
{quote} Not sure what you mean by proprietary issues since we're all looking at the same information. Propriety would suggest private inside knowledge which nobody has unless you're working for a central bank or a big financial institution. It's all just different interpretations of the same chart. I trade supply and demand, Davit likes his pivots. Some people like moving averages, S/R or trend-lines. Calling potential trades and posting after trade entries and exits gives nothing away apart from a heads up that the method is valid. People then...
The 3 categories why traders on forums don't want to post their actual trades -

1. They don't want to share their method/strategy/system with strangers on the internet,

2. Wannabe successful traders will be found out with their actual trades,

3. Scammers and marketers.

95% fall under category 2&3, very very few traders have reached the skill level to have issue with category 1.

Over on the recent MoneyZilla interactive thread the reasons are that -

4. they play ball only with other pro-footballers(banks etc).

5. They play ball only in professional matches(large accounts of $100++K)

6. They won't be bothered since they have nothing to prove,

7. ???

Imagine this is a football academy, after gone through a period of classroom lessons and when on the actual pitch to work out the practical ball skills the "pro" abstain from kicking a ball. That's how weird it looks when the best way to learn from the "pro" is to watch them kick the football around.

There's no 'pro-footballer(trader)' who's willing to kick a ball(trade) shown on a forex trading forum.
Quoting hanover
{quote} Having said that, I agree that trading ultimately comes down to mastering a process, and that knowledge is worthless unless/until the individual finds his own way of applying a suitable strategy consistently. Patience, dedication, resilience, keeping a steady nerve under pressure, self-belief, continual practice, experience, accuracy and consistency of execution, ...... developing and nurturing these essential qualities starts and ends only within each individual.
Maybe the thread should have just concentrated on the psychology side of trading as mentioned by Hanover. By drifting into actual trading strategy was
the downfall as each trader has his own belief of superiority of his own particular method. Hence all the abuse.
It gets more serious when you actually depend on your profits as your main income.
Only each trader himself can put a value to that from his own trading ability. As the saying goes "there are many ways to skin a cat".
Unfortunate metaphor, Best of Luck, Cat.
The Only Limit, is the One that you Set Yourself - Felix Baumgartner
GOOD TRADING TO EVERYONE IN 2018


Attached Image
NO MATTER THE SITUATION,NEVER LET YOUR EMOTIONS OVERPOWER YOUR INTELLIGENCE
Because there are new traders joining the ranks each and every day, I thought I'd make a quick post here just to brush the cobwebs off of this thread for those who may be interested.

Wishing everyone well, and don't believe most of the crap on this forum..just believe in yourself and never underestimate this business, and I say business because that is what it is, a business and not a game of poker. Dedication, professionalism, and a great deal of hard work are what this business requires to be successful. It is not a business for dreamers or people who are impulsive and impatient, and it is certainly no place for people are are incapable of learning from their mistakes.

Quick post prompted by something I saw on another thread today, and though I haven't really got anything to add to this thread, I do have just this.

RULES - we've got to have them, because without some kind of plan that we structure around price movement, we are just drifting in the ocean without a paddle.

But we cannot just design a set of rules on a piece of paper, rules come with experience and one has to know how they apply to each new market set up - they are the manifestation of all we have learnt as traders, which is why a strategy that is used by one trader is next to useless in the hands of another who has not evolved with it.

Yes, we have all heard the Turtle trader story, but that does not relate to the retail trader who is putting his or her own money on the line. If you do not have sound knowledge of the markets, if you do not have a strategy and rules that you always abide by and which fit to your market in any one minute, hour or day, and if you lose more on any single trade than your risk tolerance allows, you will get pulverized in this business, again and again.
Quoting cat
...RULES - we've got to have them, because without some kind of plan that we structure around price movement, we are just drifting in the ocean without a paddle...
Quoting cat
... a strategy that is used by one trader is next to useless in the hands of another who has not evolved with it...
I couldn't have said it better myself.

How to build a personal Mental Road Map about Price Behaviour, founded on Clear and Objective Rules.
This issue was a real and proper “crusade” for me, here on FF...

I wish for you, Sir, all the luck that I didn't have trying to convey this point!
This is part of a post I wrote on another thread...
It's a perfect summary of what I think after some years spent trying to understand Mother Market...


Trying some answers (partial and surely too generic...)

Don't judge.
I mean... don't judge “once and for all!”
Never be rigid in your “mental scheme”.
Market is an “always changing” environment for definition.
Each new candle add new information. So, follow the development (and don't judge... don't impose your view on the market.)

There are always two parts:
>Your initial bias - which direction you think the price is moving. (note that I used a present continuous and not a future tense!)
>Adapting to the reality of which direction the price actually moves.
The first is "easy". (LOL).
The second is where traders lose money.

How to build your initial bias?
Well, it depends by your point of reference.
What do you wanna see? What are you looking for? What is your “Mental Road Map”?

Are you a pure discretionary trader? You trade with the bottom of your pants? All guts and feelings?
Are you a technical trader?
A mechanical one?
Wanna trade the Moving Averages?
The supply and demand level? (That very, very often are in conflict with the MA!)
Set-ups? Patterns?
Only one? Two? Three?
Only deep pull backs?
Are you a contrarian? A breakout trader?
You wanna master the complexity of all this all together?

And what is a “change”? Where to stop? Where to reverse positions?
Yes. Trading is not easy and is not simple.
We need rules. Conviction/Confidence, discipline and determination.

We face other Traders.
Traders taking decisions. Million of decisions in a million of different “places”, levels... spots and points.
Yes. Market is complete freedom.
Market is the better place where you could take a wrong decision!
So choose and decide.
But when you choose a style you must become a Master of it. (If you want to trade 1min chart why look at H4?)
OODA. Observe, orient, decide, act.
Who will survive?
Only the most able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which we find ourself.
Jack the nimble.

... P.S.
Yes, Turtles Rules are not for "normal", "average" retailers....
But inside that episode, part of the "History of Trading", there are huge and deep lessons for each one of us, humble students of the Price Dynamics.
Quoting skyway
{quote} The 3 categories why traders on forums don't want to post their actual trades - 1. They don't want to share their method/strategy/system with strangers on the internet, 2. Wannabe successful traders will be found out with their actual trades, 3. Scammers and marketers. 95% fall under category 2&3, very very few traders have reached the skill level to have issue with category 1. Over on the recent MoneyZilla interactive thread the reasons are that - 4. they play ball only with other pro-footballers(banks etc). 5. They play ball only in professional...
I'm a bit of a newbie and I'm not getting consistent results (successes), but I would add:

kinda 2. and definitely 7. They don't want to post because it puts pressure on them to continue to post successes, even though we all know all systems will suffer some drawdown periodically. They may then get criticism and this, and self pressure to get and post good results, then leads to failure and fall off of confidence.

Note to self? If I receive criticism from others, and only 1 in 10 traders are successful, then I am most probably being criticised by people who are also not successful. Therefore, logically? I should ignore most (if not all) criticism.
[quote=solotrade;11126579]{quote} Note to self? If I receive criticism from others, and only 1 in 10 traders are successful, then I am most probably being criticised by people who are also not successful. Therefore, logically? I should ignore most (if not all) criticism.[/qu

Most definitely, unless it is obviously constructive criticism, and the difference between the two should be clear to see. There are essentially three types of people here on ff - those who wish to learn, those who wish to impress, and those who wish to help. The difference should not be too difficult to determine.

Success? Screen time, and lots of it. This business is a lot more difficult and takes much longer to learn than anyone realizes when they are relatively new to the game, and risking money than we cannot afford to lose is suicidal unless we know exactly what we are doing. Most aspiring traders simply do not want to wait that long, hence the high failure rate.

Wishing you well - just keep at it, and learn everything you need to learn, about yourself, and about the markets.
A quick post but an important one even though we all know this.

It is worth being reminded that our success as traders is directly proportional to our ability to think and act like traders. This means that emotional trading has to be completely taken out of the equation so that entries and exits are systemised and taken without hesitation and without worrying about the consequences. The system ( not any system, but the one we have devised ourselves through much trail and error ) provides signals which we recognise as opportunities to enter or exit the market, and we take them, each and every time, day in day out. Losses are managed and treated as costs to running the business, for there are always costs to running any business, and in trading, these are the losses we incur. If the losses exceed the gains, then we are either allowing our emotions to sabotage our trading, or we need to improve upon our ability to read price movement.

The catch - humans are not robots, and our evolution as a species has only been possible due to our innate fight or flight mechanism, a powerful switch in our brains which maximizes the importance of survival and danger aversion over everything else. This is a fantastic fail-safe mechanism to have when hunting game on the African Veld, but not so great when we are about to enter a trade with the risk of losing money if it goes wrong, because it means that we will either avoid taking the trade altogether, thereby sidestepping the danger, or we will panic and allow our emotions to take over if we do and it turns against us, both of which will be disastrous on our bottom line trading performance.

So we have to re-programme ourselves completely, to be able to override these natural human tendencies we are all born with, most of which serve us very well in the normal world where each and every decision that we make does not punish us if we happen to make the wrong one, but not in trading. As a trader, we have to project ourselves into something and someone most of us are not when we first start to learn to trade, because if we stay as we are, susceptible to our normal human emotions, then we can never become consistently successful traders, never.

When people say that trading is hard, really hard to master, it is this aspect they are talking about above all else. No it is not easy to learn how to correctly read price movement, but given enough time it can be done, but it is at the psychological level where most of us fail, and we fail for no other reason than we are human. To succeed, we have to step out of this skin into a new one, and be able to stay in it for as long as we trade.
Just a quick follow up on the last post ! made.

I would like to ask a question, which doesn't need answering here on this thread, but it is something that is worth thinking about.

How risk averse are you, generally as a person. Are you someone who easily steps out of your comfort zone, or are you generally someone who prefers, by nature, not to.

I ask because the type of person we are has a dramatic effect on our ability to trade the markets. If we are too cautious, if we are the type of person who naturally tends to shy away from risk, then trying to trade effectively will be the equivalent of banging our head against a brick wall, and every bit as painful.

The opposite is not to be reckless, but it does mean that we have to embrace risk. Traders have to embrace risk, every day, and they have to revel in it to be consistently profitable.

If you are one of the many traders, and believe me there are many, who can read charts well, who has a real edge that can identify winning trades, but are still unable to consistently take money out of the markets, then it is you that is the problem. It may be that you are too risk averse when it comes to live trading, or it may be that you have real discipline issues which let you down, but the problem lies not in the markets, it lies with you, which is great actually, because it means that it is fixable.

Identify the problem, and fix it. It is the only way. I'm not saying it is easily done, I know it's not, for it is incredibly difficult to change our character and personality to that which is required for consistently profitable trading, but it has to be done, or we may as well quit right now.
My 2 cents:

the best type of mentality is being risk neutral. The ideal zen state is to be indifferent to all trades and their outcomes, the only thing you should be checking is to make sure your edge actually exists.

People often get the wrong idea about what it is they're actually trying to do in trading. Your job is not to be 'right', nor is it to 'make money'. Those are outcomes. Your job is to identify high edge trades and do them, ideally with as little emotional bias as possible. The market does whatever it wants to do without any regard to your stop, take profit, position or even existence (as a trader that is).

It is possible to train a heavily risk averse or risky person to become risk neutral through deliberate practice.

One analogy I like to use is the Blackjack Dealer analogy: your job as a trader is the same as a Blackjack Dealer. Once you've established that you have absolute edge (in the form of probability), you simply take every trade that exhibits that edge. You deal every single hand possible, even if you bust and pays out the table, you keep dealing. Over the long run you will be profitable.
I would like to share my experience along the way. I want to share some tips that I think can help...

1. Do not take the information on the forums seriously, usually 99% - absolute nonsense ( using this advice you will save a lot of time on real training).
2. Do not believe the guru, mentor, refresher courses, do not buy a trading system for$ 5000 to become a millionaire (you will save time, money, nerves, it will save you from false ideas about trading).
3. No one will do your job for you (you have to analyze charts, make decisions. The whole process of learning consists of trial and error, and again trial and error of the final conclusions).
4. Do not use a demo account ( test strategies on real accounts with a minimum amount of money, it will give you useful emotions that will be needed in the future, and speed up the learning process).
5. Do not believe in many so - called rules:" R: R should be at least 1: 3"," the risk should not exceed 1-2% " - it's all nonsense. ( It all depends on the trading style used, your trading statistics and is set up depending on it).

p.s. Day trading and scalping are more profitable due to the large number of trades and potential profits... (perhaps this was my biggest mistake ).

Just some thoughts that came to mind...
Excuse me, my English is very bad...
Quoting cat
One of the hardest things about learning how to trade is that no one gives a shit. If you are training to become a doctor, an engineer, a teacher or some other worthy professional, your friends and family will be proud of you and shower you with praise and encouragement, but when you are locking yourself away in some small room at home, unseen and unknown to the world for hours and hours a day, people think you are a fool, a dreamer, a gambler, someone who doesn't want to work for a living. Speak to any successful retail trader and I guarantee they...
One of the best and most honest posts on here in years, aint that the bloody truth! If I had a dollar for every time I heard "pfft, how many 10 cent pieces have you made today?" over the last 5 years I wouldn't need to trade.
Ardua Ad Astra Per
I'm probably repeating myself with this post but it's no bad thing.

We all know that losses are unavoidable in trading however careful we are to avoid them, but the majority of the losses of losing traders occur due to lack of preparation.

In trading as in any venture, preparation is everything - if we do not prepare properly for the task at hand, then we are more than likely to fail. When we enter a trade, we must know exactly why we are doing it at that particular moment. If the entry is impulsive or unplanned, then we have set ourselves up for a losing trade. Such disrespect for the markets deserves to get punished, and it usually does. There is no guarantee for success in trading, we all know that, but there is no guarantee for failure either, unless we are unprepared. Putting our money on the line without the necessary amount of preparatory work will always be doomed to failure, and that means being able to recognize a potential trading opportunity before it is confirmed. Failure to do this will inevitably result in chasing the market, poorly timed trades, and general trading chaos.

The Sniper here I have posted before on this thread, but here it is again. It is a very valuable piece of instruction for us traders -

The Sniper


  1. The sniper will train for years to sharpen and perfect his shooting skills, and the sniper knows exactly what his target looks like and pulls the trigger without hesitation
  2. The sniper must have unusual patience and be able to stay still for long hours.The sniper must know when to take the shot and when not to. He must be a keen observer, paying attention to details and being aware of his surroundings and everything that is going on around him.
  3. The sniper must be meticulous in his preparation; planning routes for both insertion and evasion, and should be meticulous in record keeping. Sniping is a constant learning experience, and the sniper must be able to keep acquiring knowledge to enhance his skills and abilities.
  4. The sniper in the military has an edge over his enemy; His edge is unwavering patience, mastery of his weapon, and the ability to remain consciously in control of his mind and body for long periods of time in high-stress situations.

Quoting cat
I'm probably repeating myself with this post but it's no bad thing. We all know that losses are unavoidable in trading however careful we are to avoid them, but the majority of the losses of losing traders occur due to lack of preparation. In trading as in any venture, preparation is everything - if we do not prepare properly for the task at hand, then we are more than likely to fail. When we enter a trade, we must know exactly why we are doing it at that particular moment. If the entry is impulsive or unplanned, then we have set ourselves up for...
yes.
but many in forums look more like using a super nuke and try to splash it at all. and more like gamer who can restart any new game or account with little mini accounts.
Quoting cat
As mentioned above, here's my Christmas card from the great man, Geoffrey Wellum, author of' First Light', and still alive and kicking today. They made a film about the book - here's the trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WqVppfopMY {image} {image}
The great man passed away on the 20th July, aged 96. Reading his wonderful book during my early years of learning how to trade, along with many other WW2 pilot's stories, helped me with my psychological approach enormously, and I would recommend any of them to traders who may be seeking some inspiration.

R.I.P Squadron Leader Goeffrey Wellum.
I never post anything which I do not identify with myself, and whatever I identify with as a trader and as a person, I know others will also, as we are human after all.

I have always been, and still am to a certain extent, a procrastinator, though I have managed to eliminate this character trait from my trading. If I hadn't, I would no longer be trading, that's for sure.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/a...-procrastinate
Quoting cat
I never post anything which I do not identify with myself, and whatever I identify with as a trader and as a person, I know others will also, as we are human after all. I have always been, and still am to a certain extent, a procrastinator, though I have managed to eliminate this character trait from my trading. If I hadn't, I would no longer be trading, that's for sure. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/a...-procrastinate
After reading this, I am not sure whether I am a procrastinator or just plain lazy...
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