How serious are you about making money in Forex?

Silly question?

I think not.

How many people come to this board, and then fade away, either because they lose their cash, or because a so called 'winning trader' did not give them access to their system, so they went off looking for the holy grail (hint it really doesn't exist - no strategy is 100% perfect)

SO I want to give a challenge to new traders, failing traders, break even traders alike... winning traders, don't bother, as you don't need this...

I want to issue a challenge to complete a series of tasks i set. I will give you NO strategy, i will give you NO false hope.

What i will do, is to SHOW you how you can develop yourself into a winning trader, or at the very least, a Break Even trader.

it will take work, on your side. It will be a journey of discovery, you will not be done and dusted in 2 days, it will be an ongoing experience.

Are you wanting to commit to the challenge? Reply here, and make me a promise that you will keep your wallet in your pocket, you will focus on one thing - this challenge.

I want nothing from you, I dont want your money, and I dont want you wasting your money on the rest of the tat out there that has flooded the market. YOU will do the work (YES, to earn money, YOU need to WORK, nothing comes free... it takes either TIME or MONEY, I am asking for TIME only).

So register your interest, and we will see where we get to.

By the way, there will be some negativity, and disbelief, I only want to impart some of my experience. Some of it may be counter intuitive, some maybe repeated, some may work for you, and some may not.... which is FINE... it is GOOD. Some people can use MA crossover, some people cant (cant think of an easier method!!!)

I am putting my neck on the line, and will take the abuse... at the end of the day, apart from time, you have nothing to lose.

My aim is purely to get you thinking, get you working, and get you advancing.

Who's in?

Is forex gambling? Retracements, Are they the sign of correction or beginning of reversal trend? Because I think the spread is likely to be profit we should take. Because it's taken by so-called "spread", I can't think of other way other than being speculative.

Not quite sure what you mean by taking the spread as profit....

Gambling is defined by wagering money on an uncertain outcome...

In Forex you can never be 100% sure that you will make money on every trade, but over 100 trades you can put the odds in your favour that you will be profitable. You are ALWAYS speculative, but there is different magnitudes of speculative.

After all, digging for Oil is highly speculative, but your chances of success in hitting oil in Saudi Arabia is much better than hitting oil in Denmark.... past precedent tells you that oil comes from Saudi Arabia, and not from Denmark.

So you go to SA to dig for oil.. still speculative, but your odds have increased. If you start looking at maps, and you see trends developing as to where the oil HAS been found, you can start to get an idea of where the oil is YET to be found.

That is what we are doing here. Yes it is speculative, but what i am offering is how you can start to work out where you can start digging for oil in the Forex markets...

There are a number of elements that make up a successful strategy, whether it is simply looking at naked charts,, what time frame you look at, what R:R you want to work with etc... all which i want to cover as part of an overall strategy (which is never explained in these forum posts, as people regard a strategy as simply the method, or set risk reward, or set sl/tp ect) that suits you. This will show you how to develop a strategy for you, becuase you are the one who develops it... i just guide you on the process.

It gets you critically thinking and objectively thinking as to what can work, and what gives you the best success...

Is it speculative? Yes. does than mean you will lose cash? No. Does that mean that you can make money? Of course. Will it be easy? No. Will you see the benefits if you put the effort in? 100%

What I mean with spread is, I think the spread is adjusted, so that on a more consistent pairs the spread is big, and in the less consistent pair the spread is small. Again, when news is arising, the spread becomes so high, it could potentially takes the profit. Alright I'm in. I'm dead serious on making money from forex. For starter, to see the trend, I use ADX with the setting 25. So that means when the number is above 25, the trend is happening. But again, indicators are lagging. So I'm not sure if I can trust indicator. I'm a bit into technical approach above. I haven't learned about fundamental analysis.

OK, i see what you are saying- if your broker does not have fixed spreads, then absolutely the spread widens with volatility and can eat into your profit.

I don't trade fundamentals - news days i stay out of the market (such as NFP and heads of banks talks for the most part that will send the currency haywire) however, i can pick up the pieces of this afterwards by using technical analysis - but again, it has to be the right time and place.

We will wait for some more people to register their interest, and we will go through some stuff together...

Just to let you know, i use a mixture of TA, PA, S/D, S/R to determine whether to enter a trade, and also to exit the trade. Using all these things together, builds good strategies that i use.

Part of what i want to share is how to turn those lagging indicators into a winning strategy. BTW, I am a big fan of ADX in the right circumstances...

Yes, thank you. My broker doesn't have fixed spread. Alright. we'll wait for some more people to join in.

Hello please count me in,after two years of struggle i understand it is possible to succed with discipline and hardwork,im ready to put in the effort required.
Thanks.

Roland I am in

cool, 3 seems a pretty good number to start with, and if anybody else wants to start, they can jump into it as we go on. - I am going to assume everyone has MT4, and knows how to open charts etc - if not, PM me and i will walk you through it....

I want everyone to have a DEMO account. First and foremost, I dont agree with Demo accounts, as they are about as useful to actual trading as flour is to making wallpaper paste.... HOWEVER!!!! hey are a good place to start for developing strategies, as we want to start getting used to trying things that we have not done before.

So once you have your MT4 demo account, I want you to open up the following charts on the 4hr and 1 day charts - NOTHING lower than these time frames. At the end of this.... thing (dont want to call it a course lol!!!) you can experiment with lower, but i am pretty sure you will find that your win rate drops, and your profitability drops as well.

AUDJPY
GBPUSD
EURJPY
USDCHF
CHFJPY
CADCHF
USDJPY
USDCAD
GBPJPY
EURGBP
AUDUSD
NZDUSD
EURUSD
NZDJPY - this one is optional, as it has a higher spread than then rest.

The rest of the pairs have a spread of a maximum (at time of writing!) of 3 pips. This comes back to Andrern's point of spread... these are pretty stable pairs during the London and NY session... Tokyo the volume dips a bit, so not unusual to see the spreads increasing overnight (I am on GMT time by the way!).

Stay away from the exotics, as in my experience, they are probably only good for trading on the weekly timeframe or monthly - they dont have the volume or a good spread for most of the time.

With these pairs we are trying to optimize our returns, and although during news events and over weekends, the spreads can jump about, they will suffice.

Something to bear in mind, that one strategy will not be a strategy that fits all pairs. We can analyse this as we start trading though.

Also, can everyone open up a Trade explorer to show how you are getting on. I want to be able to see how you are trading as we go through this - it is really important - trust me! It is only on demo in any case!

We will get into everything else once everyone has sorted these bits out!

ON it, all currency pair opened

Right, first thing to do, is to have a look at the picture here:



Looks a bit messy, but this is only showing you some of the tools we can use for technical analysis... not indicators, but the tools to help us analyse the charts!

So everyone should be pretty familiar with the trend line and horizontal line... which pretty much gives you your trends and your support and resistance levels - yes? If not, give me a PM and I will talk you through it, but we shall be touching on this in a bit in any case.

In the top left hand corner is where these hang out... i know preaching to the choir, but stick with me... The insert button gives you access to things like lines, channels Gann, Fibs, Shapes (that you will see when people draw in Supply and demand levels)... and things for labelling the charts... just to clear up something, the bits i have put on the chart are dumped on there, they do not represent supply and resistance - i am only showing you what they look like before people start shouting foul!!! The other bit in that top left hand corner is just a quick toolbar for things like fibs, and line studies.

What most people do not realise, is that when you open an indicator, you can mark up the INDICATOR in exactly the same way... so you can add fib retracements, you can add shapes, you can put andrews pitchfork onto the indicator... maybe you are seeing where i am starting to go with this....

So the first Task about creating your strategy, is pick a random indicator... preferably one you have no idea what it does (and one that opens in a separate window, not on the main chart), and start just playing about with the various tools, and adding them to your indicators.

Have a bit of fun with it.... see if the Fib retracement bears any resemblence to highs and lows... see if the pitchfork works on the Awesome oscillator.... who cares at this stage... Try to start correlating the tool with the chart... does a different tool give you a better understanding of where price changes, goes sideways, gives you profit, causes you to lose. Start looking at the highs and the lows etc...

The point of this is to start using the indicators in a way you have not used them before, and in a way they were NOT designed to be used.

WHY????

If you have been using the indicators the way you have been taught, if you have been losing using these indicators in that way, then expect to get the same results you have always got with them.

This is the start of creating YOUR strategy that YOU can develop and that YOU can have success with, as the more you create, the more you will be able to see what is happening on the chart....

So task one - you should have your charts open, put an indicator on your chart that opens in a separate window on the chart (ie, ADX, ATR Stochasic etc... you have PLENTY to choose from!)

Put ONE indicator only on your chart

Put ONETool on your indicator and try to identify correlations between the highs and lows (or the trends even, anywhere you can profit from) and the tool you are using on the indicator. When you look as though you have a correlation, go back in the chart and mark where the tool on the indicator would signal to buy or sell.

Post a reply on here describing what you have done, what the correlation is, and a screenshot of your chart with the buy and sell signals marked on there (vertical line, arrow, thumbs up etc). Mark All the signals, 'winners' and 'losers'

I will be doing the same- doing exactly the same with an indicator that i have not looked at before.

By the way, the way you do it, may be the same as it was supposed to be done - that is not a problem, but don't go looking for how it shoudl be done, rely on yourself! It will make you a better trader - trust me!

Any questions, post them here...

This is a quick example i have just bashed out inside of about 5 minutes - i have NEVER tried this before.... This is brand new....

Using the OSMA which is something to do with the Moving average... OS....? not to sure (as in cant remember exactly!!!



So what did i do?

Attached the OSMA indicator to the chart, and started looking at the high of the OSMA and the low of the OSMA... how did that correlate to the highs and lows of the price?

Looks pretty good form peak to trough, but there you need a place to enter... If you look if you entered at the 'bottom' for a buy, it keeps on going lower for some time... on that first example - 72 pips (remember this is the 4 hour time frame i am working on)

Ok so lets get some verticals of where the peak and the troughs are (marked as 3 on the example).

So i have some visuals of where my tops and bottoms are, i put the fib retracement on the indicator itself, messed around with it for a couple of minutes, and decided it wasnt really working... ok so i put it on the chart itself... ok, now we are getting somewhere.

So enter on the 0 line of the fib retracement - not great, that does not help us out, as it still drops... however, we have a potential target value now.... ok lets make it so that the price needs to DROP below the 0 line, and then when it comes back up and breaks the 0 line we will buy and set the first fib line as an exit point.

Quickly pulling this together, we have 2 wins, and the other one i looked at did not qualify as it did not drop below the 0 line sufficiently enough...

A bit rough and ready, but a bit more time on this, and a few refinements... guess what, we may have a viable strategy...

hope you get the picture!!

This is only stage one... this is not a strategy, this is only the START of building the strategy, keep that in mind. Just because you THINK you have a strategy, does not mean that you do... you need to back test this to see if it works (which is what YOU need to do on your strategies) and we will work on refining them a bit further down the road.

looking forward to what you come up with!

Eurusd BUY on H1 TF BREAK AND CLOSE above 21EMA.

I am up for the challenge...

There's my chart. When i do the back-testing of this trading strategy it pretty much does well, I don't seem to know why in live trading I've not got a handle on it.

Earlroy, while there is fundamentally nothing wrong with the strategy, and we are looking for you to develop your own trading strategy, I think you need to go back and read through what and how we are trying to develop the strategies.

We are trying to develop strategies that are your own, looking at how to develop them with no basis of knowledge in the indicator itself- a break above an ma is probably the most common strategy as a beginner- read through the posts again and the. Follow the bold text.

Ma's come slightly later on...

Also we are only trading off 4hr and daily timeframes. If you are a losing or b/e trader this first step will help you know end...

Sepak- same as the above. 4hr and above only... There is good reason for this!!!

The strategy seems a pretty obvious one- have you read through the bold text above?

I don't quite understand your trading rules, as if you are buying when the green line crosses above for a buy and crosses below he red for a sell- you are getting lots of takeouts for this indicator when the market goes flat... Can you give your step by step process for entering and exiting the trade and give some more examples?

Hmm, someone creates a new account to follow this thread. Wonder who you are in your "previous life".

I don't quite understand about that putting one tool on your indicator. Here is the chart I'm using and an indicator. What should I do next?

http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc79/andrern2000/USDJPYH4.png

EDIT: do you mean like this one?

Hi Andern,

Spot on thats what we want to be looking at- so you have the RSI, and i see that you are using a 'trend breakout', so joining the peaks, and the break of that trend line signals a buy or sell...

The next job from this is to start running back in your chart and seeing what the hit ratio is for the anaysis - keep a running log of wins and losses. Remember that the open is the candle AFTER the signal is generated. We need to get a feel for if it is successful or not.

Once we do this bit, we start forward testing.

Again, what we are trying to do, is find analysis that works on the backtest, and then proving on forward testing. You can also start to build up your strategy as we go through, so when would it be likely that you would open and exit a trade, woudl you use a trailing stop etc...