Rookie Lessons Learned

Well, last Thursday taught me some hard and painful lessons that I will definitely remember for a long time. I'm glad I made these mistakes before I tried to trade forex full time and while I have gainful employment. Here are my lessons I learned:

1. I like charts and analysis. I have developed an ea that I am comfortable with that trades .1% of my account equity at any time. It backtests great and if I hadn't messed with it, then I wouldn't have lost 80% of my account on Thursday. Lesson: Don't mess with the system!

2. Last Thursday I shut down all my trades so I could trade the "sure thing" of the NFP. Lesson: There is no sure thing!

3. And one more lesson: I am NOT going to be a news trader!

This is really more for my documentation that discussion, but I welcome your comments.

rosieposie

Never really understood the hype about news trading.
There is no reason why one should news trade any event.

I've seen many posts referring to EA. What I can't seem to figure out is, just what is EA?
Would you mind answering what is probably extremely obvious?
Thanks

Expert advisor. It's a program that runs in metatrader that trades for you... or at least attempts to.

Oh! I have one myself!

When using Interactive brokers, don't trade lower than the minimum amount for IDEAL PRO as you'll get sent to IDEAL where the spreads SUCK!

I placed a buy stop order at 155.xx for GBPJPY and got filled at 159.xx when I wanted to sell I was offered 150.xx. I said screw it and traded a much bigger lot so I got filled at 156.xx to close it and prevented part of the catastrophe.

Lesson: Know everything about your platform. Had I been more daring I wouldn't have had that problem either. I blew 5% of my account on that bad trade alone.

The thing with EA’s is that they are uncertain. They might detect a signal in the market that would make them “think” that the trend is going to change and they open and order. It turns out the market did not do what I appeared it would and you were not right there to notice, you lost. There are some though that prove to be really effective.