Beginners have faith! fast progress is possible

Successful traders are born, not made. I find the Turtle's story fascinating. Even clever old Eckhardt believed that the experiment showed trading can be taught to anybody. What that experiment and all the available evidence suggests is that trading requires a natural talent. Consider the amazing fact that the Turtles were taught how to trade breakouts and some very simple MM algorithms. You can teach a monkey to understand those things, but you can hardly produce successful traders based on that.

All this discussion about indicators and stuff is not going to make any body successful. Of course you can get by if you spend years and years doing it. But being successful enough to do it full time and earn a living and more from it in the short term requires special talent. It is rather like the difference between a concert pianist and the guy who entertains drinkers down the pub. It seems obvious to me.

Hi all

I've been mucking around with Forex for just over a year. Trying all sorts of techniques. I even bought some systems that claimed to be the real "holy grail" of trading, only to find out most of them don't work at all and others might really work only for those who created them. Is there really such a thing as a fully mechanical system that performs consistently? In the end, I find that it doesn't really matter all that much what method you use for your entry/exit...there are thousands of good methods. The winning edge is how you are able to adapt your risk/reward strategy to whatever method it is you use. There's a very profitable pro trader in Australia who simply buys signals from a third party. Those signals are correct 20% of the time. He only takes the trades that fit within his risk strategy (curiously, he keeps THAT part of his trading secret) and makes big bucks that way.

As for Trend Manager and Heiken Ashi.... I've been looking at those indicators for a number of days now. They do seem to be very good indicators and probably as close to a "holy gorilla" as one can get! Haiken isn't really MA-based, as soomeone has suggested. I've looked at the script in metatrader. It seems to also involve some sort of pivot calculations. What's important though is that I think with proper money management these indicators could be very successful, particularly to new traders.

Trading with no SL and manually closing a trade. Sounds familiar to what I was doing as a newbie and I was doing great with beginner's luck. Perhaps I should look back to what I was doing before because it was so easy to make small pips consistently. Don't be jealous people ... fast progress is possible and it's up to you when this happens.

You know, I have to eat a little crow here...but before I tell you all the rest of the story, I want to reinforce that I still DO believe a successful trader can just "happen" and that some people can be "naturals."

Now the rest of the story. The 23 yr old above that was rumored to have over 50 million in the bank. Well, turns out he was a con man. Promised 100% returns in 6 months in the FOREX market. He built a pyramid scheme, taking $1000 from one guy, giving him $2000 back 6 months later, paying him with the $2000 he took from another guy. He eventually had taken over $8 million dollars (some Phillip Morris employees emptied their 401k and gave it to this guy!). He was recently busted by the FBI and has been all over the news here locally.

Lesson here? The percentage of "naturals" is VERY, VERY small in comparison to those who have to work their butts off to make it in FOREX or any trading for that matter. Oh, and a "natural" probably isn't a 23 yr old punk with prior felony convictions for check forgery.