Walk the Talk from a fun loving discretionary trader

How do I take a Big Picture view?

Attached Image (click to enlarge)

How I trade by using views of hands-on experienced traders like Brixen?

Maximum 5 minutes is allocated by me for analysis of the market. For me important is studying the internal forces of demand and supply. I don't put in any time for plotting triggers. I leverage on the availability of free and paid advisory services.

I use analysis being done by experts or experienced traders.

Here I can give examples of only FF traders. FF rules don't allow showing links of outside traders . FF rules are quite reasonable. I want to observe them in letter and spirit.

I always look for experts who have a sense of history developed that comes from them either trading or observing trading events.
Hindsight Traders are useless for me. Signals with no rationale. Also not interested.
Minimum 10 years of uninterrupted service of giving views and ideas for trading - Before the facts happen.
Explanation of rationale for taking or suggesting trade is equally important.

Scan FF for posters with at least 20,000 posts. Spend at least 30 hours to find out whether their views will help your trading.
Avoid all Hindsight Traders.

I found Brixen, with 45,000 posts, posting before the fact views and trades. He specialises in studying and trading just ONE SYMBOL.
Just the kind of thinking I have . Obviously, I am happy to feed my brain with his views and let my brain decide what to do.
I don't follow his trades. I follow his views only. I am his disciple . He is my Guru in true sense. But I want to be better than my Guru. That is how I think.

Why I love OHLC lines?

After reading the view of experts or experienced traders , I use OHLC lines to plot Entry and Exit.

Exit either by TP or forced by time is what I like.

Small funded accounts:(Intra-day Trading)

I take them as a challenge rather than to generate any passive income. An intellectual exercies

Goal: 70% of exit by TP,
30% of exit by Time or Equity Loss.
Profit Factor: 2
Exit by breakeven and Exit by Trailing Stop are not favoured by me.

Deep pockets account: (Swing Trading)

Goal: 80% of exit by TP
20% of exit by Equity Loss
Profit Factor: 2.5

Averaging by ramping up (for increasing profit) when the view is that trend will continue.
Speed up exit by TP or small loss when there is conviction that the trend has reversed.
Hedge when I think is going to be a temporary period. For GBPJPY, once this temporary period lasted for 130 days helping broker to make 28% of my gains as Swap costs. No regrets because I still made 68% nett.
I don't use FIFO brokers. Only those who allow hedging in same symbol

Averaging needs patience and deep pockets.
Drawdown upto 70% until mean have deep pockets and mindset to bear with psychological pain.

Hedging needs real trading skills.

Hedging involves:
Locking or freezing positions to restore the use of full margin when Margin % falls to 150%.
Unlocking or trading again when you feel confident of trade continuation.
RE-Locking when trend reverses and does not support continuation.

You have to make a chart of probable trigger points. Without this chart in hand, never ever attempt hedging.
This locking and unlocking in real time gives some kind of kick to me and I would not advise any trader with less than 10 years practice to use it.
It's fun trip for me.

Expert or Mentor... a boon for learners like me

An Expert is like a medical laboratory that is producing capsules, sometimes after 25 years of trials, that work fast.

The reality is that you can't find many free-spirited experts who don't want to work for trading shops.
Because of the easy access being provided by www , an unprecedented wave of fortune seekers has been unleashed.
Financial Trading has attracted its share of gold diggers, buccaneers and entrepreneurs.
All of them see there is money. Including those who have no idea of what an entrepreneur can be .
Tragically, it is the coders who have lost out mostly.
Equipped with IT and programming skills, they think they can code holy grails products and use IT skills to market them.
Unfortunately, they become the first victims of their own enterprises. They depend on traders for ideas and some of them have lost their entire life-saving believing those ideas will make them rich instantly because of their algo coding skills.
Most of them think it is easy to make money by selling signals, their skills of analysing hindsight trades, and everybody feels the Holy Grail breakthrough is around.

Experts help me from being overwhelmed by a plethora of information with information and my brain gets enough time and comfort to take a decision.
Trading without facing pressures and confronting demons of fear and greed is quite tough. Without the help of mentors, you need tons of money for real trading.

Brixen's views for DAX

DAX CASH INDEX 17CET chart update: running at the speed of light!!!!
1. last friday prices held 400 zone
2. last monday they held 540 zone
3. last tuesday they held 740 zone
4. yd they held 870 zone
5. today they broken up 14k zone



Now what is my brain telling me?
Follow the seasonal chart posted by Brixen in the past
Ok I strongly believe in past patterns repeating in financial trading - it can be any symbol.
So for today I will not relax and be prepared to trade if wild movements happen. Being Friday, it could be a quiet day or may be storm in a teacup.
Will the action start next week? Only big boys know well.

Why I trade DAX? Why do I like scalping?

I trade DAX when US30 market becomes quiet. Like Gamestop breaking the correlation between US30 and DAX.

Like WS30, it is often extremely volatile and fast-moving market.

What Precautions I take for all volatile markets is:

Never to overleverage trading account with too many positions.
Trade only for the Day.
Similar to WS30, the Dax index can make sudden and dramatic moves that can quickly turn your account from successful to disastrous in seconds.
DAX 30 incurs more costs - its buy-sell spreads and commissions can eat away more than 50% of your gains if your gains are less than 10 pips per trade.

How do I plan trading capital?

I have faced up to 75% of drawdown many times in my online trading experience of 17 years. If you don't have money to feed drawdown, then expect positional or swing trading life to be a stormy one.

I survived drawdowns or temporary loss situations after having gone through a trial-and-learn process to realise how position sizing plays a strong key role in financial trading.

I am now used to think in terms of Pips. Before entering the trades I take a look at high and low of past 6 months and then work out worst-case scenario of equity loss level (wipeout) in terms of pips.

I divide the margin money I can afford to lose in terms of pips and the contract size.

If I have $5000 that I can afford to lose without affecting my lifestyle and 50,000 pips is equity loss (total washout) then I will go for 1 cent tick value lot contract to meet 50,000 pips equity.

If I have $500,000 (which I can easily afford to lose) then it will be $10 tick value lot.

However, because of my spine arthritis, now I do only intraday trading with 200 pips target a day so drawdown is not that of an issue now. I close all trades before calling it a day.

Important is never to trade under pressure . Pressure could be from your attitude to money, your health, your inability to concentrate or not having a clear rationale for financial trading.

The rationale for trading

I want to be a full-time trader.
OK, then be ready to get experience for next 10 years.
If you can support your life with your family deep pockets, why not?

I want to be a part-time trader for passive income. OK. Start as a hobby and invest the money you would normally spend for a family dinner or a family holiday.
It will give you strength to face psychological pain that you will be subjected to in real-time trading.

Do you like to trade for quick gains or effortless success?

If yes, scale down your expectations of any income and enjoy trading as a recreational sports .

If you are serious on making passive income, or becoming a professional sports person, then be ready to invest 7 to 10 years of part-time hours in acquiring all skills.

"Observing, learning and acting" is the way a sports person attains proficiency. You will have to go through the same process.
You have to do or access probability studies to understand sequence of patterns in the past and be ready to identify them when you see them repeating in your live trading.

Why should I do it? I am led to believe that money can be generated fast and quickly. FF provides free EAs and signals. It has so many excellent algo traders, programmers and analysts.

If this is why you have got attracted towards trading, then use your common sense. Think again.

Why 95% of new retails traders are losing money? Why those teaching you or providing signals are not making any money themselves? Why are all the time they are analysing trading in hindsight? Why are they posting their trades after the fact happens.

Can you control market forces ? Can you influence demand, supply and prices like a single shopkeeper can do in a mall where competition is coming from two shops.

Do you want to be driver (decision maker) or a driver-cum-cleaner-cum-auto mechanic undertaking so many trading related tasks?

A self-directed trader has to be mainly proficient in executing online trading transactions and leverage on know-how provided by experts for free or a fee.

Why should you analyse markets or do technical studies when hundreds of sites provide all this information free of cost?

OK. I just want to have fun and keep my brain active. I want to learn it as a video game and who knows by doing so I will get hands-on training that will help pick up some self-directed trading skills. In any case, that is how I have picked up various skills while attending a primary or secondary or even high school for years altogether.

If that is the case, it will be worthwhile for you to take a look at a thread I have set up for elderly hobby traders. Unfortunately, no hand-holding from me. You will have to learn by self. It will be fun.

https://www.forexfactory.com/thread/...r-traders-with

May I suggest you to start with scalping.

Honestly, scalping is a performance sport. All the aspects that apply to learning any performance sport equally apply to scalping.

I like it because it involves practice or rather DELIBERATE PRACTICE.

Practising without self awareness of who you are and what you can do in a specific situation will not work. It also means you have to understand your own capabilities of struggling with forces of fear and greed and control your mind.

You ought to know how the markets and symbols operate. And why you will have to develop a sense of what could happen and trust in its probability.

A holistic understanding of the risk involving active management is required.



Good luck to all.

FILTERING MARKET NOISE IS THE KEY TO CONSISTENT TRADING WITH PROFIT


In this age when you are flooded with information, you have to develop an ability to filter noise and process information in such a way that it does not overload your brain and you retain your ability to take decisive actions in your life. Particularly in financial trading.

As a former financial journalist, I made money from personal investments purely based on a sense of history I had developed while working for newspapers including the Wall Street Journal.

I ignored market noise all through and listened to my brain. It worked well.

I had no opportunity to cover financial trading markets as a journalist. I

When I started trading forex and indices I realized it is not a mall where a group of shopkeepers joins hands to manipulate prices.

It has its own auction market system, liquidity suppliers, buyers, sell-side and buy-side analysts, and a global market dominated by around 10 big liquidity suppliers.

With no previous experience in dealing with such a market, I decided to focus only on mastering the self-directed transactions execution process and studying repeatable patterns so that I can identify them while trading live and make use of them.

Lack of Excel knowledge did not hamper my pursuit of getting statistics. FF is full of generous people who share their knowledge without expecting anything in return. It is from people who believed in statistics, I got big help. I have to thank Blue Rain, futurespec, and a few others for explaining Excel's usefulness in planning trades and strategies.

Next, in order not to get overwhelmed by information, I stuck to my way of using the sense of history model to feed my brain with filtered information.
I looked around for 5-6 experts having at least 15 years experience of analyzing speculation markets and assets. Much to my surprise, I found the information free of cost.

I understand fundamentals well because of my old professional training and commerce education. I learned that Financial trading markets use them mostly as entry triggers at a micro-level. But fundamentals do work at the macro level. By talking to friends working for a few brokers, I found out about the existence of various books and plug-ins that help brokers and liquidity providers protect their bottom lines. This information helped me steer clear of MT4 brokers and I opened an account with Interactive Brokers and traded futures mostly.

Having understood the peculiarities of operating in a speculation market, I decided not to waste time on predicting the market.
I just have to react to the internal market forces releasing and drying up liquidity. External market forces worked only at the macro level.

Now I feed my brain with views of selected experts and my findings collected from probability studies done and let my mind decide what to do.
I have arranged sufficient money that can meet drawdowns from time to time. The risk I will be taking is not going to affect my life-style in case I lose money.

A sort of holistic approach to taking and managing risk.

Following the forces of demand and supply and
attempting to skim the volatility


Having retired as a financial journalist, the only skill I have is to depend upon my own sense of history and look at the micro and macro level pictures. However, I never covered financial trading markets and had no idea at all how to take part in it.

I made it up by looking for real traders and analysts who have at least 10 to 15 years of experience of looking at financial trading markets and products.
I bank upon their sense of history. I don't bother to analyze or study markets myself. Brixen is one of the FF traders among the list of 5 experts chosen.

Like any market, internal market forces compete and use supply and demand to manipulate prices. Again I have no expertise here. So I just focus on how liquidity is released and dried up. I do spend time on sourcing probability studies done by others (I don't know Excel) so that I can recognize the repeatable patterns when they happen during my trading.

I trade WS30 regularly and GDAX (as an alternative to WS30 slowing down like it happened last week) trying out ways to skim the volatility.

I have kept sufficient money in my account to take care of the Drawdown.

I have made it a point not to overload the brain with information and cripple its decision-making ability.

I don't use any signal-giving indicators or do technical analysis (Moving averages). I don't follow any signals or trade recommendations by anyone.
My brain provides me the signals.

For me trading is teamwork and as a self-directed, I must focus on executing trades.

In other words, I remain the driver and not try to become a cleaner as well as a mechanic or engineer.

GDAX February Fracas



Lines being drawn for the March GDAX battle



Big picture

DAX Trading zone until Friday

DAX Options close to expiration near US holiday

Attached Image (click to enlarge)

DAX options Battle Lines drawn

Putting in time to train yourself is a MUST if you want to be a consistently profitable trader.

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I dare say 99% of FF members are looking for "effortless success" and this applies to all including newbies.

Self-directed trading job involves picking up skills by self-coaching and practising on the job. This is the minimum required.

Whether you are looking for a job in the industry or want to trade for self, intensive demo or cents account real trading should be conducted.

You have no control or say in the markets, so you can outsource related work like analysing the markets by finding 10 to 15 years experienced analysts sharing their views voluntarily through forums or websites. It will give you some kind of idea as to the prevailing trend. Nothing more than that.

Never look for any signals

You can do some virtual trading based on historical data provided by brokers (lookback data) or backtesting with a clear idea what you will gain out of it.
Ideal size of TP, SL , good time to trade , etc.

Important is watching how trades are conducted , how swiftly entries and exits are made, and attempt to do the same on demo or real accounts.

Most of important is you have to learn learn how to control your mind and purse.

I think putting a lot of effort and time in execution of transactions helped me a lot.

By outsourcing analysis of markets, I could focus entirely on execution work and learned a lot about speed and momentum , active hours and how swift entry and exit within the initial burst of momentum pays off and keeps my sanity in tact and helps avoid going through psychological pain.
Practice makes a person perfect. That's true.

Risk Management is the basic thing any trader MUST know about .

Stop Loss,
Equity Loss,
Trailing Stop for SL

Realistic Size of TP
Protect profit,
Trailing stop for TP

Advanced traders using Hedging broker (not the netting platforms) know how to apply hedge, release hedge, re-apply hedges. Hedging helps recover margin to continue trading and not get bogged down by the trade in drawdown.

Risk and Reward is part of money making process. You can't have any fixed formula for risk reward ratio. Sometimes you make 10 pips and sometimes you make 50. It all depends on your psychology which favours faster exit or prefers to stay put to exit after realising what you consider as optimum potential of the trades.

it all depends on your income level and affordability level. In other words, your own personality and your attitude towards money and work influences your trading decisions.

I trade for passive income by investing in trading capital that I know I can afford to lose and which will not affect my lifestyle.

I started with small accounts and initially used micro and mini contracts.

Pips size is counted as same for all contracts. Not pip value. It is per tick of contract size.

You can easily be a pip millionaire and can afford to have a 10% of equity Stop Loss

Averaging is another technique that needs deep pockets. Most of the times, it works depending on the symbols you are trading.
Fast mean reverting trading instruments work well with averaging.

Momentum Meter for WS30 and GDAX re-starts ticking

Any type of financial trading works like this

Is it your creation that pic Simnz?
congrats!

No.
I am a professional content curator (aka as a journalist) and based on my 36+ years of trading I have collected such pieces of information in bits and pieces.
Now before I die, I want to empty myself. I can safely do it here . No agenda as such . With short attention span being the order of the day, I am trying to cater to existing demands of conveying information.