Trading Forex is Hard

No no, I meant boat stuff. I've become interested in boat life since I moved to Malta and am watching Sailing Uma and SV Delos. We're going to subscribe to a sailing school soon. I'm hoping for satellite internet to become good enough to be able to trade off of a boat in a couple of years and if not, I plan to retire in 6 years anyway. Well, retiring here means to stop daily trading and focus more on my stocks portfolio and perhaps other stuff.

Among the English ones its the BBC World Business Report, BBC global news podcast and the economist podcast. The Financial Times also has a few interesting ones. Ultimately, there's a lot of interesting stuff available either for free or paid, I also like the Quartz Obsession podcast which picks rather random topics like Japanese whiskey, rare earth or office chairs. Virology has also become very interesting but turned out to be too demanding while trading.

Hi guys upcoming 10-14 jan 2022 weekly outlook for major pairs
EURUSD - Slightly positive support 1.1260-65 resistance 1.1430-40. Suggestion sell rally with sl 1.1480.buy 1.1250 sl 1.1180
GBPUSD - Over bought highly positive support 1.3420-25 resistance 1.3680 sell rally sl 1.3740 buy support sl 1.3380
USD JPY - Positive support 114.80-75 resistance 116.50-60 buy support 114.20 sl selling aviod

Forex trading is not more difficult than trading in other markets, but the forex market does present its own particular conditions, behaviour and risks that beginners should be aware of before they start. Leverage: Leverage is a double-edged sword and can dramatically amplify your profits.

Pay attention to whole/mid level numbers, as you can see they do matter/help.

I don't know if anyone uses mt5 (but I do for a couple reasons).

I coded a round number indicator (on the side while trading ) if anyone is interested :


If someone uses it and they find a bug or want a mod, let me know!

An 80 pip move today alone, kudos if you caught and held on to the whole move!

I'm old enough to remember when 80 pip moves were the size of the average swing, and there could be several of them each day. Forex volatility is very narrow these days.

Another successful history charts trader and his clever followers. Some people never learn anything

You probably couldn't find another "system" for your site here. Judging by the negativity, things are not going well for you.

What are you even talking about? When I am seeing history charts trader I will call him history charts trader. Should I be positive about someone hanging noodles? I dont think so. Ask your guru to post trades at real time, not his painting oh history charts, and we will see. Everyone is a pro on history charts, everyone claerly seeing where to buy and where to sell. And I am doing well, thank you for your concern. BTW if you want to believe in BS it is your choice, but you better believe in Santa, at least it is much less damaging to your wallet.

This was probably some kind of institutional support. Will share next month and we'll see.

Keep working.

Also for others, this could help you with trading. You need to do this. It's not about history trading, rofl.

SF

The following post contains an extremely long wall of text with some newb questions. Proceed to read it at the risk of depleting your attention span to nearly zero and having to mindlessly scroll youtube, quora, reddit or all of the above at once or worse, refreshing your email inbox 25 times per minute for the next 4 hours all the while knowing nothing of importance will pop up.

Q1:
Is there a way you can recommend from experience that would help the process of finding what works and what doesn't? For example Mark Douglas advocates for collecting samples of 20-25 trades before assessing them. Is this how you proceeded to find what works for you?

Q2:
I am not asking this in a bitter way: I am wondering if you are keeping part of your strategy/approach details privately? I would assume you shared the core of it and someone willing to learn may or may not connect the dots himself? Is that correct? Like stuff you don't want to disclose publicly about how you trade (wich I would be the first to totally understand). For example, making some kind of analysis to make a mental picture of what's likely to occur today. (Or I am (likely) complicating things too much again?)

I mean, if you did extensively give out everything you do in your trading, it says something else to me than if you shared the core of it, learning-wise. It means the problem right now I can be 100% sure it's of psychological nature, impulse control and the likes, self sabotage etc. and I need to zero-in on that (which I'm already approx. 98,45343% convinced is the "problem" already). This question seems weird but I'm really not trying to pick a fight lol. It's just how my brain works to try to fill blanks and tries to know if there's an actual blank...

Q3: I have seen you write a couple of times about the take profit, as in the typical limit order to close an already opened position. If I recall correctly, you said it did not make sense and you were manually trailing the stop instead. I have experimented with it also, and right now for me it seems to be draining my "emotional capital" enough that I end up completely blind to what's happening and end up most often than not with a b/e or a loser (even after going into profit, which is mind boggling). I know I need to read the micro-action but for now it seems I do better not trying to do it too much after the trade is live.
What seems to work for me right now is to have a target in mind where I will move my stop immediately 1 tick below market once reached and then trail whatever additional tick(s) I can gather this way IF price really blows/spikes through it, it can be worth it especially if the target is reactive(obviously I am doing that with the help of an algo). Another alternative I find less interesting (for now) is to not trail every tick but let it blow through with stop 1 tick below target price and then target next zone in mind. It is less interesting to me because more often than not price will retrace again after a spike like this and whatever additional distance price had made prior to the spike is lost.

Q4: Would it be a good way to learn this by simply forgetting about micro-management for now, and simply collect samples of trades that I let run either to a stop that makes sense or a target that also make sense? (After each sample try to find where are the probabilities and come up with some better management rules/guidelines). Kind of building from the bottom-up and I guess my question is what is the bottom here from which I can start building this probabilistic mind-set.

(Although, I think I am starting to understand what micro-levels are supposed to look like on currencies, perhaps in the beginning I was seeing too many and it was just messing with my head a lot.)

I am probably over-complicating all this again. I just need to dust-off every corner of my brain for it to let go and really trust the process of creating a probabilistic mind-set. To be honest I am probably already aware somewhere in my mind of the answers to most of these questions. Sorry for the very unstructured post, it's a reflection of my brain right now lol.

It's probably pointing to the fact that I have difficulty simply letting go and getting in the habit to flow with the market without imposing my view and what I would like to happen in my decision making process. (And that's what I need to work on.)

(“A probabilistic mind-set pertaining to trading consists of five fundamental truths.
1. Anything can happen.
2. You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money.
3. There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge.
4. An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another.
5. Every moment in the market is unique.”)

The other two keys are getting good with momentum, and cutting trades early when they stop looking good, that's all..no secrets.

Full credit to Jens for the statement in the screenshot.

Shoot, you almost got me! I confess, I only share what seems to work so far that people stay on the ball, but still mostly lose to generate liquidity for me. Veni recognised this early on, we've been sharing profits since then. But let's leave the seriousness aside and focus on the fun:

I don't keep important details to myself, or let's say not on purpose, but my way of trading did not originate on the drawing board, but in my head. I started by trading classic reversal patterns and learning from mistakes and losses. When I explained to Veni and a few others what I was doing, it was also only partly altruism. It helped myself to put what I do into a more or less stringent set of rules or rather guidelines. A recurring experience for me was, of course, that I had to explain in detail things that seemed self-evident to me because they were in fact only self-evident to me. Just imagine you are teaching a computer how to eat. Routine 1: Open your mouth. Wait, how does that even work? Well, let's start with the jaw. Just as a pointed analogy. The human, however, rather rarely does nothing when he doesn't know how. Instead, he interpolates what is missing with his way of doing things. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. That's why Veni or others don't trade exactly as I do, just according to the same pattern.

A practical example of these missing links is the manual tracing of a running bet with the trailed stop-loss or my opinion on take-profit, so I'm re-explaining this in the hope of forgetting fewer things this time. The basic question is first of all, how do I get the most out of a bet? The fixed take-profit basically means that I want to get out at this price, even if the price had gone further in my direction. The manual trailing stop-loss, on the other hand, is a different approach, which could be paraphrased as follows: I don't know if this is really the best exit option, I'll keep all options open instead, and take a small bet on a missed take profit vs. further price gains. You might say it's the agnostic approach, but there's no need to get that philosophical. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. With the fixed take-profit I miss out on further price gains, with the manual stop-loss in positive territory I again give away some of my profit if the price actually turns at or minimally after the take-profit level. I like the latter option better also because the take-profit actually only makes sense with quite perfect ranges, which seem to me to be somewhat rare. However, there are hardly any limits to creativity. You can also combine them. Have you ever considered using a take-profit just to reduce your position? Yes, I'm only here to make peoples brains explode.

I think a missing point was that I leave quite a lot of room for small setbacks in the price. Only when the price reaches the area where I would also have positioned a take-profit do I pay very close attention to what I see and tighten the noose. However, this can also be multiple areas.

However, in the beginning, I spoke of a more or less stringent set of rules or rather guidelines and so I would like my contributions here to be understood more as food for thought or "that's how I do it" and not as a set of rules that you have to follow if you don't want to be doomed. All the details, such as volatility, that you have to take into account in manual tracing, I can't share simply because of technical possibilities, because I can't capture movements in static images. But you can come up with results that work for you in a few hours of screen time. Maybe they are the same as mine, maybe similar ones that work nonetheless. If this were a virus, we would now be talking about random replication errors and a variant that might work less well, or maybe even better ;-)

Finally, please also remember that the question of trailing stop loss vs. take profit is also no longer a discussion about the (essential) exit strategy but about fine-tuning it. The first step must always be to find good bets and determine where approximately you should cap them and I believe this has been covered here in this thread reasonably well by examples and also some explanations, even though there is probably still some room for improvement to be made on the latter part. Obviously, if you tend to overthink things, it is easy to get lost and if you try to copy everything I do, you will overlord yourself. Like I said above, it wasn't created on the drawing board but in my head while trading or after analysing problems so I naturally grew into it.

Lol, sorry I really didn't mean to. I promise to keep it quiet, in exchange of a small %.

Ok I'm going back to bed...It's cold today, my fine cashmere socks are calling me.

Nice catch! I woke up an hour ago, it's 4:30 here lol

If you shorted where I think you shorted, the timing was pretty

About to close for about 60 pips.

Excellent job my friend.

Thumbs up.
-- and even not a bad day in the futures market ;-)