How I turned my trading around! I first read James thread as well as no brainer trades thread. Utilizing s/r is very important. Now I was a sucuessful scalper in the minis-( index futures) but wanted to get out of the futures and transitiion to FX. It was a tough road, since I am used to scalping in and out all day long. I tried that with fx and was getting slaughtered. I then took the time and read the 2 above threads as well as another thread on another forum about using inside and outside bars. I wanted something simple with out many indicators and found it. I do not call it a system since it is just chart pattern recognition. I was using 15 min charts which seemed forever to me since I was used to tick charts and 1 min charts in the minis. Now what I do is look just to a 30 min chart and 1 hour chart. I watch pretty much four pairs although you can use any pairs and any instrument really, this is nothing new. I look for morning and evening stars on the charts and trade the reversal. When using these charts it was hard for me since I was so used to trading 20 times an hour and then waiting now for an hour to trade. It was the toughest thing for me but it helped my patience and worked beautifully, it kept me out of crap and made my trading easy and a lot less stressfull and forced me to take only good setups. I see the first setup bar then the next bar which could be a doji or hammer or shooting star. Then the 3rd bar if going long I wait for it to come above the body of the previous bar( shooting star or doji) then go long, as a short I wait for it to come below the body of the previous bar( shooting star or doji) then short it. I usually put the initial stop above by a few pips, or at the high of the 2nd bar( the shooting star or doji and then as it goes my way I immediatley bring the stop down. Sometimes the 3rd bar will for example if we are looking for a long, be above the second candles body and maybe the high and then come below the body of the shootin star or doji( 2nd bar in this series) at that point I wouldnt take the trade. I want good setups only. As I said before this is nothing new not the holy grail. Just something that has worked for me. I used to look for these things in the futures trading I did, but they did not have as much prevalence since I was trading off a very low time frame. But now with these higher time frames comes higher probabilities that these work. That was what was standing in the way of my sucess the inability for me to switch to higher time frames becuase what I was used to, and now my only problem which was keeping me from sucess was my own patience. I fought long and hard and made the transistion which has helped me as well as some of the threads along in this forum which tuned me in to this type fo trading. Now for even better profitability I use s/r levels from time frames of 60 min 4 hour and daily and this really swings it in my favor. Still its hard to wait it out but it is worth it in the end. An old mentor I had when I was trading futures told me the less you trade the more you will make and less stress you will have. I trade full time for a liviing and now am trying and almost will make the full switch from futures to fx. It also allows me not to worry as much as to the spreads of the fx broker and so called stop hunting by them, but to me when I lost scalping fx it was my own doing,. It seemed the broker was out to get me since everytime I put on a trade it immediatley moved against me like it was waiting for me to put the trade on and then take off the wrong direction, but it was just me being dumb. So this is just a little info for those of you who choose to investigate it for yourselves. It is worth while, easy. Trading is easy part, then mental discipline is the toughest part for me. I fought agaisnt this type all along and refused to beleive this can work, and when I finally opened my mind and eyes to the simple things that could work it was a ephipany for me. Enjoy.
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