FXAnalytics thread Horribly davestating....

Hello all, these are just my thoughts and feelings...

Us newbies are on an emotional rollarcoaster, reading one hyped up thread can send us sky high with dreams and hope while one negative one can start a whole line of doubts in our heads.

Now I know that all the naysayers are actually the wise and the realistic highly experienced trader (including FXAnalytics) who are admired by all and I listen to them all.

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...t=61656&page=1

But Out of ALL the negative threads I've read, this thread above started by FXAnalytics had DEVASTATING effects on me. On one hand I totally trusted and admire FXAnalytics as I could tell straight away that he is a huge guru with centuries of experience that I can NEVER achieve, on the other hand, all the knowledge, books, forums and time I've spent INSTANTLY went down the toilet. I was devastated. Where had I gone wrong? If trading was going to be more difficult then any other job on earth,if experienced trader were REALLY making only 2% or 3% a year on their money then what in the world was I thinking? Why not just back out now? I had gone from super happy and on top of the world, to depressed that I could never succeed at doing this for a living.

It's been a week now after reading that thread, and I have not TOUCHED the meta trader software, I'm just afraid of even firring it up, all the hope is gone in a BIG way, FXAnalytics wrote an excellent piece of work, but I just believed it SO much that quiting before even starting is starting to make sense to me.

I know we should hang in there, but after a HUGE blow like that, that there really is absolutely NO chance in this FX market and that all the good stories I've read were all just LIES and sugarcoated stories, really makes it hard to have hope left.

Mohammad Reza.

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=80986

Quitting now is probably the best thing for you to do, get your money back from your broker if you have opened an account and get a good job with bennifits, you are definitely not ready emotionally to trade.
If this sounds harsh think of what you will feel like if you blow 10 or 20 thousand trying to trade, I would spare you that pain, especially if that 10 or 20 Gs is money you really can't afford to lose.
So don't be too hard on yourself and consider yourself lucky that you have found out early that trading is not for you.

so you found the truth about Forex... so what?! Is it true that most lose their money? I don't know I haven't seen any reasonable data to prove it other than rumors and a comment or two from brokers.

The question then becomes, do you really expect to earn a high paying salary (in this case returns) with an elementary school education? Do you plan on trying to trade forex with an elementary school education? I sure hope not. There is nothing wrong with trading demo for 1-2 YEARS if you want. Better to blow a demo account or 10 rather than your own.

I personally feel that most of the ones that fail, do so because they felt like all they had to do it put a couple of indicators on a chart and the money would start flowing in. There is much more to it.

The 2-3% may be true for some but not all. I know of several traders who make 2-3% per week without risking very much of their account. I don't publish my results but let's just say it is better than 2-3% per week on average so I know it can be done.

Learn how the markets work, how trading works and be willing to spend the necessary time to elevate your forex education to the Masters degree level or better before risking any of your own money.

of course when you set ur expectations low, anything better would be bonus.

In reality, much more could be made....and lost. It depends on how big your apetite for risk and reward is. Problem with most is, they have a big appetite for huge rewards but have a small appetite for risk which equates to a confused trader who more often than not...go bust and blames the world for it.

Have you heard of the mythical phrase, "low risk, high reward"?
I have...plenty of times.

Thanks for the replies guys,

The thread that Mystic started on "How I Turned 1k To 100k In A Wk!!! " is starting to warm me up a bit and get those eyes rolling again

I know I have a lot more to learn and am totally willing to study it for FIVE more years if it takes that much. The fact that FXanalyist was very SURE about the fact that even pro's can only make 5% or so in a year consistantly, is just so bonecrushingly hard to swallow.

It just dose not make sense to me, If I'm a pro with YEARS of experience and spending 5 to 6 hours a day glued to the monitor day in and day out, am I crazy to settle for 3 to 5% a year ???

I can just deposit the money in my local bank and get more then that. So I really want to know if that statement is true, who in this forum in thier right mind would settle for 5% in a year??? I would probably guess the figure is perhaps minimum 30% a year right?

Anyway thanks again to all kind members here.

Good. Anytime you feel down again you just tell me and I'll start thread "How I Turned 1k To 1,000k In A Wk!!!" to fire you up again. Good luck.

Just remember this: Even with the best intention at heart, there still two ways of how others people can guide you:

1. They can take the effort and time to painstakingly persuade you to the right direction.

2. They can bark you the way and, if you don't listen, wack you up good until you walk to the right direction.

Whom choose which way, I'm sure it's easier to guess than predicting market movement.

This is the method the market uses; it does not go for that "spare the rod" stuff.

Johnedoe has a valid point. You need to toughen up and have the courage of your convictions and not let every other point of view sway you. Your still too new to have grasped that - but when you do you'll have made a big step forward. If this eludes you or you have no core bedrock values to build on then you should leave now.

Wondering how you are making out? Certainly don't want to discourage you from trading, just want to help inject some reality into the conversation.

one thing you gotta realize is that everything he said is from his own experience. but, what works for him might or might not work for someone else. know pros who consistently make 50% a year and are doing ok. the actual percentage isnt the most important thing. its the consistency. if you can make half a percent a month CONSISTENTLY youre doing fine.

Consistency is indeed the key; often it's a rear-view mirror thing though. We never know if what we do now will actually result in consistent returns or not.

For me (just for me), I try to be consistent in the things I can, the use of leverage, they way that I test models, how I adhere to the rules etc. From there the returns simply fall where they do. As a trader I've never felt that I could "Target" a monthly, daily, yearly return, as I can never know what the market is going to do.

I think it's like being a baseball player; you can prepare the same every year and each year will be different. At the end of your career you'll achieve a certain RBI but through the course of it there will be many different statistics that play out. You could spend two years back to back trying to do nothing but hit home-runs, swinging for the fences on every pitch. One year you may hit ten of those out of the park, the next year you could hit 30. The problem is, if in the second year your RBI tanks, and you hit fewer homes runs, you may be looking for a new career. Again consistency is the key...

So it goes with traders, if you play good small ball and let the home runs happen when they do, I feel you have a much better shot at longevity than if you carry a large risk profile* into every trade.

Here's why I think that: While there is no guarantee for success at any stage of a career, it has always appeared to me that traders who have been around for five years or longer, tend to use a very different risk profile than those in the early stages of their careers - it seems to me they tend to be much more conservative especially if trading is how they make a living. What they've seen in the past shapes their expectation of what can happen in the future, it's all about the unknown. This experience is KEY, if not difficult or impossible to quantify. The trick is to get to that experience level, to trade in such a way that you can survive everything that is coming down the road but is still unknown.

I really think the worst thing that can happen to a trader is a high level of success in their early years, it improperly shapes their expectations. There is nothing worse than being a fat tail in a distribution and riding that wave straight to mediocre... or worse.



* The problem with using terms like risk profile is it's meaningless... risk is relative to your experience as a trader. It's difficult to understand what you haven't been through. It's often hard to accept the structures of others when you yourself have no basis. As humans we also tend to have an "it won't happen to me" mentality. I would guess that collective thinking often drives black swan events.

The idea of Risk Management isn't new, it's been around long enough to be well defined and you will often hear people reference LTCM and how much leverage they were carrying when things fell apart. Despite having these well defined risk models at their exposure, highly educated and respected officers in hundreds of banks allowed their balance sheets to be inundated with very high risk profile loans. It appears very few if any actually sat down and said, what if this market corrects, how will we unwind this. It appears most didn't care. The difference between them and most of us is, no one is going to come and bail us out when the account hit's zero, or falls so low continuing makes no sense. The internet is littered with thousands of traders who've realized if they adopt a sensible risk profile now, it will take years, YEARS, to recover their losses, forget making a profit. Hard earned money flushed down the drain.

If you are a new trader, here is my challenge to you. Stop what you're doing right now, and spend the next four weeks reading, doing nothing but reading. There is a wealth of untold knowledge right here on Forex Factory for you to tap into. There are over 60,000 member profiles here, get to know as many as you can, especially the ones who are no longer active or only posted for less than a year or two. What kinds of things did they believe, what were they saying, what were their opinions on leverage and risk. How does your thinking compare; do you see yourself agreeing with people who are no longer around? Of course a few may have moved on to great things and just decided not to post, but being realistic if you sample a large portion of these inactive profiles you can be fairly confident in why they are no longer here. Now compare these traders to those that are here now, who are saying the same things and watch carefully as time marches forward. If they keep trading and survive do they continue to think the same way or do their posts change, or do they just disappear. By doing this you can begin to model the behaviors of successful traders and unsuccessful traders. You will also be able to spot those who may have a better chance of survival and those (on the average) who have little chance. Once you own that knowledge you can adopt what you know and implement it into your own trading and then let experience teach you the rest. Hopefully, with a little luck added, you will survive long enough to really get a handle on what it means to be a successful trader.

Most traders are willing to commit to what they believe is good education about trading (even if it is baseless); the question is will you take the time to educate yourself on some reality? In addition I would also encourage your to spend some time reading through disclosure docs and reported returns of professional traders, Barclay's and Autumn Gold are good reference points for that. People will often counter, professional trader have different goals... yes they do. Theirs are based on a lot of experience and time spent in the market. If your goal is to make double digit returns every month, you need to do a lot of research and have some kind of basis for believing it's possible. If 600 people on FF posted up right now that they achieve this goal, that is less than 1% of the FF population - also known as statistically insignificant. If they have done it for less than five years, it's even more insignificant. Having basis for a belief, requires a lot of hard work, not a lot of hoping. The math won't lie, crunch the numbers, be objective and trade with the next twenty years in mind, not the next twenty minutes.