My Story, Need Advice

Yeah sorry about that, I didn't mean to single you out, I was having a bad day!

But to answer your question, I think Soros said it best in the quote in my signature.

My personal opinion is that the reason the majority of traders lose money is they spend far too much time and effort trying to find and tweak some sort of directional indicator instead of developing ways to exploit to the max the times when the market moves in their favour. It's perfectly possible to have a strategy which is 'right' only 20% of the time yet still make more money than a strategy which is right 80% of the time. I believe it's more important and potentially more productive to master the skill of managing a trade and managing your money than it is to try and get direction right.

Anyway, I was probably a bit harsh on the people who have posted in this thread, for which I apologise, I know some of you guys are only saying what you honestly believe.

-

LOL, there's comes a point when you've just got to say to heck with it, it's not my money they're spending!

Horse, lead, water and all that stuff!

You're female, right, otherwise Houston we have a problem!

That was my big 'ah ha' moment personally.

http://www.melissakirsch.com/blog/wp..._partridge.jpg

hehe, he's a smoothie!

Yep, mine too, after what seemed like an impossible task of ever finding something to reliably predict it was like a revelation, everything got a heck of a lot simpler from then on. I can't even remember what triggered it, something really insignificant I expect, a real case of not seeing the wood for the trees! Direction, although important, was somehow less of a problem.

May I ask: which broker do you use?

A few different ones, CMC Markets in the UK as a bucketshop, a currenex broker in the US, as well as a couple of spreadbet companies also in UK, but not all at the same time!

Pipmutt no need to apologise, you Hanover and Craig, are 3 of the very small number of FF member's who's post's I give serious thought to.

As for Soros saying that it is possible to have 80% losing trades, and make money, well how disheartening and confidence killing is it, to think that 8 out of your next 10 trades are probably going to be loser's. It would be for me.

As I said I plan to have more winner's than loser's, then the other stuff is less important, maybe bs was to harsh a term to use.

So me and Soros think differently, each to his own.

Oh no, sorry, it wasn't Soros who said about the 80/20, I added that bit, Soros's quote was "It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.".

I'd agree with you, each to his own, whatever works for you and makes money can't be wrong.

Anyway I'm outta here, catch you after the holiday, have a nice break all.

Enjoy your holiday.

Four Kids,
It sounds as if you are doubting yourself, your trading strategy/plan, and your trading abilities. All perfectly normal during the learning stage. To help ease your pain, I would suggest adding more (security) money to the acct, hope fully that can easy your mind on losses. And under funded acct can be considered a stress point. Another thing to look at is money management. Are you trading with 1 mini lot? If not, I would suggest you do. Are you placing stops on ALL your orders? Do you have confidence in your strategy? What about a trading plan? Analytics?

In trading, you win some you lose some. The key to trading is to limit your loses and never chase losses with good money. As traders we must suck it up and gain to confidence needed to become successful. You can't be a trader and fear it. If it's money you are worried about losing then I would say, you're in the wrong profession.

Jhig,I think you completely misunderstand what I am saying. I have no doubt's about my strategy/ plan/ abilities. I have total confidence in the way I trade. I have no fear of losse's, I expect, and accept them. I just plan on having more winners than loser's, then I don't have to rely on mm, r/r, etc to save me.

As for adding more money to my acc I would if I could, but I can't at the moment. An under funded acc might be a stress point for some people, it isn't for me, it just makes it more of a challenge.

Thank's for careing about me, but I am doing OK, and I am very happy with where I am at with my trading.

What makes you think that I doubt myself, or that I don't analyze my trades ?.

Are there any good resources on learning this? Is it some kind of 6th sense? How do you have a conviction with a particular trade to stay in longer than another similiar situation? It must be a 6th sense.

Deus, this is an excellent question, IMO. Now I'll do my best to provide an answer, even if 99% of what I post is "the blind leading the blind".

Firstly, you might be interested to check out the MAX system, as (from what I've read) it seeks to maximize profit from trending situations. FWIW, I'm seriously considering subscribing myself. Here's Hedginghog's independent view.

Secondly, here's my own take. I think it's fairly obvious that the turtle trading style (letting profits run; pyramiding; etc) will be profitable only to the extent that markets trend. More here.

So the key to making the turtle strategy work in a forex context must be to find the most heavily trending pairs. Let's say we're trading intraday setups (H1/M30/M15). Then the probability of one of these 'trending' should be increased if the higher TF chart(s) are likewise trending strongly. When two overlapping waves move in the same direction, the result is reinforcement, and as Elliott Wave students know, the impulsive waves are longer than the corrective waves.

The following is arguable, but after looking at charts for almost 4 years now, I'd concur with J16 that the higher TFs offer greater consistency of trend. Here are two possible reasons: (1) the longer the time period, the greater the opportunity for a significant cross-section of the trading population to participate, giving a more comprehensive market view; (2) broad economic trends (perceived strengths or weaknesses in a nation's economy; inflation; the global economy in a state of risk appetite or risk aversion; carry trade; etc) are going to stay in place, and play themselves out, over a long period of time, which will ultimately be reflected in longer term technicals. There's an excellent thread by Razorjack here – see his post #10 for more info.

What does this have to do with maximizing profit under trending conditions? Well, I'm looking at the concept back-to-front, by simply attempting to find the 'trendiest' markets, and only THEN attempt to apply the (broad-brush) turtle strategy.

Razorjack's posts bring me to my next point, a quote from Tom Yeomans: "pairs don't trend, currencies do". So what happens if we look at the relative strength of individual currencies? If we plot these on the longer term (daily, weekly) TFs, will that give us a technical proxy as to underlying national economic strength? Sure, as with all TA, it's going to be a lagging process, but offsetting that are the following benefits: (1) the technicals will confirm that sentiment agrees with the underlying economic rationale; (2) it removes the need to try to accurately weigh up the offsetting effects of a number of complex economic factors; (3) if these conditions have a more gradual, longer-term impact, then the disadvantaging effect of the 'lag' is reduced, in any case; (4) by trading the strongest currencies against the weakest, we can potentially double the likelihood of trend continuation, i.e. for the trend to reverse completely, the strong currency has to be come weak AND the weak one become strong.

Better yet, if a pair is trending upward, support levels tend to hold, and we get some fantastic intraday low risk entry opportunities (as per DIBS, but using bounces off recent key support levels, rather than inside bars – more here), while the strong daily trend allows 'long tail' exits. In other words, intraday entries (say 10-20 pips risk) but longer TF chart exits (50-500 pips potential return). Obviously vice versa for a downtrend. My only other observation is that the 'flipover' S/R works best on the major pairs, sometimes accurately to the pip (I wonder if that's what Troikaone1's talking about here? : "FOREX has incredible mathematical accuracy when it is trending well"); more leeway for error is required on the exotics. And of course the spreads on the latter are higher.

Pairing the strongest against the weakest makes for not only stronger trends, but also cleaner movement, i.e. less long wicked candles, 'jagged' moves, whipsaws, and undesirable spikes and pullbacks that might potentially stop us out.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I've had some decent results with this approach over the last couple of months, using AUD and CAD as the strong currencies, and EUR and GBP (and more recently, JPY) as the weak ones. Pair those up, and check out their daily charts, and you'll see why. Maybe that's untypical behavior, and doubtless the naysayers will say that I've been lucky, but as long as there are shifts in currency strength/weakness that are gradual, then I can't see why this type of scenario won't repeat itself, at least in some small way.

As with all of my posts - take it or leave it - take the ideas away and prove (or disprove) them for yourself.

Anyway, forgive me for butting in, especially as your question was addressed to pipmutt. I would hope that a trader with 14 years' experience provides a vastly superior answer to mine.

Very nice reply as always Hanover I'll think about some of the things you said. Currency strength has been on my mind lately as I've been reading some of the Trader101 stuff. Smjones basket strength indicator he developed is excellent as well as your relative strength.

I think nothing but good things can come from trading the strongest against the weakest. After the T101 thread Smjones sure seemed like a believer haha in this concept.

Thanks for the reply.

6th sense about what, direction?

Like I mentioned in a previous post most traders seem to have a fixation with predicting direction and they obsessively spend all their time and energy on it. Take a look at the number of people in the Interactive Trading and Trading Systems forums, they're packed in there like sardines searching for tools to help predict where price will go. Look at Hanover's post, very interesting and well written (excluding the sarcasm ), but again all about predicting direction.

I'm not saying that some of these people won't scratch out a reasonable return but in my experience it's mediocre at best, most times it hardly justifies the effort let alone the risk, and as we all know the vast majority fail. I think everyone (with the exception of SupremeChaos!) agrees we're in this for the money, lots of it otherwise what's the point, we may as well get a regular job and put our money in more traditional investments.

Soros's quote in my sig, and the part of my post which you quoted, probably sum it up best for me. It takes quite a shift in thinking and focus but for me it was a more logical approach than anything else I had tried, and believe me I tried pretty much everything imaginable, and then some!

To use a Hanover quote, "As with all of my posts - take it or leave it - take the ideas away and prove (or disprove) them for yourself."


-

Pixie - it seems your thread has been taken a little off track here and there. Let me try to help you get it back on the rails. Go back to hanover's post, #13 - it is the best one in this thread by a long shot. Read it, and then read it again. And with respect to another poster I suggest you promptly ignore the any recommendation about looking at EA's (perhaps there is a time and place for this but this might be several years down the track, if ever.)

To add to what hanover has said, you need to learn how to learn, this is not a cliche, it is about highly practical and tangible stuff, as you will discover for yourself:

If we jump ahead to the 'end game' that many new traders aspire to, we will see than most (ok, I cannot say all) successful traders end up trading in a totally different way to when they started out, and with a different methodology to what they thought would make them successful. This implies that there is a critical process of learning and evolution that you need to go through. So if you are a 'normal person' (whatever that means) your job right now is not to trade and make money - it is to establish yourself into the long and tough learning process that is required to becoming a life-long profitable trader - if indeed this is what you aspire to be. In time and effort it is worth (another) masters degree.

We consistently successful traders have a happily boring and lonely job - we seek satisfaction in the boredom of our work. We leave our emotions at the door, exercise an enormous amount of patience every day, and save excitement and fun for the pleasures of life that successful trading can enable. For most, this satisfyingly boring job is the reality of trading for a living - and indeed it is not for everyone.

I wish you all the best for your trading journey.

PS - you will come across a lot of ego driven wankers in these forums (I am not necessarily talking about the contributors in this thread) who offer nothing other than the fruits of their own failure, as supposed trading advice - if you can sift through the crap and find the good stuff, then you might gain a thing or two from these forums to set you on the right track - with the rest of the hard work being up to you.

lol, I can never understand why some people feel the need to say things like this

But that aside, from your previous posts Hedginghog would I be right in assuming you're another proponent of the "predicting direction comes first" mentality? If not, what in your opinion comes top of the list?

OK! So getting this thread back on the rails didn't last very long did it! Oh well, maybe another time.

Happy trading, and good will to all.