My "edge" is my practical trading METHOD. It involves bloody hard work, the willingness to think, learn from mistakes, adapt, in staying humble and in seeking satisfaction in learning that previous held assumptions are simply not correct. The edge is in the method - trade execution and profitability are just the outcomes of the method.
My edge does not reside in a "system," EA, or in technical indicators and it was not found magically by looking into a mirror. My edge has taken many years of hard work to develop and I must assume that to stay profitable for many years to come I will need to continue to develop that edge.
My "edge" is my practical trading METHOD. It involves bloody hard work, the willingness to think, learn from mistakes, adapt, in staying humble and in seeking satisfaction in learning that previous held assumptions are simply not correct. The edge is in the method - trade execution and profitability are just the outcomes of the method.
My edge does not reside in a "system," EA, or in technical indicators and it was not found magically by looking into a mirror. My edge has taken many years of hard work to develop and I must assume that to stay...
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Joined Feb 2010
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Status: Bulls and Bears, dual to the death
|183 Posts
The ability to comprehend the chart is my advantage. Once I realized that there were only 2 environments to trade in thing became simpler... Do you know what the 2 environments are?
I read that the market 95% of the time was RANGE BOUND, So that left me with the other 5% being BREAKOUT; these are the two environments of trading. Identify the environment and place your trade.
An 'edge', in the classic mathematical sense, must be measurable and definable. With regards to this, traders have no edge. Yes, there may be a handful of traders who have developed a method to create a measurable edge in trading--- but if so, they ain't talking. No one on this board can predict the next pip, or 10 pips, or 100 for that matter over a long time horizion with any consistency that could yeild results any better than flipping a coin. No need to debate that statement here, many threads have already done so and the results are in. Many traders "think", believe, and hope they have an edge, but all of their collective thinking does not amount to a bucket of spit. (Exception: Stop hunting if you know what you are doing, have a lot of money, have the patience of Job, and don't need a lot of pips to cover your nut.) Predicting short term market gyrations is a losing game for almost all.
Longer term, however, does not share the same plight. Markets can and are manipuleted for minutes, hours, or days. But manipulation for weeks at a time is a lot harder to pull off---and less frequently done. And if done, it is a lot easier to recognize than short term manipulation. So I trade off the weekly charts, fine tune with daily, and use 4hr for entry. I cannot call this and "edge", because it is not, but it is the single most important peice of information that I have ever come across to positivley impact my trading.
An 'edge', in the classic mathematical sense, must be measurable and definable....
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how can you say no one on this board has an edge thats a very big statement i think you will find half the people here wouldnt tell you if they had an edge anyway for fear of being bugged by others for it. so when you say NO one has an edge in the real world they do in forex factory we are all moving average traders.
An 'edge', in the classic mathematical sense, must be measurable and definable. With regards to this, traders have no edge.
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With respect I'll call BS on that.
An edge in the classical mathematical sense is actually usually the intersection of two surfaces.
But in the statistical / probability of gambling sense an edge is simply a probability of profit that may be expressed in terms of a probability of win, win to loss ratio, and standard deviation. Most traders will never be able to express their edge as I think you are suggesting. Also the edge statistics fluctuate in a macro sense and may disappear for a time or all time ... like the quiet war casino's run against forms of cheating. But there is a mathematical edge and it can be derived by analysing a series of trading outcomes.
No one on this board can predict the next pip, or 10 pips, or 100 for that matter over a long time horizion with any consistency that could yeild results any better than flipping a coin. No need to debate that statement here, many threads have already done so and the results are in. Many traders "think", believe, and hope they have an edge, but all of their collective thinking does not amount to a bucket of spit.
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I accept that challenge!! I can show you that predicting 10 pip moves (not including spread) is very doable. Naturally, some periodically falter and never make the 10 pip goal, but will be some amount of (+) pips. I have been doing this for quite some time and it works for me.
I mean no disrespect and certainly am not trying to show I am a better trader than someone, or that short term trading is the only way to go or anything like that. I just want to show that there is no RIGHT or WRONG way to make money in currency trading, only DIFFERENT ways. I just firmly believe that if people get it out of their heads that only one way of trading works, but instead have different methods at their disposal, they will be more consistantly profitable. Think about it: trade long term when you want and short term when waiting for the long term setup...
Speaking of consistancy, what do you mean by "..over a long term horizon"? On an earlier post on a different thread you wrote:
An 'edge', in the classic mathematical sense, must be measurable and definable. With regards to this, traders have no edge. Yes, there may be a handful of traders who have developed a method to create a measurable edge in trading--- but if so, they ain't talking. No one on this board can predict the next pip, or 10 pips, or 100 for that matter over a long time horizion with any consistency that could yeild results any better than flipping a coin. No need to debate that statement here, many threads have already done so and the results are in. Many...
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An interesting post here by FX-Petra. If we assume the scope of your statements apply to the study and trade execution of a single instrument, in isolation, then you may very well be correct. But if we broaden the view of trading to include the understanding of relationships between different instruments and different markets, and seek to exploit those commonalities and differences, based on the 'fundamental' drivers of those markets, and for example, the behaviour of the participants at certain times of the day week, or year, then I would have to disagree with you. Such an approach, however, requires the continual evolution of the 'edge' and I think I may have eluded to that in my previous post in this thread.
A common mistake/error/oversight/assumption (call it what you will) that many traders seem to make, is that they believe that successful trading is about the mastery of one instrument, and seek to become "in tune" with the characteristics of that instrument to the point where its price movements (usually we are talking about a trend) in isolation of anything else, offer the opportunity to make consistent money. While this may work for some - usually for a short period of time only - I suggest it is a very insular and unsophisticated way to approach the markets, and very much open to the "flipping coin" scenario you mention in your post - the illusion of technical indicators become very appealing in such scenarios, and hence the prevalence of crap on websites like this one... "Which pair should I trade and which indicators work best?...surely there's an edge to be found in there somewhere..." And so the story goes.
An edge in the classical mathematical sense is actually usually the intersection of two surfaces.
But in the statistical / probability of gambling sense an edge is simply a probability of profit that may be expressed in terms of a probability of win, win to loss ratio, and standard deviation. Most traders will never be able to express their edge as I think you are suggesting. Also the edge statistics fluctuate in a macro sense and may disappear for a time or all time ... like the quiet war casino's run against...
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ok, you got me on that one---- there are 2 diffrent kinds of "edges" in math. And yes, a casino has a definable, measurable edge in the vast majority of house games. That is a bankable edge because the results over a long time horizon have shown that there is only 1 outcome....the house wins. No such edge exists in short term day trading as it relates to the retail forex market.
how can you say no one on this board has an edge thats a very big statement i think you will find half the people here wouldnt tell you if they had an edge anyway for fear of being bugged by others for it. so when you say NO one has an edge in the real world they do in forex factory we are all moving average traders.
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Well, let me be clear. I am talking about short term daytrading in the retail forex market. Stop hunting is a viable strategy as I mentioned in an earlier post. Also, if you have a friend who is the head trader for HSBC, Citi, or the like, you should do very well... provided he emails you every morning with their trading plan for the day. But there is NOTHING on your chart that is going to give you any edge over the market. Not price action, not any indicator, not any analysis, not your experience or intuition. As a small retail investor, we are all at the mercy of the market makers and movers.
