Looking for general advice for starting serious trading

I'm looking to increase my account size soon and trade the gbpjpy (some of the other majors as well but mainly the geppy) mostly during london/new york session overlap 8-12 EST and maybe also longer term trades as well. I've been trading with a small account off and on for about 5 years so I'm familiar with much of the basics. My short term goal is to simply use trading as a supplemental income while also gaining more experience towards using it as a primary source of income. I'm not swinging for the fences expecting some eventual dream of an extravagant, wealthy lifestyle (not that I'd mind that either ) but would eventually like to make modest living that could be supported by trading from home and enjoying all the usual benefits of working from home.

For the intraday trades I'd like to focus on gbpjpy mainly for the volatility and am just looking for any general advice in how to deal with this pair. ..Would it be worth it to go back and study historic charts for this time of day and take notes on how it moves, how many pips, etc.?? How about trading with or without a system? I feel that my temperament is better suited towards trading without a system and just going off of S/R, PA, etc...I've noticed that I've had moderate success by anticipating quick moves and getting in and getting out for a small profit, for what it's worth.

(I have a basic understanding of PA such as pinbars, doji, etc., also fibonacci, S/R levels, psychological levels, etc. but I still sometimes get the feeling that it's a coin toss when I make a trade and I'm not fully confident. I do notice that the S/R levels and psych levels seem especially important. I also have learned about the basic ideas about MM, for ex. don't risk more than 2-3% per trade, etc.)

(..on a side note, I'm not sure how to allow fundamentals to influence my trading. Currently the yen has been losing value since around last fall, but just today we're seeing talk of QE in the UK, the gbp taking a hit and talks of this trend continuing for quite some time.
In this situation is it just a matter of trying to figure which currency is in worse shape than the other? Also, how much should other crosses gbpusd, usdjpy, be able to help? what are the best sources for basic financial advice in these areas?)

Simpler has always worked better for me. You sound like you have the knowledge, just might be complicating it a little bit. I was able to increase my acct 126% last month due primarly to the yen, with no single trade risk of over 3%. If you look at the monthly and weekly charts on yen they are at a decision point. My trading really exploded when I went to higher time frames, following strict plan. I tend to analize which curriences are strong and week and pair them off on weekends with trading plan for that week. I only check trades once a day at close of daily bar. Trading the larger timeframes takes most of the news spikes out of the equation.

Hope this helps

That does help, thanks. Trading on higher time frames seems to often be recommended by the more experienced traders, I notice.

Focus on supply and demand. Ignore everything else - I've been through the rat race and really it all comes down to that. Where are the institutional, market moving limit orders stacked up? If I told you there were 1 billion dollars worth of sell orders at 1.59 and there weren't many buy orders until 1.56, where would you sell at? Just under, right? Why?

thanks kanzler..

this might be a dumb question but how am I to know where the institutional, market moving limit order are stacked up?

and (just to be sure) when you say I would sell at just under, am I right in guessing that you mean just under 1.59 because the selling pressure will move it down, and then get out before it gets to 1.56 when buying pressure resume?

You're very much welcome. Exactly - there are a large number of sellers at 1.59 so you might want to sell at 1.589 to get your order filled ('front running'), but you'll know it would take many buy orders to break above 1.59 because in order to do so, all of those sell limits must be filled. Once all orders at 1.59 are filled and there is one more buy order, price moves to 1.5901 or up to whatever price the next closest willing seller is at. Price cannot magically jump over that block of orders, it's just how it works and should be fairly straightforward. As a result, you can use this knowledge to set tight stops with confidence, resulting in excellent risk/reward ratio trades.

As for how to identify them in the forex markets, this is where things get kind of opinionated. In equities (stocks) and futures you get a central exchange and have access to "level 2" data which tells you how many orders are at whatever price at the exchange. This tells you exactly where orders are stacked (although there are games traders play there as well such as fake walls, so it's not quite as direct as it could be). In forex though, there are many different groups further representing thousands of individual traders and institutions, so no one person has access to see where orders are waiting to be executed. For example, you can see Oanda's order book here ("open orders"), but this only represents Oanda's clients, not Goldman Sachs or FXCM's.

In order to find areas with the only tool we have, the chart, I personally start looking for areas of price consolidation. Consolidation means that there are a roughly even number of buyers and sellers at least for a while at that price range. If there weren't, logically price would have risen or fallen. It has to! When price breaks strongly from an area it was earlier at equilibrium (and not on news), more than likely an institutional trader has shown their hand. We know that an institution is probably buying or selling there because a large order was executed at an average acceptable range and the market immediately moved to fill that order, resulting in a large jump in price. When price returns to that area, you will often see another spike in price in the direction of the original move, as the institution buying or selling there wasn't done filling that order for whoever they're filling it for. Sam Seiden goes over this concept quite a bit in his articles and video series and he's where I originally picked this concept up from. Note that I do not recommend buying anything their 'academy' sells, everything you need to know is out there for free.