Trading Made Simple

Emmanuel,

I'll give you some details, I am in the military, and as such work long hours, and have no access to any trading platform or web site during my day at work. I am currently in the US Pacific time zone, so London opening happens after, or right around when I go to bed (I have to be up at 0500 for work). So I end up waking up through the night to check for TMS trades.

It's difficult to judge trade set ups in those few minutes, and I end up missing a lot of set ups. I most often find my trades at the opening of the 0700 PST candle, and they are usually sluggish to develop. When I do find set ups in my admittedly sleepy state, they usually perform right up to expectations of the system.

I use a set TP of 50 pips since I cannot monitor trades through the day at all. And in situations like the G/A trade we have been watching develop, I have missed almost 250 pips because of this, and I missed the re-entry on the bounce, I was exhausted after work, and turned my alarm off without consciously waking up.

My goal is a modest net 100 pips a week, but I would certainly be much happier with more! I have 5 years left on my contract, and as such, have 5 years to either get financially to the point that I can get out of the service, or decide to re-enlist for another 6 years. Through my career, I have been gone from home, more often than not. I have been away from home for most of the last three years (all of the last year), and will be home for about two months before leaving again. So developing this into an income stream would be a literal lifestyle change for me. It would be nice to be with my family for more than a few months at a time.

I tapped out and took a 31 pip lost. I'm staying away from aud pairs. Lost a Fu**ing steel rolex amount of money between both my accounts on this freaking trade. MotherF*&^ Every trade on an aussie pair as been total Sh*^ for me this week. I can't believe I have only got one signal this week so far. All the others trades I have had to freaking get in at the start of the candle which I hate. -5 gmt is CRAP this week for signals. Normally I would have 3 to 5 signals I could take by this week. Yet there as been one and that was on GJ on Sunday. WTF!

Glad you could have a laugh while I lost my arm on that trade mate.

Sorry

1 arm and 2 legs left

on my another account i had these opened from last week.

You will get those pips back as3. We will get them back.

If you are using MT4, it is a standard feature. Find the Terminal button on the STANDARD toolbar. Click on it to open your balance sheet. Click on the Account History tab. Find the trade you want to place on the chart. Left click your mouse on that trade, hold down the button and drag and drop the trade on your chart. It will place the entry and exit arrows with a line between, along with the TP and SL arrows.

Thanks for the help. I got Admiral Markets set up and I also have FXDD set up. It is amazing the difference in the tdi indicator on each. They say totally different things.

What I have been doing the last few days is tracking 4 hr signals (TMI CROSS for those who hate the word signal) on four demo platforms from gmt0 to gmt3.

So each hour with the help of my Chinese and South African programmer I get this info which I will post as I can if it is helpful. It may be educational and avoids trying to go thru each chart for those who trade closed bar

All it gives is the first or second bar signal on closed bar.

I use the Fibonacci Channel indicator. Go to the Insert button at the top of your platform and click it. Move your mouse to Channels and click on the Fibonacci indicator. Double click on your chart to place the indicator. Right click on the new Fibo channel and go to Fibo Channel properties. Open the Fibo Levels tab and change the levels to 1, 0, 0. Then place the channel where you want it.

Gmt0+ Iamfx---No TMI closed bar crosses

No signal. Good night.

Yeah its only 27 pips im down for the week. If I had just stuck to my rules I would have only 1 trade this week for 60ish pips profit. By chasing trades do to lack of trades how i use TMS I wasted a lot of my time this week and got smacked down.

Overtrading, chasing trades = Total Noob Mistakes

The two losers I took by bailing out of trades 1 went my way 40 pips. Now EA looks like its heading back to breakeven. I hate when that happens. Its like you are forced to close the trade because you don't want to take the potential full loss. So you bail the it goes your way.

The FX market can make fools out of intelligent people just like Horses can in Racing.

I think I'm going to call it a day. My heart is pounding.

Thanks for posting. I have been trading with fxdd and it is 12 midnight here eastern time. My 4 hour candle just reset and this is the time I have been taking my trades. I just downloaded Admiral Markets and the 4 hour candle won't reset till 2 a.m. eastern. Is this the best time? You just posted the above chart so I guess you are trading like me at the eastern midnight hour. Anyway I am much enjoying this process after trading tick charts for 4 years. I really appreciate everyone's info and dedication to the thread. It has been most helpful.

NZDJPY H4. Just an example of a super side way market. On the plus side, the break out would probably be huge.

This is candle time percentage, just to show the remaining time for a candle to close, open, it helps me in taking entry at new candle or wait the candle to close before entry

Gmt3_Excel Markets - No closed bar signals

I believe the next hour would be Big E 6am bar?

Trading the H4 chart requires some patience...that was a hard lesson for me to learn six years ago. But I read a lot of contributors to this thread discuss lower time frame exits/entries which may work for them. But the H4 chart allows me to have a life beyond FOREX and still supplement my income. Here is what's working for me:

I normally ignore TDI crossovers around the "50" level. Why? If you look at price action it is normally consolidating when the TDI is in this area and flattens out (we do not get the 10/2 or 4/8 o'clock nice moves as originally discussed by the thread author. To be sure, you can always find some mid-stream crossovers that follow through, but most of them provide lower levels of profit.

I still do my examinations every four hours like most of you, but I focus on the TDI reaching the "68" or "32" levels which in most cases, corresponds to being "overbought" or "oversold". The market breathes...it cycles like your chest going up and down as you inhale and exhale. When you take in a really big breath ("68"), what normally follows is a big exhale towards "32". Then you have to take another breath (from "32" towards "68")...and so on. It's a K.I.S.S. principle that even an old fighter pilot can understand.

Let's look at one of my favorite pairs the AUDJPY:

Here's the screenshot of the 3 March oversold TDI cross to the long side which took 4 days to give an exit (price NEVER closed below the PAC so stay with the program! It gave up 380 pips during that trade...PATIENCE!

Now the pair needed to exhale (it was way overbought) and gave a great TDI cross sell signal on 7 March. This trade gave up 135 pips! (Exit was when TDI reached the "32" level and gave a buy cross signal and hit the S/L trailing the PAC). This trade lasted five days and was carried through the weekend.

I now honored the buy signal mention above on 13 Mar @ 0000 which resulted in a loss of -65 pips. One could argue that the Market Base Line (yellow line in TDI) was sloping down seeking neutrality near "50" but let's keep it simple.

The next buy signal was 17 March (I really liked this one as it had divergence) and this position is currently still open and at +165 pips with a S/L in profit! Again....PATIENCE.

The final pic is of TDI crosses that I generally ignore and normally indicate consolidation as you can see by price action.

If I don't see my pairs in "68" or "32" territory...I wait. One doesn't always have to be in a position. Eventually fundamentals or news will get the TDI in an area I like to trade. Finally, trading the TDI cross as I've explained is the most aggressive way to trade it...my S/Ls are generally in the 50-70 pip range. I pay attention to H4 swing highs and lows as well. When I'm not home, I check the trades every four hours on my cell phone using GoToMyPC.

Perhaps this will help someone in the thread. I love the H4 charts and at the time of this posting, this pair alone has given up +615 pips in March.

Would you take entry a little bit earlier? I put some notes on the chart, thanks for you continuous support

price not going anywhere for me.
closed two trades on eur/usd with 43 pips each. could have been into the 90s each but i was not online when the price shot up yesterday.

PS sorry for not posting chart. net is damn slow to upload a chart or maybe my workplace has disabled uploading