It seems impossible to make money in the long run

I've been using a successful scalping trading for 6 weeks now. I've taken more than 50 trades in several markets conditions (huge volatility, poor volat, balanced, imbalanced, newsflow, risk aversion). Today I decide to backtest manually and I've just figured out that it's not as profitable as it looks.

To tell the truth I'm suprised. I was thinking 80 trades was enough to prove or not the validity of a system but I was wrong.

Is anyone here may show a successful trading explorer for years or several months?

(Excuse my poor english)

It probably is impossible to be a successful scalper in the long run. You are simply taking too large a risk for too little profit. Learn to trade longer timeframes. I personally use H4, D1, W1 charts in my analysis, lower timeframes only for entry/exit points.

I don't know. Risk is just an aspect among others; a trader has to be fine with his risk. Therefore scalping, daytrading, swing are the same from this point of view.

The problem is the only sucessful traders I know are 1) Future traders 2) scalpers.

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had you asked that several months ago, it would have been easy to point out several live explorers that had been very profitable for years.... but when ibfx sold out to fxcm, those explorers were shutdown.....

webjeff, who was also with ibfx, is someone that i've mentioned multiple times in the past..... there are others, but jeff's explorer is easy to prove so i have felt confident pointing it out..... he trades 1 pair only...... always uses the same realistic stop loss and profit target...... he trades 1 signal..... he takes every trade...... and to my knowledge has let every trade run to it's own completion.....

the new explorer he has now is with fxcm...... his old ibfx explorer had run for seems like over 3 years and was at one time up over 300%......

he might be the best example of a successful ea trader......h

Thank you for your contribution.

I just want to say that I know it's possible to make money in the long run. As I said above, I know some traders (I'm sure for five persons) who make trading for a living. The thread's title is just to open a debate.

Anyway thank you.

I don't know what your strategy, but I'm a scalper too. I used my strategy from 22 September 2014 until now, i made 3,000 single trades and have 10% profit now. When someone have a profitable strategy I don't think they will be here and discuss anything.

Firstly a scientist thinks that he's wrong. When he doesn't find any mistake, he accepts he's right.

I do a fair amount of scalping. I was profitable every quarter this year. Made around 28% return total. But I have only been trading live for a year and a half so I think I can do a lot better with more experience.

Just keep it simple! try to have profit at the end of the day, the week, month. Withdraw your original deposit as soon as possible, and that's the best stratergy.

Choose an answer from the following to satisfy your this thought that it is possible or impossible to make money in long-run:

1. If people here are successful in trading, why we don't come across any direct or indirect member discussion how they made their fortunes or even a random post how they spent their profit money on some sort of luxury?

2. There are many successful traders here on FF who are making millions but they remain quiet because of tax issues or because they don't want to give away their methods.

3. There are successful traders but they do not waste their time posting here. It is only learners and addicts who post here.

4. There are so many threads in this forum that it is difficult to find a convincingly successful trader. One example could be this fellow.

5. Everybody here is successful but nobody wants to share his/her success with others and you and I are the only fools and useless persons here.

There is a lot of chop in the lower timeframes. Switch to the 1hr,4hr, or daily charts. I'm still learning forex myself, but I tend to do better at the longer timeframes.

It's absolutely certain that "someone" will make money in the long run. And, it's absolutely certain that "someone" is losing in the long run.
Just like in the lottery, if enough tickets are sold eventually "someone" will win the jackpot.

However, the combined accounts of all retail spot forex traders are always losing.

How to find the GEMS in ForexFactory and sift through all the B***S***

Lets open with a joke:
Question: How many Geniuses work at FF?
Answer: None. Because they still don't know how to solve a simple "member ranking" system


==================================

I hardly read stuff here and any other Forex forum... because let's be honest, 97% of the posts at FF are rubbish. Then I see genuine people seeking help, only to be served by Bullsh*t artists, behind their hidden agenda. (Firstly, don't contact me because I won't contact you back. I'm not here to mentor anyone. I'm not here to sell anything. Never pay money to anyone who proclaims to be CrucialPoint... Don't get scammed).
So let's cut to the chase... What we are looking for are "Quality posts/posters".

First you go to the members list found here.



Here is the formula:
Number of Posts (divided by) / Number of Subscribers = X (+ add positive Trade Explorer)
X is the rating of how much bullshit they post

X should be 5 or less. It means for every 5 posts there is 1 subscriber. Any number greater and farther higher than 5 increases the B***S*** rating. If X is 20, it means that for every 20 posts there is 1 subscriber. It's this simple; if you are here to talk BS, you will end up posting lots of post without people resonating to your cause. Deleted posts should be added to the total post as FF doesn't tally the deleted ones.

Writing and posting takes a lot of time. And especially posters with 6K -15K of posts, suggests that these people have no life. 2-3 quality posts a week is a lot. That totals to (3 x 52) = 156 posts a year. And if a member has been at FF for 10 years, 1560 post is sufficient enough for High quality posts. Anything outside these numbers are utter Fluffy B***S***.

If you are a newbie who asks a lot of question or someone conversing, it is reflected on the number of your posts. People who knows their shit don't talk/post a lot. Someone who is making money is busy making money and not posting on forums.

You see the pic I provided above?... all B***S*** artist.

So I went through the members list and applied the formula and these are some of the people I found. Please note: I have no association with any of these members. I am not even subscribed to them. I've never even read their posts. I've never even known these guys have existed until today. But am rest assured of their post by the ratio of the people who found their post with quality, thus with limited post comes with high subscribers.

And guess what and BEHOLD!!! ... to my surprise they have live trade explorers with good positive results.
Here are just some of the ones I found:

doktorforex: 30 Subscribers - 2 Post - (2 positive TE)
alirajaie: 277 S - 42 P - (3 positive TE)
Gurangax: 287 S - 300 P - (1 Positive TE)
realreason: 188 S - 19 P- (4 postive TE)
Wuza: 144 S - 633 P - (1 Positive TE)
Kinspk: 134 S - 331 P - (1 positive TE)
Anup: 116 S - 197 P - (4 positive TE)


And off course there are some with no Trade explorers:
TheRealThing: 199 S - 30 P- (No TE)
PeterCrowns: 214 S - 41 P - (No TE)
and yours truly CrucialPoint: 139 S - 342 P (No TE) At least you know that for every 2nd post I posted, there is some someone who found value in what I posted. Compared to other High Impact posters with 10,000 posts on bickering, berating and degrading other members that goes on and on.

Off course if FF change to this system of ranking, clicks will go down and revenue of FF will go down. All the bickering and nonsense is what brings in the money to forums. Forgive me about the early joke. I'm sure there are intelligent people working at FF... but as with life, politics and money always get in the way.

So I hope I have shed some light to those who are here to cut through the crap and really serious about their learning and experience in trading.

Peace,
CrucialPoint

You should start by defining what a GEMS is, what constitutes a GEMS ? ... objectively.

Hi, in my opinion, scalping can simply NOT be successful on the long run, and this is just because of statistics.

The basics of statistics is that anything random will approach better its theorical odds the more times you try.
For example, if you roll a 6 faces dice, you have 1 chance out of 6 to make a 1, same for a 2 ... same for a 6 (1 chance out of 6 = 16.66%)
Now, if you only roll it 6 times, you may get 3 times a 6, 2 times a 5 and 1 time a 4. Which is pretty far away from the theorical odds. You had a 16.66% chances to get 6s, but you got 50% here.

If you rol this dice 600 times, you will get a little bit closer to 100 times each number.
If you roll this dice 6 million times, you will get pretty close from 1 million time each number.
The more you increase the number of rolls, the more you will get close to the 16.66% theorical odds for each number.

The same applies in forex, which is pretty random on the short term (the shorter the time period, the more random it is).
The people telling you of risk/reward ratio is pretty irrelevant, because when you enter a trade with a risk/reward ratio of 1, you have 50% chances to win, and 50% chances to loose.
If you enter a trade with a risk/reward ratio of 2, you win 2 times as much when you win than when you loose. But you have 66.66% chances to loose and only 33.33% chances to win.
So, it's in fact quite the same, as you will win more but less often.

You can think of the roulette game in a casino: Betting on a 50% chances thing, like BLACK or RED gets you 2 times your money. Betting on a 33.33% chances thing gets you 3 times your money. etc...

Now, if you ever was to Las Vegas, think about the fact that all this huge and expensive casinos have been built just on statistics. Just on one simple trick if we take the roulette example:
When you bet on RED or BLACK, you do NOT have a 50% chances to win, but a little less. There are in fact 36 numbers, 18 RED and 18 BLACK, but you must add the 0, which isn't either red or black. So your chances to win when are 18 out of 37 (instead of 36. It's even 38 in a double 0 roulette).

So your odds to win are approx 48.65% instead of 50%. And this little 1.35% is what Las Vegas has been built with.

Now, I explained all this, because it's the exact same with forex, due to the SPREAD (+ the commission if there is any). The spread is lowering your odds to win when you enter a trade. So your odds are not 50% but lower, and where it becomes really interesting is that the smaller the TP and SL are, the higher the spread is proportionnally.

If you enter a trade with the goal of taking profit (or getting out at a loss) less than 18 times the spread (+ commission if any), you have LESS chances to win than by betting on RED or BLACK at a roulette in a casino. For example, with a spread of 0.6 pips on EUR/USD, which is pretty good, if you want to get less than 10.8 pips, your odds are worse than at the roulette.

Combine the 2 things: That you more you try, the more you get closer to the theorical stats, and how the spread is somehow rigging your odds, it's mathematically almost impossible to SCALP successfully on the long run.

When you code EAs and backtest them on a long enough time period, you see this very clearly: You usually see how you get exactly that: Theorical statistics.
Realy short time frames is a suicide. Hope you enjoyed the post, and you're welcome if you have questions.

Note that the number of posts shown there is misleading, because it shows only the posts in the threads that have not been deleted.

k
.

Here's a (day trading) study from Stock market perspective http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/2014/...-actually.html

"In the average year, 360,000 individuals engage in day trading. While about 13% earn profits net of fees in the typical year, the results of our analysis suggest that less than 1% of day traders (less than 1,000 out of 360,000) are able to outperform consistently." (p. 15).

so, i think it safe to assume that, after 15+ years period the (stock) daytraders survival rate drop to less than 1% ...

Did anyone knows similar study for non-intraday / longer time frame traders ???

your statistics is at serious fault man

will you say that even with 90% or higher probability's ? When your trading statistics is that good how could you turn the other way.
If you have a method that can achieve just 1:1 when including the spread and commission into the the risk and reward. You are set.

=

2 Pip Spread
+
6 Pip Stoploss

Risk = 8 Pips

Minimum Target = 8 Pips
+
90% Success rate


At this point when your trading is so precise you don't even need 1:1 R/R in the typical way people view it. If you do the math right you can have a lower reward in pips than your stop yet your actual risk when everything is weighed together, is still 1:1 +