Let's Build Your Account Back Up Discussing Bad Trading Habits!!

Welcome Wintrader! Glad to have you aboard!

Add 9. Trading smaller timeframes

I see a lot of people complaining about paying too much commission. It would be great to pay nothing, but you need to consider it as just a cost of doing business. It's like the the rent you pay on a main street shop. Without it you have no business.
When you fast scalp, commisison and spread take a large part of your profit, but look at it like a business. Providing there is some profit left after paying the expenses (commission and spread), then you are OK. The issue is when there is no profit left, then you start looking to blaim the costs of trading instead of the trading itself.

looks like we have the same habit LOL been trying to learn forex almost a year now and got margin call several times. I am also become like a monkey switch tree here and there (one indicator to another) but know i am stick with PA and S/R. been doing good with that strategy to bad the only think i guess i am lack right now is greed and how to exit a trade. that from me hope we can change our habit so we do not become a loser.
BTW Happy trading

Yes some of these don't apply to me. I'm a swing trader so most of my trades are held over multiple nights. But I get what you mean.

So recently my 2 biggest bad habits are:

1. holding trades long long long and not locking in profits along the way.
I have a tendency to point to my account and say "look I'm up 60% in 2 months and am up over 2000 pips!". Then the market turns and I give back most of those and stop out for around 200 pips of profit or less. Annoys the shit out of me. So Graviton over on another thread suggested that when I see a larger than average candle close I should close my trades or at least close part of those trades and lock in those good profits. I have started doing this. Then wait for new signals to enter again. Another idea I want to add from this week onwards is to close those trades or part of those trades on a Friday night, again locking in those hard earned pips for the week.

2. entering multiple trades on a successful trade whenever I feel like it instead of using my usual signal rules.
Sometimes I wake and open my platform to find a trade up say 200 pips. I get excited and add another position. Then over the next few days or even a week it retraces and cause much angst until it either reverses again or moves into a new trend permanently. To avoid all this I should be drilling down to the next timeframe or 2 and looking for my original signal there to enter again in order to get into profit ASAP. Over time I may even be able to use stops on those smaller timeframes instead of my main timeframe and thereby reduce the pips on my stop (I dont up pips but % of account) which in turn would mean higher returns as price moves in my direction.

Good thread. It's good to sometimes have to write your thoughts out.

8.Over Leveraging

AUD/USD Buy 0.7815
208:1

Making rules you don't follow doesn't make any sense.........

Good Thread OP. My main problem is not using stops. Probably due to lack of discipline. So easier to just click the button (see what happens) on hunches rather than doing the proper risk management plan for every trade.

I like this thread. I used to pop in and out of here years ago when I first started trading, and I picked up a lot of bad habits from others who didn't know what they were doing! So, I stopped coming in....this is also a bad habit, listening to traders who have no idea what they are doing! I've been trading for almost 10 years now and have been pretty successful. It took me awhile to learn and read charts correctly. I have learned to trust myself and trust my trading decisions. And, I use my own strategy that I put together, therefore, no one to blame! I will put a list of my own destructive trading habits...that I have since learned from, and they are the ones that will destroy your account in the matter of days....

1. Not knowing how to read a chart, short term & long term
2. Jumping into a trade because you don't know how to read a chart, just because it's going up or down!
3. Chasing the movement (chasing a trade) Let the trade set up and come to you. Don't get caught in the middle of a consolidation pattern!
4. Trading with emotions (no emotions allowed)
5. Learning where & when to enter a trade avoiding a drawdown that will wipe you out
6. Being greedy, over leveraging, adding to your position if you don't really know where you are going
7. Letting losing trades run, hoping it will go in your favor (eventually, if ever)
8. Not having a trading plan...knowing where you are going...if the trade is a quickie or a longer term run up or down
9. The trend is your friend is a saying for a reason....trading against a trend. Just because you entered it doesn't mean it's gonna change for you!
10. Overtrading....too much, too many to manage, one bad one will wipe out the good ones
12. Guessing
13. Trading the news, which is usually a temporary movement anyway, unless you are in a long term trade then just let the news happen.
14. Use a stop loss! That's why they are called stop losses! But know where to get into your trade and where to set your stop and take profit.
15. Over analyzing and overthinking...no reason for it. We are little players in big ponds! Unless you stand to make a few $50,000 in that one trade!

So, there are my stats on why you will lose an account! If you don't know how to read a chart learn!!! Get a mentor, learn wedges, flag patterns, consolidations, they are the basis of my trading strategy and I use 4hr. daily, and weekly charts to know where I'm going, and 1min and 5min to get into a trade. I too, hold trades for weeks and days. I held GBP/AUD for 2 weeks closed on Monday and made a killing! I recently posted a few charts on GBPJPY because I saw a lot of people in the forum who seemed to be guessing. I'm in long on a breakout of a 13 day consolidating bullish wedge that broke out last night. I also use FXCM...used to use FXDD but they relocated to UK. I have no issues with them either. It takes awhile to learn! No foolishness! We are trading to make $$$ not lose it! You can build a $200 account into $1000 and more! So build that account back up!

"Never trade with emotions, never chase a trade....you will lose everytime!" — Successful traders everywhere

It is difficult to advise you because I have no idea how are you trading. But, in general, if you leaving trades unattended, you need to use a stop loss and move it as the trade moves in your favor. While there must be some common sense applied sometimes, I use, as a guide, the Parabolic SAR with settings of Step 0.1 and Max of 1.0. I normally use the second mark when trailing, however, it is only a guide. But, if you are going to set and forget, it is decent.

Another method is the 3 candle trailing stop method. You place your stop at the highest high, or lowest low, of the previous 3 candles and move it accordingly on each new candle.

This should stop margin calls. However, if you are placing a trade and then going to sleep without ANY monitoring, then it would be useless to you. Except that you would just keep having your stop loss hit, which would be above/below the previous high/low, but perhaps not so far as to cause a margin call.

If that is you, thank you for giving me your money

The other thing you might consider is using an indicator with some type of alarm on it. If you have something that coincides with your strategy, then turn on its alarm, turn the speakers up, and then check your computer when it goes off. You can even customize the alarm sound if you need more than a mere ding to wake you up. I used to use Star Wars wav files , but you can use any wav.

Hope this helps solve some problems. If you figure out how to be profitable, then perhaps you can scale down the time frame and only trade when you are awake? That is an option too. Good Luck!

My biggest fault as a trader is that I'm too emotional. Here are the bad things I've done:

1. Jump in the trade on the fly, instead of opening pending orders with set TP and SL.
2. Having huge draw-down, hoping to chase the losses by hedging.
3. Closing profitable positions too early.
4. Regretting the lost opportunities, while there are plenty of them every week.

I found also that staring on the monitor for too long causes only harm. Once I have a plan I stick to hit and just check the position every once in a while. If I'm gacking at the thing the whole day, chances are that I get nervous and mess the whole thing up.

http://www.investopedia.com/articles.../04/042104.asp good luck

hi dbutton1990,

my broker is also traderway. I feel stop order, limit order, SL, TP none of them are filled at the requested price most of the time. Though i am using ECN account, i feel i am loosing some points both ways. Well demo is like walk in the park, doubled it twice before starting live. don't talk about emotions here. there is some other thing going on here with the broker