Want to know how to get rich?

Lol this is insane. yaed might be manic. Or overcaffenated. What is your day job?!?!?!

Yupp! Well said.

What is your moma?
Can i take her out for wine?
What is your shoesize?

No seriously, could you say anything that matters instead?
I am willing to take everything you say seriously and investigate ANY ideas you present. But right now that doesnt seem to be the case. Was there anything relating to technical analysis you wanted to talk about?

For an appreciation of order flow you could try this thread. Also I worked through the (free) lessons and found it very enlightening.

If I'm not wrong, Darkstar still offer courses for a fee which I reckon it won't be cheap though. I will check it out the free stuff though. Thanks.

Best Regards,
LearnAlways

Great read!!!

I really like Darkstar, hes one of the few who knows how freedom of speech should be used: Free. But i read through that stuff and it seems to be more sort of general stuff that i already digested in general. I read his other stuff couple of years ago and i think it was good for me then. Probably those things could be good for some people.

What i do like about the little technical stuff i could find is that there are no indicators. And i think i like it for a technical reason: Its crap! Maybe someone has an EA or several that is any good, maybe not. I at least dont know any mechanical way of doing things that are worth a damn.

Maybe this is one of the things i found semi usefull:

http://www.orderflowtrading.com/Arti...-Patterns.aspx

For instance this observation is quite usefull:

"In a triangle, the horizontal line represents a very important level at which strong order flow shows up every time price visits it (usually horizontal line is a major level for its own reasons). Because of it's importance, the horizontal line rarely gets broken, but price keeps pressuring it and price reacts to that level less and less with upcoming tests. After 3 or more tests, price often breaks through in the desired direction. This makes the triangle be viewed as a directional pattern.
Trading a breakout of triangle is very unreliable, but trading the retest is an excellent opportunity with a great risk-to-reward ratio because of the psychological and order flow factors like the mass buildup of stops just past that horizontal line."

It is interesting that he remarks how it is unreliable it is to trade the break. It is interesting how a lot of people still seem unaware of this.

I made lots of shitty trades on this account yesterday and just left them and then it dropped like 150 or so overnight cause of the brit election. So this morning i closed all that crap down. And then i made some trades. I think these could be interesting to some people. All you need to do to study them is look at the charts. The levels i am looking at is semi obvious from the statement, but just in case here there are. The levels are not pipette exact, since that dont matter anyway:



The first one i just set and then i went to kindergarden with my son.
I think my favourite is the 8 second trade, the second from the top.
If you set those levels and look at the chart i think its fairly obvious why i put them there.
I set the levels there before i started trading, based on this nights data.

Yesterday head and shoulders trades

The issues of psychology and money management.
Up until now i have been keeping this thread and my other threads about technical analysis, specifically focusing on entries. Two other topics that could be interesting is trading psychology and money management. Up until now this has been so. But i feel sort of done with technical analysis for now. Keep in mind this has been my focus for 5 years here on FF. Anyway, the other two topics are pulling my interest. But they have innate issues relating to them.

Psychology is VERY personal. Meaning its about how we grew up: Did our parents hug or beat us or both? Did we grow up in the country side, small city or big city? What class are we from: Working class, middle class or upper class? REALLY personal things like that is parts of psychology. You can probably then understand why i havent gone into this: It might not be stuff that people want to talk about on the internet. After reading Darkstars blog though, i am sort of inspired i guess. So thanks for that. But i am also inspired by other events of my life and litterature and my own knowledge and so on.

Money management is ALSO very personal. It relates to how much time you have every day on average to trade. What timezone are you in? Should you be using a demo account or a real one? If a real one, how much money can you loose before it starts to really hurt? How much profit, expressed in % per unit of time is the minimum for you and/or your family to survive as a trader? If you loose x% in y unit of time, will you break down and go into a depression?

What im trying to say is that i have been trying to keep things mathematical, technical and only focusing on the numbers. I KNOW for certain thats just a part of the story of trading. But as i bring these issues up, i hope all of you can see i have stayed out of these issues becase for most people its probably too personal to talk about on a public forum.

Lets just take an example so i can make it absolutely clear:

I have a friend who has 50.000 $. She can trade something between 5-10 hours a day most days, though some days she cant trade at all. Her minimum profit per week is 1%, any less then that and she thinks its not worth it. Thats 500$ a week on that account, and thats what she needs to feed her kids and pay rent. She grew up in the Swedish upper middle class, which represents lets say the upper 7% of the economic strata. Bother her parents ran their own medium sized business. She has a troubled background: Her father abused her for many years and her mother didnt do anything about it. Because of this she has a problem maintaining relationships and she has periods of very low self esteem. She has two kids below school age. Her current man is beating her, but for her trading is a way of standing on her own legs and getting rid of her husband and buying her own apartment.

All of the issues in her life CAN be resolved by intelligent, social people. If we choose to be people like that. If we are afraid and hide from each other, they CANT.

Now as you might imagine, its quite problematic for her to talk about all that on a public forum. And if we are talking psychology, its exactly those very personal issues that matter. Stuff you dont talk to just anyone about. Stuff you dont want everybody to know. In this there are another attached issue: Its often hard to find out if people are telling the truth on the internet. About themselves. About the hard stuff to talk about. Me, you can right now find in the phonebook or a site where you find people. You can verify that i am who i say i am. Just in case you wanted to. Probably noone cares, cause why should anyone? Im just a normal guy that puts on his pants one leg at a time.

I cant resolve these issues by waving a magic wand and just make things real nice. I guess thats sort of why i have stayed away from it. But at least now in case any of you are wondering, now you know why.

interesting story, her unfortunate childhood resulted her marriage to a similar man like her father, who abused her. subconsciously women tend to marry a man sharing similar traits of their fathers.

Well all animals repeat behaviour. I guess you could say its part of who and what they are.

....my sister must be unique!

He has re-written the lessons this year to include current observations.

What I really liked was his explanation about how large players position their orders.
I did get the impression that some of the trades would be picking up just a few pips.

Yesterday's NFP took out some 30minutes swing high/low by a few pips. Just a liquidity problem as rationally people would place their stop orders over the swing point.

The larger the account the more liquidity you need if holding time is constant in the comparison of account sizes. This leads to big accounts either making very few long term trades or doing other types of things like greek-neutral or HFT etc or perhaps they'll determine the market just can't support their size and invest elsewhere.

Demo traders without live experience and serious thinking are doomed to fail as their size grows as the very short term charts tend to give you a lot of repeating patterns but don't take into account that when for each cent you are making, someone is losing a cent, those who are now losing a cent because you went live may change what they are doing, particularly as your size grows. If it's some market maker you end up trading with then the patterns change*** if you put size on if there is no trader willing to take the other side at that moment. This is because once market maker has your money they are going to try to find someone to match your trade with. And logically, they are not going to drive the price in your favor once you enter as then if you were a short term trader and exited quickly, the market maker would lose money.

If you look, there's many complaints that once people started making profits, market makers/bucket shops etc may close account without good explanation. That's because there's a lot of these bucket shops who just license a platform to run their business. (= maybe they truly thought they wouldn't encounter a profitable trader and since they aren't traders they don't know how to deal with it beside closing accounts, adjusting prices or deleting trades etc - if you are serious about trading, focus on staying in the game for 5+ years - I'm not telling everything I've learned because 1) some of it may be competitive advantage 2) I regard brokers as large traders (they win by sharing profitable ideas - those ideas become unprofitable and then everyone gets margin calls) - the most typical "trade" for a broker is to wait for people to hit margin call. A nice broker always allows you to answer the margin call by not closing any positions. Retail does not have access to such brokers typically. The best you can do as retail is have multiple accounts so you still have ammo left if SHTF.)

There used to be human market makers but that got computerized as trading frequency increased. I don't believe there is such a thing as trader. Market maker is someone who buys low and sells high. Investor is someone who has fundamental information and acts on it quick. The confusion is really that you can be market maker at various timeframes. As a retail trader you have to have a larger timeframe and stronger edge than those guys at the broker/market maker-brokers because they are skimming the milk. You pay commission, broker spread, market maker spread, exchange fees, interdealer fees, hft eats your alpha, delta neutral hedging, progressive tax, position ending up with more experienced traders - like George Soros - those guys can bet so big that central banks can't peg their currencies - we don't even get to see that money because we are trading in a "skimmer infested" retail market while the real pros don't pay any middle men - they do pay huge spreads but being someone like Soros, well they can simply scare/talk the banks into giving them money - essentially the profitable traders fall into 2 lot : market makers of various timeframes and poker players who bluff people to handing their money.

*** actually these bucket shops can "deceive" you as they actually let you trade profitably for a while (eating the bucket shops profit without affecting the patterns) with the knowledge that you'll get greedy at one point and then they'll either change how they react to you or start to hedge you to the real market where banks or smarter traders exist and change what they do if you are eating their lunch. So if you learn to trade profitably at a bucket shop, eventually a time comes where you have to adapt. You could immediately trade similar strategy as some big player - they may make few %'s a year but when you have small account few %'s is not much. I estimate that you probably need 3-4 different strategies to scale up from $$$$ accounts to 8 figures and it's possible that some of those strategies may require different brokers ( eg. if you are trading 1-10 lots, futures are probably better - with <=$$$$ account, market maker/bucket shop that allows any size position is probably better *as long as* it's one that lets profitable traders withdraw with fixed withdrawal fees or no fees).

Hi Yaed.. i am aware that you do average in your losers.. may i know if you could share us some of the strategies you use to take care of the trades you average in in case they go really bad.. thanks you and look forward to you reply...

Dharma: Doing my thing
I am not so sure about that. Some days i do 1 position at a time. Some days i do 2, some days i do 12. It depends i guess.

What i think is important right now is 1 position at a time. SL is roughly 8-12 + spread, TP is something like that but it depends on PA.

I have been thinking about Darkstar and the patterns he presented. Pretty much standard stuff. Those patterns needs say 100-200 candles to form. Thats investor stuff to me. I trade patterns that are more like 10 candles, much, MUCH more simple patterns. And then i use high TF information. Let me take an example:









Actually there are people who are telling me to stop spread this stuff on the internet. Its no weird people, just my friends and so on. They dont get why im giving it all away for free. So there, to my knowledge i have spread the most monetarily valuable stuff i have: Knowledge. Maybe its not going to be the key that fits the lock for everybody, but i can do only so much.

I was trying to explain the above post to a friend hwo has a IQ of 160 or so. Mind you hes not a trader. It was NOT very easy to make him see what i was doing. Considering he is officially a person who has easy to understand things, maybe im downplaying the meaning of 5 years of experience.

Anyway this is what im looking at now:



And thats a good place to sell as the the current M5 candle breaks the low of the one before it. Though i have to mind the distance to the next S/R so that i can fit a REASONABLE TP in there. A reasonable one is roughly 10 pips. 7 pips and my RR is getting a bit shitty.

Hi yaed,

I just want to say thanks & express my appreciation for your selfless sharing of vast trading knowledge, I am grateful and appreciative of your efforts. It has helped me to re-look at simple PA of horizontal lines placement. Thanks a lot.

Thanks & Best Regards,
LearnAlways