Much of Forex talk is illusional esoteric talk

Thanks Giganntor for your supporting words.
I agree with you thats it is always the trader who is responsible for every outcome of his actions. Yet I still dont understand why so much focus in forex is laid on psychology, "its you and not the market", "the enemy is you not the market", "control yourself not the market", "not the strategy but yourself is the obstacle" etc...... In no other profession there is so much focus on "yourself" and not on your plain and simple capabilities. When I am a programmer no one asks me about my personal feelings or anything near that issue. When I build houses and I construct them bad no one says "the problem was not the lack of knowledge how to build a house but the problem was you and your psychology.... and all that esoteric talk again". Not even when I deal with stocks there is so much focus on psychology. I have to KNOW if this company is good or not. When I lose I was wrong with my knowledge and not with my psychology or anything. I do not even say that all this esoteric "bla bla" is wrong but its certainly not the main thing as it is in any other profession.
But exactly this impression is always created. Just control yourself and stick to any strategy and you will win.
THIS IS WRONG!!!!
If it would be that easy how many millionaires would be here? There are certainly many very self controlled and rationale people here. But just as the right mentality does not make them a good house constructer so it does not make them a good trader. There is simply more. Knowledge! A strategy that can be clearly described and quantified in numbers. If it was all mentality I could be the next genetic engineer that cures Aids and cancer.

In forex, trading mentality is a much larger factor than in any other activity.

Does the psychology aspect exist in other industries? Sure it does. Would you prefer a dentist who only wants to make money out of you, or one that also wants to make sure your teeth remain in good condition. Would you buy from a sandwich shop where the owner/operator is concerned about the assembly staff using hygenic gloves and clean work surfaces, or .....

So in forex, mentality is important because it affects the way you trade. The other thing about forex is that it can quickly remove all your money.

If it would be about informations, knowledge only being what really matters then there would be plenty of millionairs in trading..cause there are plenty of people with a lot of knowledge..yet they suck as traders. Plenty of great mathematicians..that sucks as traders. Ever heard about LTCM? These guys were considered geniouses and yet they blew billions thinking they figured it out with their system..

Btw in trading stocks knowing the company ain't enough..people can be very creative with numbers and then suddenly the company can go belly up. So knowledge doesn't guarantee you can forecast the company's future well. You gotta have some kind of 6th sense & be able to stay calm even if something unexpected happens.

Controlling ones emotions ain't that easy for most people. And when it comes to money..oh boy. Money means a lot in this society. You just gotta have them, you can't pay with smile or being nice! At least not too often!

So whether you admit it, whether you like it or not..there can be whole bunch of emotions on money. Making them..loosing them. Besides, having bunch of money can be dangerous in some part of the world. Or was dangerous in the past. Same for standing out..not being the "good average hard working guy" but rather some "speculator/player who doesn't create any value just robs others of their hard earned money"? Sounds nuts? These could get you into troubles not so long ago..and still can at some places in the world. And nobody wants to get hurt! Thats's another reason for whole bunch of emotions..whether it sounds logical or not. After all, emotions aren't logical..women are great example. Or watching somebody go bonkers seemingly for no reason.. So, start observing people around you..are they really able to control their emotions or rather aren't? People can go off for "no reason"..not to mention when couple hundred bucks or couple thousand bucks or even more is involved!

And since many just don't know how to handle emotions..they just resist even talking about that, wanting stuff to be logical, knowledge based..cause that's where they feel safe. But does that work? This approach creates followers at best..not the best/pros. And there's no place for followers/average in forex. Same in fight, you can be a winner..or a looser. Nothing in between. Sooner or later you become either winner or the later..

Either you have what it takes..or not. Ultimatelly, everybody has what it takes..some just would need to dig deeper they they do..cause they don't know they are the real deal too..and so they stop digging, stop going for it.. And that's pitty. So, do know you have what it takes and do know you'll find what you are looking for. Just keep going. Like the unstoppable Duracel rabbit. And that involves resting and rethinking the next step.

Btw it's great you already got some of the answers nailed down. Just do know they aren't fixed, they do evolve in time, cause you evolve.

Myrmika-I am a member of FF because I enjoy trading and traders. Trading is one of most challenging/frustrating and yet hugely rewarding and thought provoking endeavors. I learn everyday. I see trading as a long term journey. I enjoy learning and improving and I listen to other traders and read and study as much as I can with a very humble mind. No ego here. I am in this for the long haul, not to make a fast buck. If you want to become a successful trader focus on learning and improving and not money and profit.

When you hear someone say that trading psychology is the most important aspect of trading what they mean is that you need to develop your mind specifically as it applies to trading. Learning about order execution, which platform to use, what hours to trade, what pairs to trade, what stop loss and take profit to use are all important but unless you develop your trading mind you will never progress to a level of confidence that you need to trade properly.

What I have found is that in order to be successful you need to have confidence in what you are doing, and in order to have confidence in what you are doing you need to be successful, almost like a circle. You cannot have one without the other. Work hard and eventually things will start to "click" for you. All the little pieces of the puzzle which were fragmented will start to work together. You will start to make profitable trades more often and start avoiding low probability trades and you will learn to close out losing trades early with small losses and start being comfortable letting profitable trades go longer and further. Your mind tricks you into letting losing trades go on forever because "the trade will eventually come back", and your mind has you closing out winning trades very quickly to "protect your precious profits". This is the way nature hardwired our brains, to accept big losses in order to avoid the pain of closing out a losing trade and admit being "wrong" and cutting a small winning trade short to "protect the precious profit". At some point you realize that this way of trading will never work and is part of why 90% of traders lose money. It is backwards. That is where the psychology comes in-you need to condition your trading mind and think calmly and rationally and not let emotions rule your trading. Emotions will keep you from becoming profitable unless they are under control. You need to condition your mind to accept small losing trades as part of trading and let the winning trades go to your targets. It takes time and repetition but once you learn to master it it becomes second nature. Trading is much more enjoyable when you are not constantly overwhelmed by greed and fear. When I have a losing trade I accept it as part of trading. I also accept winners calmly without becoming overly emotional.

Understand that when you put on a trade your money is always at risk. Once you click the mouse and the order goes live you no longer have control over what happens to price action. Manage the trade but don't fret over where price action goes next. It is beyond your control. If it is a loser study what happened and what you could do better next time. If it is a winner study what happened and how you can do it again.

Once you calmly accept the risk of trading and also the idea that there is no 100% guarantee of a profit on any trade you can begin to focus on what is the best place to enter a trade and exit and how to manage your risk and reward properly so that you can start to make small consistent profits over time and increase your confidence while you develop your knowledge. Professional traders started where you are at and worked their way into being consistently profitable-there are no shortcuts, there is no Holy Grail no one has a crystal ball to predict the future with certainty. Study technical analysis and fundamental analysis and keep up with current events in the world economy.

Personally I am a firm believer in target trading. I use multiple levels of confluence (things that all line up like fibonacci levels (extensions and retracements), pivot points, etc. to find targets on longer term charts. Even when I am trading on lower time frames I use long term targets as a point of reference from which to find the most highly probable trades and which way to trade (order flow). In general using a longer term target will keep you from being constantly whipsawed by price action on lower time frames which is what happens to most retail traders. If you trade on lower time frames without any kind of longer term reference point chances are you will be stopped out no matter which way you trade (long or short). Retail traders for the most part are handing their account over to their broker and to the market makers pip by pip because the do not know where the longer term price action targets are and they are constantly stopped out because they were taught to put their 20 pip stops directly over recent highs and under recent lows where everyone else puts their stops and the market makers have a field day running their stops all day everyday. You can learn to prevent this from happening to you.

As far as finding a "strategy" I would suggest the following:
1) Open a demo account and start familiarizing yourself with the function of your broker and the platform their clients use
2) Start a journal and write down everything that you think is important and you dont want to forget-dont write everything down its a waste of your time and effort
3) Use your smartphone and take pictures/screenshots of important charts, educational lists, TO DO lists from webinars, etc to save time from writing it all down so you can review them at anytime
4) Attend live webinars of traders and if it doesnt apply to you or you dont like what is being taught or its a sales pitch close it out Dont waste your time
5) Watch archived webinars and videos on forex and trading websites if its educational watch it if its not close it out
6) Research and read articles online about trading and eventually you will find out what type of trading (time frame, long term or short term, etc) fits your personality) for everyone it is different Dont seek to copy someone else-seek to develop your own unique strategy and skills based upon your personality and risk tolerance
7) Seek out successful traders and learn all you can by listening to their webinars and reading their writings
8) Learn learn learn Work Work Work
9) Dont risk live money until you feel you can win enough trades to keep a small account going without a margin call

Eventually you will start to develop your own "strategy" based upon your own personal preference for what type of market, what time frame, what broker, what platform.

You are correct that almost every trading discussion of "system" is based on delusion.

There is not one indicator or oscillator that can predict the next bar. No one can predict the future. There can only be a slight "self-fullfilling prophecy" because technical traders are all looking at the same signals. But only 15% of market participants are technical traders. 85% use fundamental analysis, supply/demand etc...

You can't really be profitable by hoping the 15% of technicals traders are trading that day. Take any deck of cards. Turn over each card one by one and create a chart with a black 6 as a 6 pip up move and a red 4 as a 4 pip down move etc...

When you are done, you will see every possible candle pattern the hypsters use to sell their systems. Dojis, engulfing...you name it. You will draw perfect trend lines of up trends and downtrends. All tech is lagging mumbo jumbo.

Ever look at different times frames on the same pair? Most often the one hour chart is a screaming buy while the half hour chart is a screaming sell. Your edge is one percent at most and only high frequency algorithym trades in huge accounts can take that advantage. Trading short term is fools gold and the minute to minute or hour to hour swings are not possible to predict. Studying geo-politics can make you some money in oil / gold.

If you have to play the game to satisfy your short term speculation urge then your best edge is binary options (Nadex seems legitimate). And using these options, you will never have your account wiped out as with trading Forex itself. One week before the Swiss franc wiped out thousands of accounts and bankrupted firms, option guru John Cater said, " stay away from Forex...one day you'll wake up and your entire account will be gone".

Why not try a different approach. Why not learn what is really going on and learn what it takes to become profitable. Stop focusing on money and pips, start focusing on how the market makers are stopping you out. Figure out how market makers are baiting you into bad trades. When you finally start to make profitable trades everyday you trade with a confidence that makes trading interesting and challenging. You need to trade without fear.

Trading can be frustrating while you are learning. No doubt. But for the few who refuse to give up the rewards are great. Start thinking like your competition, the market maker. Ask yourself some questions:

How is the market maker baiting me into making bad trades? What are they doing? Can I figure out what they are doing and do the opposite? Is it possible? Can I trade against the crowd/herd? What are they doing to get me to do the wrong direction every time? What things do I need to start doing to stop making losing trades and increase my winning trades?

When you start to think like the market maker you can begin to understand what they are doing, how they are moving the market, how they trap retail traders into bad trades everyday. Once you figure out what your opponent is doing, you can begin to devise a strategy to win. This is not checkers, this is chess. Its not a fight, its a war.

Take a look at the EUR USD AND GBP USD charts. Both pairs are now moving up because the herd is now short. The news for the Euro is negative, i.e. Greece may leave the Euro, quantitative easing in Europe, negative interest rates in some european countries etc. How can the euro be going up if the news is all negative? Maybe the market makers have a short squeeze in play????

Keep on eye on longs EUR USD GBP USD USD CAD
short NZD JPY

Hang tough.

Exodus is on the mark. The reason that the psychology is so important in trading is that there is hard earned money at risk and the market makers who run this use your (mentality) emotions against you. How else can someone on the other end of your internet connection get you to constantly hand over your hard earned money to them unless they can control your emotions??????

I went away from trading for a while and recently come back into it with a fresh head. During my time away I also played poker, and one thing I learned which I have brought into the Forex world which I didn't understand before, is in Poker there is no exact way to play a certain hand 1,000 times over, as every hand is different because of the opponents you're playing against, and you can't always ABC your way to making money because it just doesn't work. I believe this is the same in Forex. When I first started trading forex I was so set on finding a system which had a rigid checklist everytime I made a trade, but in reality, just like Poker, this isn't always possible, because every trade is different. This is one thing I learned away from Forex, and something to think about as I get back into it again, that no set trade will happen time and time again as every trade should be treated uniquely, just like a poker hand.

Questions are great, opens one's mind and makes one think outside the box.. Way to go. Can only recommend. Works wonders even for dopey/obtuse like me.

Yes...the questions are great...aren't they always? Of course...no one on this thread has given any answers

One thing I advise anyone reading this thread to do if you're not understanding how the market is moving or you want to understand how to use candlesticks properly, look at Steve Nisons candlestick Forex seminar he did many years back.

" look at Steve Nisons candlestick Forex seminar he did many years back"

that's an answer

Are you serious? Are you for real?

There were plenty of valuable answers. Finding what works for you as a trader is one of them. If you don't see that as an answer..well, enjoy the state you are in.

You got your own answers. Imagine that 1.000 people would give some 1.000 answers..to your 1 question..just sharing what worked for them, what they find great..
You wanna tell me you'll go test all 1.000 answers? What if it would be 10 million? And what if none of that would fit you?

You got your own answers. With an open mind you are unstoppable. With a closed mind..you are basically just disaster waiting to happen. And then you'll have an opportunity to reconsider whether to open the mind to actually have a chance to succeed or stay closed and suffer as a result of that..

If you are looking for somebody to tell you "do this", "go there", "read this", "trade that way"..then you might reconsider whether trading is for you. Trading is not for puppets. If you choose to be one, ok. I'd suggest to give your money to someone that will trade them for you and spend the time in a better way then just following blindly what somebody else tells you.

Solution is not in the informations, it's in the connecting the dots and picking up what's relevant for you and only you and throwing away the rest. There are zillion bits of informations, good luck if you wanna absorb everything that can be learned about markets.

But..you wanna practical tip? Ok, study Trading in the zone by Mark Douglas. Reading it once ain't enough. You'll better understand what's going on in you while you trade.

"You wanna tell me you'll go test all 1,000 answers?"

Why not, I already tested about 769 "systems".

Anyway, let's see who has a good answer to this.

I like binary options.
The commissions are cheapest.
I can put on a binary position and the underlying only has to stay above my strike to make money.
I can make money every single day if I stay in front of the computer and close positions if they turn against me.

Problem is...there's are no US binary brokers regulated in the USA except Nadex and they have no stop orders. You can never leave your house. Their mobile sucks...like most others, it's impossible to quick trade anything.

I want the most probable setup where the underlying will at least remain above my strike as binaries can be bought "in the money" below current prices just like standard options. That's it. No seeking any massive moves of 80 to 100 pips. Just strong enough to stay up (or down if short). Then, I can at least put on a position and do other things for 2 to 6 hours (the average hold in between economic reports that I will not trade into). Thanks

Plukin: Glad you like the post. I hope that struggling traders stop for a minute, catch their breath and compose themselves then start to open their minds. An open mind is a powerful tool. And trading is all mental.

I have to agree with you Rifid. Trading Forex can be profitable, it is gambling for those who get up everyday look at the chart and see it is rising and click "Buy at market" or see it falling and click "Sell at market". For those traders, yes it is gambling and they will certainly lose.

The experienced traders who enjoy trading look to buy when the market is falling and sell when the market is rising. They look to buy when the news on Bloomberg is negative. When the herd is buying the smart trader has his platform ready to sell.

I did that "hoping" thing in the past..but observing how myself was literaly blind to great stuff unless something shifted within and I realized it might be actually something to explore..I understand that people are where they are and can't really be changed or forced. After all, I myself would and did fought furiosly being forced into something even if it would be the very best thing for me.
I needed to shift it within, learning to find what's true for me and what's not. And learning to open myself to more.

So knowing all that, I choose to know:
1) people are exactly where they are suppose to be.
2) people have what it takes to make whatever shift is required for them to live their dreams, regardless whether they themselves trully believe that.

And with that it's easier to honor them & their free choice & be a happy camper thriving in my life and no longer trying to fix others or trying to do it for themselves.

People are ultimately their own creators, they can be the Creation of their success, thriving or the Creation of their demise, suffering.. It's just about what people choose to create.

And I know they do know it deep within. And when they'll be ready they can join me in thriving, I'll gladly show those who are interested to thrive in life, living great life with ease and grace. And bunch of fun no matter what's going on around in "reality". Bold claim? Yeah, I ain interested in anything less then the best. I am here to thrive, to live big. No matter the starting point, no matter the circumstances, no matter the place or family I was born into or the way I was or wasn't brought up. No matter my life experiences or conclussions I ever made. No matter what..no matter what..none of that defines Who I trully am and What am I capable of creating & achieving.

The past is the past, it was what it was. Was it what I wanted? Nope, not at all..but I know I did my best, my best I knew at that moment..and as I choose to rock & roll, I choose to learn from everything I ever went through. And in that aspect my past was perfect, cause it guided me towards were I am now. And that's an amazing achievement considering the "cards" I got to play with. Those made me really doubtful & suspicious towards anything "new/different/other"for quite some time.. And thus very closed. Oh, well, all is well now. It worked after all! Surprisingly..Why? Because looking back it almost seems like I did some 99.9% things/decisions/choices wrong, I screw bigtime and overtime..and yet I arrived 'home' after all.

That's miracle! That's friking miracle. And when I did, everybody can too. Just choose it and follow your knowing! You do know what's best for you.

Excellent........I love trading and traders-you learn more about life and making good decisions from learning how to trade than you would studying for a Phd in psychology...

I hope that everyone is now long GBP USD and EUR USD and not fighting the minor countertrends.....

Trades ideas I like:
Long EUR USD
Long GBP USD
Long USD CAD
Short NZD JPY

Any one like any of these ideas???? Agree or disagree?

Watch the sharp 50-100+ pip stop run moves against these trades as the smart money runs against the retail crowd.....
All aboard the crazy train.......

No, I played the short-side today and made almost 3% in GBPUSD

Can you tell me what your entry and exit were? Are you still looking for short trades today 6/4/15?