How to start like a pro? - afraid to open trades

To learn how to deal with fear you had better start trading with a small deposit, which is not a pity to lose. With time and experience you will have more daring. Well, another important thing is an incentive. We must not represent defeat, but victory.

Correct you need to trade with an amount you feel comfortable with in order to not have the pressure of losing all the time

Interesting thread. Lot's of good info for newbies.

The answer to this depends on what your trade timeframe is. I cannot substantiate this in any way but I strongly believe that if your trades are held open less than a week then you are in competition with, if not the best, the second best. And neither use MT4, atleast not solely. If your tactic involves averaging into positions, then MT4 may be good enough (but only small % of MT4 brokers will allow you to withdraw these profits if reviews are to be believed!). But if you go "all in" with MT4 then you just may end up being the liquidity provider.

if you are scared of placing trades... you are scared of loosing..... scared of loosing, probably you are trading money you cannot afford to loose.

Accept the fact that you will have loosers. it's a given.

Try trading $100 (if you can afford to loose it)

All the above provided you have the method and you have traded it on demo

To be afraid to put on a trade is the best attitude.
But it must be "sublimed"
Best opportunity = most afraid

It is simple really. If you are afraid to trade it means you do not trust your trading method. So, either demo it long enough to have real statistics for your brain to see, or fix it so it makes money when trading live. Either way, you know something is not right, you are uncomfortable, and you do not trust it. If you want to be a "trader" you have to fix your system.

If you fix your system, have real statistics to back up your analysis, and still cannot trade live, then you are probably not suited to be a trader. Use your analysis if you want, but find someone else to make the trades for you. Not everyone can accept risk.

There is another possibility that you have a mental challenge from childhood teaching or religious teaching. Maybe someone has told you that being rich is evil? You can overcome those thoughts by reprogramming your brain to accept wealth. Just write down on paper that it is okay to be rich and repeat it to yourself a few times a day. In time, you will believe it.

Hopefully, it is just flaws in your technique and you can fix them. Good Luck

To that I would add that crunching stats one probably ends up running backtests if you want confidence quick. There comes risk - retail platforms offer "optimization" stuff. That stuff pretty much optimizes transfer of your money to smarter pockets... Even if you figure something that really works, do you trust a free platform from broker (they DON'T understand the game!!! that's why they're brokers and not traders) or 3rd party devs (many devs love to share stuff, no regard to IP!). If you find something golden you don't want people front running you. Why retail wins in demo and loses live is not purely due to overleverage IMHO. It's because there's forces at work - if you got holy grail then people will try to steal it. To not think so is extremely naive.

As this was about "starting like a pro" I'm tempted to say, learn to program and write your own back+forward testing system. There ARE daily bar patterns that you can make to work (I think big size insitutional Pros use them). The problem is you may get like 4-10 trades a year. To get rich quick with that you need to prepare to lose big (due to leverage needed) as I haven't found any daily pattern in 5 years of researching them that gives 100% probability.

Getting rich quickish without leverage is essentially HFT. And if there's someone doing HFT on MT4 and able to withdraw big profits without broker giving them hard time withdrawing it well hats of to them as they're pretty much able to eat the bucket shops or mm's potential profit then.

The highest frequency you can do with MT4 is maybe 1-3 trades a day per pair (with scaling if they are offering you abnormally good price intraday but that risks of them cancelling trade!) and close them before london/us session end. If the initial size is similar to your bank account and scaled size is 3-4x that, then that just might be manageable psychologically without automation. If your intention is to buy, do not send any type of sell orders to the broker (sell stops in particular) (use some sort of EA that hides your stops if you have "emergency stop". That is just telling the market "I really intend to sell low after I bought high". Of course the leaves you open to sudden 30% loss like in CHF - to avoid that, do not have anything open during news and keep track on any rumors (chf peg was rumored in advance, and the depeg was inevitable as those things have never held). If you do keep positions through news then your trading system should be based on daily or longer term candles with orders in the book accordingly (again, if you are LONG then don't put SELL orders on the brokers platform! this is #1 mistake by retail, revealing their intention entirely)

Impossible dude, noone starts like a pro, we all start like newbies

i would suggest start trading minimum lot sizes in real account, gain experience and then start to trade bigger sizes. That worked for me

Just start!

Before you start live trading make sure you are profitable demo trading for at least 6 months.
I know its hard but think of your demo account as a real money account.
After the 6 months if you are able to trade without any emotion, you are then ready to trade live.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

agree, try several demo accounts with different brokers and see how it works, try different instruments, strategies

I’ve recently started a self-defence class. I did my first workshop on how to defend against knife attacks the other day. The instructor surprised me when one of the first things he said was “you should be prepared to be stabbed and/or slashed”. He basically went on to say that in a knife attack it is highly likely that you will receive a stab or slash. He said you should go in to the fight accepting this reality. He said our objective was to not let the attacker stab us in the vital organs (especially the chest area) or arteries. He then showed us how to disarm them once we had a hold of their hand and/or arm.

I can see the similarity to trading. You are going to get stabbed or slashed (lose money). But you have to protect your vitals (money management), and learn how to disarm the attacker (make you wins count).

Bit of a random response I know, but it kind of makes sense J

Your diagnosis is called scared money this developes when you usually are trading to large lot sizes, that will make you lose more.
it could also mean you don't use money management, not trading with prooper risk to reward, and not having a profitable system.
change all these things and you will be ok. your reward must allways be at least twice what you are risking, then you should be ok,
assuming you have a decent win ratio on your system, just do the math.
this will allow you not to be afraid because you know that you will win in the long run..
you need to think about trading like flipping a coin, if you flip it 1000 times and bet on heads every time,
you will be right about 500 times. if you risk 1 dollar and get one dollar every time you are right, you will only be braking even.
but if you got 2 dollar for every win, you would win 500. but note that this is only if your coin flip method has a winrate of minimum 50%.
so if you dont have a 50% win ratio on your trading system, you need more than 2 to 1, maybe 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1 reward to risk.
that mean you got to learn not to close your trades before they reached targets.
trading isnt that hard its just math. you should use a demo until you nailed these things and then move on to trade live again.
then you will be happy you got stopped out from a trade, because it protected you from a larger loss, and you won't think twice about it. cheers!

Create 2 accounts in your broker's profile: demo and real. Start to work with them at the same time. Then solve your question with future order (decide buy or sell), check the forecast, get to confidence from your decision. After that take a coin and throw: heads - real, tails - demo. You don't know for sure what will fall, so the uncertainty immediately removes the fear of making a mistake.
Don't be afraid to earn, but there is no need to be greedy. You won't be able to win and to earn all money in the world. Therefore, it is better to get used to win real money even if not every day, but reliably.

Nice one :-)

Agree with most here. Try to trade as small as possible. With potentially only small bruices / cuts, you can accept reality. I suffered also from trading paralysis (despite knowing my system was sound), trading smaller and accepting uncertainty of markets helped me a lot. Remember, a trader only has influence on entry, exit & position sizing, not on price development. Be sure your mind is in the clear with your trade.

Trade demo until you succeed and like some have said, trade a very small live account.

Simple, deposit 100$ in a high leverage broker, and trade micro lots (0.01).. Should make you loose the fear of real live trading!

What you should do , is lower your position size. When I first started live and got to the point where I was afraid to place a trade , it was because my position size was too big....so I started trading with MINI LOTS , try that, record your trades; 3-5 months from now you will see how you have performed, study your losses and wins. Obviously if you are profitable then you will want to increase your position size... at least you are losing dollars and cents ...instead of being afraid of losing tens and hundreds // hundreds or thousands.... makes sense??

Also focus on the pips. Not the dollar amount. Above all Believe in your system.

How to start like a pro? - afraid to open trades!

... and you should be afraid - very afraid (:
You are afraid because you are still sane.
You are standing on top of a tall building. Someone has given you a feather. The person said, "the feather will protect you, you can jump now, and you will fly"
Will you jump ?
No, you are afraid to jump. You are still sane.
Countless many were also given a feather (same or different feather of any shape, color and form) and they all jumped. Most crashed on the ground below and were never seen again. Some extremely lucky ones broke all their bones in their body and they survived.
And they thought, "I nearly made it, I need to find a better feather"
Now, they are back on the roof holding on to a new and improved feather. Surely this one will work now.. And they jump again.
They are insane.
You are not.
Be afraid.

I just opened my live account last Friday (July 24th 2015), and I started trading right away. To be fair, I have been trying out different Demo accounts over the past 4 years, and many of them were wiped out in the early until mid stages due to my overly aggressive strategies back then. It wasn't until recently that I start testing a more sensible and conservative system, and it was doing alright for my demo account. Due to this, I decided that it was time for me to start trading using real money, and I started right away.

My point is, one of the best way to prepare your mentality to start your real trade is to open a demo account with a similar starting money that you are planning on having on your first live trading account, and treat it as a real money. It will just be a matter of time before you are ready to trade.