A year and a half experience and still facing difficulties

everytime you learn something new during your account blow is a sign that your improving. [experience] . review your demo trades and list down the DOs and Donts and adapt to the list [Disicpline] then you find the success within yourself. I blowed by account more than 5 times and once it was my 75% of my salary . Now I have a list of DOs and DONTs [disipline ] . and the most importatant is that there is not holy grail in forex, All you have to study is the Price Action . Indicators are late for entries because they do what the price say . well if you can read what the price say then your brain is the indicator .

Try to make some change in your strategy and test it . and goto sleep only if you find something new that will help your strategy .

1 years is not a big time for forex. I am with forex from last 3 years my all difficulties are not solve till now. Actually we face new situation a we go for trading . We not find same market . For new challenge we have to deal it with different way .So there is need to be fresh mind to face market to manage your account . You will never be a perfect trader. Loss can be any time occur in trading.

Hi, there were actually 2 turning points in my trading career. Both of them helped me very much:

1) Read book "Traiding in the zone" (Mark Douglas) and try to understand it. I read this book many times and will read it over and over again. I feel that I still do not understand it exactly.

2) Follow mentor Nial Fueller (http://www.learntotradethemarket.com/).

I am not promoter of any of them. This just my personal experience. I had to change my mind set copletely and now I am a profitable trader. It took me two years.

Hope this helps.

5+ years experience and still facing difficulties

Bill Williams will solve your problem.

A lot of advice, mutch less trade explorer. All we are pro traders!

All the experience in the world wont be enough

1 and a half years, eh? You are well on your way! With an extreme work ethic---make that "obsession"--open mind, and diligence in learning from mistakes, you have most likely only got 10 years left until you have really made it, maybe even longer.

I know everyone here has "just now finally" got it and breaking even or better after only a few years, but in reality they have much further to go. There is an extreme amount of delusion on this forum, but I suppose it is necessary to think that we are always "just now" getting it and so close to being filthy rich. This is what keeps us going and going and going despite really not being as close as we think. When you make money for a few years straight you MIGHT be able to confidently believe that you have figured it out. However,there is always the threat of blowing up if you are not extremely careful and disciplined.

It takes 4 - 5 years just to learn your arsehole from your elbow, no matter how smart or determined you are. IMHO the biggest problem facing inexperienced traders isn't internal at all - it is that the markets constantly change moods, behaviors and states. There is no one system that works all the time - when traders with six months experience start trading profitably, it is because they have stumbled onto a system which just happens to 'mesh' with how the market is acting at that particular time. They usually have no idea why their system is working, so when the market environment changes and their system stops working, they have no idea why or how to adjust.

Once you've traded a handful of different strategies for a few years, and blown each one up, then you might start to wonder why different strategies work at different times, and start figuring out how to read/anticipate the underlying market conditions. Developing a strategy which auto-adjusts to different macroeconomic environments, or learning to select the right approach at the right time, would generally take another 4 -5 years - there really isn't any shortcuts, you just need to be in the market and experience it's longer term mood swings. Somebody who has been trading for a couple of years or less has likely only ever traded in one part of the economic cycle, and won't know what is happening when things change behind the scenes. It isn't a question of intelligence or determination - you just don't know what you don't know.

After that you still need to learn how to 'be' a trader - how to properly manage and administer yourself and your funds, and accumulate a decent track record (years) of profitable trading through various political/economic/business cycles, long term, medium term and short term cycles etc ... this will take a few more years.

Basically I wouldn't consider somebody to be a long term profitable, experienced trader without at least 10 - 15 years in the market, and even after that, most people simply don't have what it takes. If you aren't sure if you are willing to apply that much effort for that amount of time to learn your craft, I recommend investing your capital in lottery tickets - your chances of success are roughly the same, and you will avoid a lot of pain.

OP never came back to acknowledge our replies or take any advice. That's a shame really because there are a lot of comprehensive and really well written replies in here to help out.

I might have to give that a go during the next non farm payrolls. Mantra on full blast, zoom down into the 1 minute chart and boom boom the full lot size.

Trading is a profession and a serious business...You take like 7 years or so studying to be a doctor, Do you consider yourself a doctor after studying for 1.5 years? No. Trading is a difficult business. It's simple, but not easy!! So you need a lot of patience and passion about trading the markets if you want to be successful in this business...If you think you can do it as a part-time job and still make millions, you're wrong....It needs a lot of dedication and time just like any other business, maybe even more dedication than normal businesses because trading is the most stressful business you'll ever encounter in your life...So it's up to you!

Little something to motivate you: The world record holder for the biggest stock portfolio appreciation/gains Mr. Dan Zanger turned 10K into 42 million dollars in 18 months, But do you know how many years did it take him to learn and reach that level? It took him 10 years in a raw of complete failures and losses before he made his killing...what do you call this? DEDICATION.

pull up a chart of the S&P. If you had simply gone long the index (pick a date), and been wise enough to keep dry powder around to buy more on some of the bigger dips, you would have made very good money over time.

The corollary in forex trading is much less tenable.

Sadly, this is far from true, I'm afraid.

I strongly suspect that the single commonest reason for "home traders" not making any real, long-term income is that they're trying to apply strategies which don't actually have any objective, provable statistical edge at all. (This forum alone is full of them.)



It varies hugely, according to (among many other factors) people's available time and skills, and their potential for mastering the underlying statistical and probabilistic knowledge needed. I come from a "trading background" and have worked very hard at it, and it took me far longer than the year and a half you mentioned.

thanks for mentioning Zanger....

http://www.readtheticker.com/Pages/B...trader-2012-12

I have traded forex succesfully for over 9 years now. Here are the lessons that I have learned that I will share here today. The hardest thing to control is your EGO. Then we go to the other two, Fear and Greed. Once you have those under control you always need to protect your capital and to do that there needs to be a Superior Risk Management sysyem in place. Trading with too little capital is a guarantee to failure. Then you need the discipline to be a trader. The first loss is still the best loss. The hardest loss that I ever took in my forex trading career was for $100 trading EUR/USD. The reason that I say this is that for the first three months of my trading career I never had one loss so I knew that I had to take the loss so my Common Sense would trump my EGO. It worked.

Now on to trading itself. You need to know both Technicals and Fundamentals to have any chance of coming into the exclusive 5% a month club and stay there for at least three years. Then you need an EDGE over everyone else. Here is a hint on that. Understand when there is Risk On or Risk Off in ALL the markets. Stock , Bond , Commodity and of course Forex with leverage of 100-1. I hope that this sharing helps some of you.

been trading for 7 or 8 years, didn't become profitable till few months ago.
i took a two year break (from live trading) after losing 50% of my account which was 100$ at the time, to rethink everything.

the most difficult thing about forex is to filter the outstanding amount of junk you find on Internet. 99% of strategies you'll find will just make you blow up your account.

For what it's worth.....
There are 2 main reasons why the vast majority of people fail at trading...

1. Unrealistic expectations

and

2. No discipline

When you finally understand these 2 things and get them right, your fortunes will change.

So how do you do it?
I trade on M5 ALL THE TIME and I don't care what anyone thinks about that.
I trade using what I call the 20/100 method. This means that my daily pip goal is 20 and my weekly pip goal is 100.
If you can't make 20 pips per day then you should think of a career change.
Once I reach my daily goal I quit and do something else.

But I want to make more than 100 pips per week I hear you say. NO YOU DON'T.
All you need to do is raise your lot size exponentially until you reach whatever financial goal you have set for yourself.

Indicators? It doesn't matter. They are all the same.
Wait for the best set ups or trade a news event. Up to you.
The point is that a gain of 20 pips per day using the M5 chart is EASY.

Discipline.
Stick to one method and NEVER change. Stop looking for something better. It doesn't exist.
Don't get emotional. Never chase losses. Never get cocky.
If you're 20 down, quit for the day. If you're 20 up after 10 minutes, quit for the day.
Never look at a chart and feel annoyed about missed opportunities.
Never let trading affect your mood.
Make 20 pips per day, walk your dog, smell the flowers, love your fellow man and BE HAPPY.

99% is TA or Fundamental. Forget it!
MM is the way to go.
Money Management like be:
sl, tp, be, jstp, trailingsl, trailingtp, close, halfclose, add, grid, marti... aso.....