Honestly frustrated with trading forex

Welcome to the club But don't we hard on yourself. Everybody here met a guy called "Margin Call". Not once

The goal is to make those encounters as seldom as possible Once a month, once per 6 month, once a year, and hopefully never

One of the most improtant thing to me was: realizing the real possible target. I started with 10% per DAY as target (scalping). Was very happy for 2 weeks or so Was extrapolaitng how in a couple of month bill be a very rich man

Only years later I come to realize that even 20% per YEAR is very difficult.

dont' listen to gurus. dont' trust anyone. dont use leverage more than x5. really

Use broker that allows the small lots and does not push you to big leverage. My suggestion would be - Oanda

A very interesting thread,I would just like to add a couple of thoughts. i have been learning forex for around four years made a lot of mistakes,got very stressed, very frustrated and on several occasions almost given up.Now I have fine tuned my methodology and would like to just list what I have found works (until it doesn't)
1.set up chart on multiply time frame (I am an intraday trader don't stay in overnight suits my personality)
2.On higher time frame (for me that is 1 hr and occasionally 4hr) see where price has been before and highlight the most recent H and L on that chart.These are your primary supply and demand levels where the buyers and sellers from the institutions are waiting with orders.
3.Copy this chart to a smaller time frame (in my case the 15 min) and fine tune the highlighted area to tighten it up so to speak.
4.Now copy the chart to the 5 min which is where the action happens.
5.Never ever trade against the trend of the higher time frame.This will reduce losses.
6.Now comes the patience, WAIT unit price reaches the extreme (the 1 hr Supply /Demand areas) let it pull away and when it returns then buy or sell depending which way it is going.Place a tight stop the other side of the zone and set a target on the opposite side which must be flexible according to market action For example if the ratio of profit to expense (stop but prefer not to use word loss) is say3:1 then as this is a numbers game one should be able firstly to survive and secondly be profitable over time. However it does not always oblige so experience will show you when to jump out.
7.This is really the basic thing. However, it takes a long time to get to this stage and along the way one needs to learn about how the market works to be able to read candlestick charts (Steve Nison best source I spent a few months learning that including a course with Steve in person ) You need to have at least 10000 hours of watching charts,understand about fibonacci, moving averages one or two simple well tried and tested indicators (always bear in mind indicators are lagging by definition as they are based on price so only confirm price action after the event.One needs to understand divergence and above all one needs to fully understand a simple no brainer way of controlling risk. Money management (if this is not done you will blow your account) Get yourself on a good course (I have benefited greatly from OTA in St Albans UK) Get a good professional broker (I use Fx Pro UK and find them excellent) I am on a Mac and run FX Pro no problem on Mac via Parallels. Get on a demo with a risk capital as near to what your live will be and trade every day until you get consistent. Ignore all the get rich quick adverts and commit to a proven methodology and do refresher courses with that company. Your odds of success will be much better However no guarantees exist in life only probability Find the low risk high probability trade and do it over and over. I trade 90% during the , open in Uk so by around 1030 I am done for the day do not be greedy LOL learn patience belief and discipline have a plan and work the plan keep a record with screenshot of every trade and review regularly adjust errors we do not make mistakes we have learning experiences. Best of luck
Happy trading

BTW IF YOU WANT TO SUCCESS... IS NOT EASY , U ARE GOING TO BLOW ACCOUNTS TWICE... BUT NEVER GIVE UP.

*Never trust (like alexnn say), never listen to Gurus/Red Flags talking in here in FF... i think only the %1 of RedFlags know how to trade...
*Never let other people manage your money... only the banks lol... Im not going to say names but a few redflags from here manage my money while i was "learning from them" and they blow my account i learn that
**I learned that is better blow ur own money while u are trading, because u are gaining experience... so always try with Cent Account Live... 10usd its 1000usd... So imagine that u are trading that money...
*In here only are about 5% good Threads.... and remember "Follow the Trend"

GOOD LUCK!

The market is predictable. But trading is a game of probabilities. I'd suggest that all successful traders have truly accepted this fact.

Only you know the answer to this question.

Someone wrote on this thread that it takes around 5 years to really be able to understand what is happening on a price chart and exploit it for a profit. I'd agree with that person; it takes around 5 years. It could take longer. Sure, it can be done quicker. I hope this would be the case for you if you choose to continue, however, if after 4 years you find you're still climbing the mountain, remember what a bunch of guys said late 2015.

I read your bio and think you may only be 20 years old. If this is the case then 5 years is one quarter of your current lifetime. Hopefully this will put the frustration you're currently feeling into perspective. It's a long haul, especially for a young guy, and especially for someone who can only commit to it part-time.

I'm 48 years old and started trading in 2011. It's only in the past year or so that these markets have finally begun to make sense. In terms of offering you some practical advice based upon my own experience I would say that learning to trade stems from the 3Ms - Method. Method. Method. Without a trading method there's absolutely no way you can measure your trading psychology. Conversely, as critically important to a trading business as money-management is, it means nothing without having a trading method.

It's a fair question to ask is, how does one find a method? The advice to back-test is good in my view. But when a similar advice was offered to me some time back I made the mistake of using a back-test in order to try and find a trading method. In other words, I didn't have a proper method to start with, let alone back-test with. And all this did in the end was waste a lot of valuable time, add to the frustration and speed up the process that I'd already been experiencing - heavy losses.

There's a lot of trading methodology to sift through on the Internet and here at FF but I'd agree with reldas's post where he cites supply/demand/Price-Action trading. Ultimately how we as individuals arrive at our own trading method is just down to sheer tenacity and a lot of hard work, but SD may be a good place to start to do some research because it's the only chart analysis (and evidently at some point down the line, trading method) that I've come across that uses naked price charts to focus solely on the one thing that we traders are all interested in: price.

As indicated, I am a beginner, but agree with "Reldas" with using higher timeframes to see where the momentum is (e.g for me its the 4Hr), then use 1M.

Check me out: (been a good day!). Support and Resistance helps as well

this is the right way of looking at it despite there are some supporting evidences for the counter-opinion.
if you accept that market is unpredictable most of the time and able to come up with a system to benefit from this unpredictability you will have a great edge over the market.

That's how I also view it Tash. While traders may smell a rat with the Efficient Market Hypothesis, there is no doubting that randomness comprises the lion's share of price action. Survival IMO in this market lies in being able to sniff out of the small non-random bias that may be lurking in it.

There you have it, the entire forex trading process is about finding this.

now we are talking about the secrets and the holy grail
great post

ssssssssssshhhhhhhhh. We will give the game away

Looks like we are going to have to swap notes skyway

can any one give me free download link for ""beyond technical analysis" book 2nd edition please

Nice choice. That book deserves to stay on the bookshelf and is worth the investment IMO. A download just doesn't do it justice. It needs to be placed centrally on the coffee table (or in your kindle library of hidden treasures) to perpetually remind yourself that systematic trading is your best friend.

Takes time to get good..

Try to find the pockets of liquidty.. on the charts.

zoom out to higher time frames... to get the big picture...

Don't put too much weight on what janet said... or the data of the day... If it were as easy as bad data go short we would all be rich!

Could you people who talk about it describe this concept "random" in as much detail as possible?

Hi yaed.......From my perspective it boils down to the question........Can future price action be predicted with a degree of certainty from patterns associated with current/recent price action?

Randomness in this context relates to uncertainty arising from a lack of perfect information. The same randomness exists within the motion of the water molecules of a cloud (a complex system). With access to perfect information about the actions taken by all participants, then it theoretically would be possible to predict the exact trajectory of price from one given moment in time to another .......however for practical purposes, the reality is that it is simply insurmountable (intractable) to have access to perfect information. This therefore has implications on the legitimacy of the claims associated with the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The best that we can hope for in complex systems is to predict the overall direction of price by looking at the collective action of all it's participants (over a large sample set)..... (or for a cloud the collective motion of it's constituent molecules) to gauge 'gross statistical measures of motion'.

The reality appears to be this....... that market participants (humans and their associated creations [bots]) make 'subjective' decisions based on partial information that is available to them combined with a swathe of other reasons (rational or irrational) that are specific to the participant that we simply can never predict with any degree of certainty. The result is that the plethora of different reasons to trade a particular quantity at a particular time produce a cumulative price pattern that is dominated by uncertainty in future price direction as opposed to directed price action from co-ordinated market behaviour (that is usually associated with an outlook associated with economic fundamentals) and simply does not provide sufficient information over short timeframes for reliable predictive purposes.

Given that the 'tick' is the fundamental unit upon which price action is constructed, the information gleaned from short term patterns (eg. 1 min to 5 mins) cannot with any statistical certainty (low sample size) have any predictive power as their contribution to total price action over an extended timeframe may or may not have any material impact on the longer term trajectory of price. At any particular moment in time, the trade decisions made may have no context to the overall direction that price may take based on market consensus. The ability therefore to use short term price patterns as a predictive measure of future price movement does not possess the requisite statistical validity required to deliver a trading edge over the long term.

The ability to predict future price action only emerges over time with an increasing sample size where price action becomes more than just a simple pattern associated with short term collective behaviour but rather a persistant series of patterns (along a single time horizon) associated with repeated price action behaviour indicating a degree of market consensus (or consistent action of durability) to the direction price is taking. The impact on price associated with this co-ordinated price behaviour is a bias in overall price direction (a gross movement) which can only be visually detected over an extended sample size and exhibits itself as extended directionality on otherwise complicated short term random patterns.....a small non-random drift embedded in otherwise random price patterns.

It is visually impossible to detect the difference between a random price pattern and a random price pattern with a small level of inbuilt drift associated with co-ordinated price action. As a result, you will never know with certainty if you are trading an illusory pattern of no meaning or a pattern representing co-ordinated collective participant behaviour. The best that you can ever hope for is to simply trade those patterns (illusion or not) that have been statistically validated over an extended sample size to be of a sufficiently repeatable nature to provide the necessary positive expectancy (within the parameters of a defined confidence interval) to your trading. The price pattern that I use which is perhaps the simplest and most endurable of all price patterns is the simple trend but I simply can never determine with any degree of confidence whether the trend I am riding is an illusion or a real trend of co-ordinated price action. The only way I can detect this with any certainty is with hindsight.

At the end of the day my performance results are dominated by simple random luck, but the edge that I am seeking to obtain is a small bias that more than compensates for frictional costs of trading to deliver positive expectancy. Once you have positive expectancy that really is the most difficult aspect of trading. Once you get positive expectancy (which really is the holy grail of trading) you can leverage your returns using a range of MM techniques (but most importantly position sizing).....but only when you truly have positive expectancy. The best measure of this is a very large sample size which only comes with a very large data sample....or as Nick Radge states....the next thousand trades. To stay inthe game for the next thousand trades in a market riddled with uncertainty, risk management must be your objective.

PS An interesting video for consideration....but despite the conclusions, non-random drift appears to be the edge that is missing here.

Impulse is the change of momentum of an object when the object is acted upon by a force for an interval of time. So, with impulse, you can calculate the change in momentum or you can use impulse to calculate the average impact force of a collision.

Do you think that the impulse of price movement can be measured, do you believe that it's possible or you think it's all pure fictional rubbish ?

If you believe it can be measured and have managed to quantify that measurement in a sensible way, then the random and less(non)-random instances of price movement on charts of any timeframe could be identified and separated.

Actually i cant make any sense out of that sentence. The tick is the smallest unit of price, agreed. The M1 and the M5 charts are built by ticks, agreed. And the next thing you say is exactly what? Ticks may or may not be what builds the M1 and M5 charts?

The long term trajectory of price must be ticks, its just that its a lot of them. We agree to this yes? What ever we are looking at in the chart its made up of ticks, but the chart only shows the high and low and beginning and end of M1 candles bundled together. At least thats what i understand most brokers do.

Well how about if decisions in the markets are NOT based on statistics at all? Sure you can gather statistics and look at it and make calculations and maybe have some fun. And maybe it sort of seems to make sense to do that. But what if it dont? Here, let me show you in technical terms what i mean:

I dont think you can use calculations of falling or otherwise traveling physical objects on price to any meaningfull extent.

For instance say that price has been like this and this is the chart you have...



Then based on that information i dont think you in general can calculate what it will be in 2 hours.
To some people if you accept that its impossible to trade. And yes, if you assume you have to calculate what price will be in say 2 hours in order to trade, then it IS impossible. Thats why people fail. They are trying to do something that they often themselves know and assume they cant. They just havent thought it through enough.

However i dont think you need to calculate that. What you need to do is to get inside the heads of the people controlling those billions of euros and dollars. What are THEY thinking? Perhaps you can call that a type of calculation. In a way its not since you dont know the variables. And in a way it still is since you "sense" or "guess" the variables: Family dinner? Coke in the bathroom? Fotball on the telly? Friday?

Ah what ever! Im simply presenting an argument here. You can have your view or what ever, it doesnt matter to me im not selling anything, im just exercising my brain.

Lets assume this is true: If price is X at time 1, then price will be Y at time 2. Lets say for instance that E/U price is 1.1 at 1st of January 2016, then it will be 1.0 at 18th of May 2016. Lets call this change of price "trend" or what ever. Then i say there is NO evidence for such assumptions. You cant give any proof with ANY chart that this is so. It might or might not be true, but then i dont think its because of THE CHART. You see what im going at here? Its not the chart that is producing/creating the price. Its not the chart that defines or creates the "trend". Its a bunch of really smug assholes with ties sitting and sweating in front of computers. They CREATE the chart. Its not the chart the creates itself. So you cant READ the "trend" in the chart, you can only read the "trend" in the mind of those smug assholes.

Can you "read" other peoples mind? Of course! Its VERY easy. Can you "read" my mind to see what i will have for breakfast? Yes. How? You look at my god damn kitchen counter. Oh there is chiabatta there. And have a peak in my fridge. There is yoghurt there. Coffee in the pantry. So guess what i will have for breakfast?

Its the same with smug assholes in ties. They got bosses breathing down their necks going: "Hey i whanna fuck whores and snort some cocaine, so GIMME MY FUCKING MONEY YOU LITTLE DIPSHIT!" Its not hard to read that mind either: Panic, stupidity, quick decisions. Voil! Corrupt governments! Voil! Imploding financial institutions! Drug cartels, CIA, the so called "federal" reserve, ECB, bla bla bla bla. Spin that shit a few hundred years back, same thing. Only no computers.

Im beating on the banks and hedgefunds i notice. Oh they are so nice providing liquidity to the markets! Bullshit! They just want to make some friggin money.