Rags to Riches in 10 or 20 Trades - Simplicity at its finest

Oh! you are from there... I understand your bitterness >>> http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=563893

i use this template . . .

You really trade that?

my little advice:

1) go to your MT4 platform - Indicator list -> remove all
2) go to your MT4 platform - Object list -> remove all
3) go to your MT4 platform - Chart properties -> Color scheme -> Black on White

Then look at chart for 5000 hours and find where are the losers and where the winners. You can not learn to read chart in one hour. City Rome in Italy was also not build in one day...

Difficult ? Yes, it is.
Time consuming ? Yes, it is.
Profitable ? Yes, it is.

On the contrary, I actually admire you for being able to trade that (if you really do take trades off that chart). So no bitterness here, just pure, unadulterated admiration.

That chart is legitimately like, an amalgamation of dozens of Forex Factory threads.

Hi milli13,

...been spending time in demo for about 7 months already. I'm not asking for a shortcut here guys.

How come so much bitterness in here?

I wouldn't call it "bitterness". I remember my grail quest, I was never that bad though. Anyone who's signed up here has, at one point, gone through something similar.

You can take a "shortcut" to success though - skip the grail quest. Dump all those sloppy indicators on your chart. Believe me, you won't be needing them once you figure it out. That doesn't mean you'll start "winning" all the time but at the very least, you can avoid wasting 2-3 years of your life downloading indicators, give or take 6 months to a year for learning how to code your own. Forget all that nonsense.

It works for me, that is the most important thing.

I am not looking for a grail quest and I understand that from the beginning. That is why I mentioned earlier I use these indicators to have a more informed logical probability before I go for my trades.

By the way, I started to learn how to code...

Heheh, well, good luck!

I started live (real money) trades yesterday and today (microlots - still testing the waters) .... and I'm still testing my strategy (manual trading on a demo)

Yesterday I go for short on USDCAD and I did well. Then today, I did two trades as shown below.

I built my MM system around this method. It is just an extended version with a lt approach but if it works it will be just as rewarding. I am 2+ months in trading but still haven't hit lift off yet, which is no surprise. Imo too much uncertainty in the market concerning US IR's atm but once a span of certainty hits I expect the system to make gains. I am still on my original deposit and only -1 net trade. It works with a target of +3 net trades before starting again.

I built a random trade generator that has a 40% win to loss ratio that can be downloaded from the thread. In that generator the net trades can be counted. I have the TP at +3 trades but still the net trades can be counted beyond and very rarely in the 2000 trades does 9 trades occur before being retraced back to -1 net trade. I'm not trying to down this thread because I still think it's possible. The reason I built my system though was because I saw much profit disappear so my method is designed to capture that profit and start again with minimal risk but also enough so that there is a decent advancement for the next +3 net trade series.

Not trying to step on toes here Mr R2R, kudos to this thread as it's an eye opener to what can be achieved.

Cheers,
Matt.
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=557430

Example of 40% win/loss ratio from the system (taken from the random generator SS):


ps I suggest just downloading the spreadsheet to work out what I did, the explanation is long winded and needs to be re-written

Bilstein - they just don't understand.

I respectfully disagree with Bilstein here. You CAN use indicators, but you have to know what they are measuring, and how that impacts your trading.

Range, Volatility, Direction, and Momentum are the four horsemen of the market in my view. If you use indies, you have to have an array that measures these things independently.

If you are going to use indicators you should look up barry barns and the way he uses them. 5 conditions. I dont do exactly as he does as I have tweeked it to my trading style.

Indicators are useless as a standalone in my opinion but when working together they can help. They should NOT be the sole reason you enter a trade. Price action is always #1 but indicators can help filter the noise.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using indicators. I don't use them myself anymore but that chart... C'mon man, that's ridiculous, lol.

The point I was trying to drive home is that when it comes to indicators, most of the time, the basic stuff that comes with just about every platform is more than enough to trade with. If you get in the rut of using a dozen indicators at a time, it will eventually stop working for you. Then you'll start learning to code. You'll move on to fishing through threads here and on other forums desperately searching for this algorithm or that to work into your code. You'll code something, start a thread here about how amazing it is, then it'll stop working. Then you'll start coding again; rinse, wash, repeat.

One of the reasons I ditched MT4 to begin with is because I had that problem. Always wanting to code more and more, trying to figure out what someone else ain't figured out yet - it's not going to happen. Not for me, not for anyone here. I'm not saying what I'm saying to discourage him or anyone. I'm saying it because I - like most here are probably unwilling to admit - lived it already.

It's a fruitless endeavor. You gotta make up your mind; you wanna be a forum contributor or you wanna make money doing this? If you wanna be a forum contributor, code away. Try and innovate. But also try an understand, this forum and others like it have been around for over a decade and ain't no one hit that "magic formula" yet. This forum and many others are littered with the corpses of once proud threads and their authors, abandoned when they stopped working. That's what I call "evidence".

I agree with Jmn on his "four horseman" comment.

Range - you can measure by eye.
Volatility - you can measure by eye.
Direction - you can measure by eye.
Momentum - you can measure by eye.

If you wanted to work indicators into the mix, you can accomplish it with a simple ATR/SMA(or EMA) combo. Maybe throw in the RSI for signal filtering.

I'm not trying to say "don't use indicators". I'm trying to spare you the torture of wasting (possibly) years of your life searching and coding to no avail. You're not going to reinvent the wheel. No one here has or will. In fact, when I look at that chart again, I see a lot of phases I went through and some I didn't:

(1) Center of Gravity (Polynomial Linear Regression Channels) from the old Mustafa Belkhayate days.
(2) Spud's Stochastics (thread here on FF)
(3) Zig Zags
(4) Fractals
(5) Gartley Patterns
(6) Triangular Moving Average Slope overlaid with a Trader's Dynamic Index and *squints* Bollinger Bands?! Then an MTF dashboard outputting data about one of the indicators in the same indicator window.
(7) A swath of dashboards outputting data for time frames you aren't even trading.
(8) Daily S/R levels (looks like there's another one on there for a shorter time frame)

Many of which look absolutely brilliant - in hindsight.

There's an old adage about "analysis paralysis" and it's a very real thing. I've been there. If your chart is that sloppy, chances are, you're new to this. If you're new to this, every winning trade makes you feel like you're accomplishing something. You feel amazing. You tell your friends or your family, maybe share your analysis here or even on Facebook. Then it all goes to hell and all of the sudden, *poof* you disappear.

I'll tell you this; when you start coding, and learning how all that mess on your chart is calculated, you'll slowly come to the realization that 90% of those things are telling you the same shit using different algorithms.

When I started trading years ago, I wanted to tell everyone. I wanted to impress them with my complicated charts - it looked like I was so smart and doing something so high-tech and intellectual. I wanted to tell people that I made money, especially my ex-coworkers.. Reality is a knife slipped slowly into your ego. Now I never talk about what I do and I'm better for it.

This was me, years ago...



..and I tagged the photo "simplicity is key" - wow, right?

It does no one any good to encourage them to make their charts look like a programmer vomited all over them. Anyone can knock me now but in a few years, while you're slaving over a hot MQL4 editor trying desperately to figure out where you went wrong, know that I tried to spare you that.

IMHO indicators tell you what happened. But will never tell you what is gona happen.

But honestly I love most frequently used indicators (RSI, MA...etc). Many retail traders use them and lose their money. BIG BOYS (Smart money) know that and hunt SL below/above MA...etc . I do my best to go with BIG BOYS .

ok nice pic of how you use to trade, tell us how you trade now ? some examples please.

Best regards

Bra Friggin Vo!