From the first half of the news trading note we learned some ways to estimate what is priced in by the market. We learned that we are trading any gap in market expectations rather than the result itself. A good result when the market expected a fantastic result is disappointing! We also looked at second order thinking. After all that, I hope the reaction of prices to events is starting to make more sense to you. Before you understand the core concepts of pricing in and second order thinking, price reactions to events can seem mystifying at times We'll add one thought-provoking quote. Keynes (that rare economist who also managed institutional money) offered this analogy. He compared selecting investments to a beauty contest in which newspaper readers would write in with their votes and win a prize if their votes most closely matched the six most popularly selected women across all readers: It is not a case of choosing those (faces) which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinions genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. Trading is no different. You are trying to anticipate how other traders will react to news and how that will move prices. Perhaps you disagree with their reaction. Still, if you can anticipate what it will be you would be sensible to act upon it. Don't forget: meanwhile they are also trying to anticipate what you and everyone else will do. Part II
Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
Data surprise index
Using recent events to predict future reactions
Buy the rumour, sell the fact
The trimming position effect
Reversals
Some key FX releases
Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
The majority of releases are quantitative. All that means is there’s some number. Like unemployment figures or GDP. Historic results provide interesting context. We are looking below the Australian unemployment rate which is released monthly. If you plot it out a few years back you can spot a clear trend, which got massively reversed. Knowing this trend gives you additional information when the figure is released. In the same way prices can trend so do economic data. A great resource that's totally free to use This makes sense: if for example things are getting steadily better in the economy you’d expect to see unemployment steadily going down. Knowing the trend and how much noise there is in the data gives you an informational edge over lazy traders. For example, when we see the spike above 6% on the above you’d instantly know it was crazy and a huge trading opportunity since a) the fluctuations month on month are normally tiny and b) it is a huge reversal of the long-term trend. Would all the other AUDUSD traders know and react proportionately? If not and yet they still trade, their laziness may be an opportunity for more informed traders to make some money. Tradingeconomics.com offers really high quality analysis. You can see all the major indicators for each country. Clicking them brings up their history as well as an explanation of what they show. For example, here’s German Consumer Confidence. Helpful context There are also qualitative events. Normally these are speeches by Central Bankers. There are whole blogs dedicated to closely reading such texts and looking for subtle changes in direction or opinion on the economy. Stuff like how often does the phrase "in a good place" come up when the Chair of the Fed speaks. It is pretty dry stuff. Yet these are leading indicators of how each member may vote to set interest rates. Ed Yardeni is the go-to guy on central banks.
Data surprise index
The other thing you might look at is something investment banks produce for their customers. A data surprise index. I am not sure if these are available in retail land - there's no reason they shouldn't be but the economic calendars online are very basic. You’ll remember we talked about data not being good or bad of itself but good or bad relative to what was expected. These indices measure this difference. If results are consistently better than analysts expect then you’ll see a positive number. If they are consistently worse than analysts expect a negative number. You can see they tend to swing from positive to negative. Mean reversion at its best! Data surprise indices measure how much better or worse data came in vs forecast There are many theories for this but in general people consider that analysts herd around the consensus. They are scared to be outliers and look ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ so they instead place estimates close to the pack of their peers. When economic conditions change they may therefore be slow to update. When they are wrong consistently - say too bearish - they eventually flip the other way and become too bullish. These charts can be interesting to give you an idea of how the recent data releases have been versus market expectations. You may try to spot the turning points in macroeconomic data that drive long term currency prices and trends.
Using recent events to predict future reactions
The market reaction function is the most important thing on an economic calendar in many ways. It means: what will happen to the price if the data is better or worse than the market expects? That seems easy to answer but it is not. Consider the example of consumer confidence we had earlier.
Many times the market will shrug and ignore it.
But when the economic recovery is predicated on a strong consumer it may move markets a lot.
Or consider the S&P index of US stocks (Wall Street).
If you get good economic data that beats analyst estimates surely it should go up? Well, sometimes that is certainly the case.
But good economic data might result in the US Central Bank raising interest rates. Raising interest rates will generally make the stock market go down!
So better than expected data could make the S&P go up (“the economy is great”) or down (“the Fed is more likely to raise rates”). It depends. The market can interpret the same data totally differently at different times. One clue is to look at what happened to the price of risk assets at the last event. For example, let’s say we looked at unemployment and it came in a lot worse than forecast last month. What happened to the S&P back then? 2% drop last time on a 'worse than expected' number ... so it it is 'better than expected' best guess is we rally 2% higher So this tells us that - at least for our most recent event - the S&P moved 2% lower on a far worse than expected number. This gives us some guidance as to what it might do next time and the direction. Bad number = lower S&P. For a huge surprise 2% is the size of move we’d expect. Again - this is a real limitation of online calendars. They should show next to the historic results (expected/actual) the reaction of various instruments.
Buy the rumour, sell the fact
A final example of an unpredictable reaction relates to the old rule of ‘Buy the rumour, sell the fact.’ This captures the tendency for markets to anticipate events and then reverse when they occur. Buy the rumour, sell the fact In short: people take profit and close their positions when what they expected to happen is confirmed. So we have to decide which driver is most important to the market at any point in time. You obviously cannot ask every participant. The best way to do it is to look at what happened recently. Look at the price action during recent releases and you will get a feel for how much the market moves and in which direction.
Trimming or taking off positions
One thing to note is that events sometimes give smart participants information about positioning. This is because many traders take off or reduce positions ahead of big news events for risk management purposes. Imagine we see GBPUSD rises in the hour before GDP release. That probably indicates the market is short and has taken off / flattened its positions. The price action before an event can tell you about speculative positioning If GDP is merely in line with expectations those same people are likely to add back their positions. They avoided a potential banana skin. This is why sometimes the market moves on an event that seemingly was bang on consensus. But you have learned something. The speculative market is short and may prove vulnerable to a squeeze.
Two kinds of reversals
Fairly often you’ll see the market move in one direction on a release then turn around and go the other way. These are known as reversals. Traders will often ‘fade’ a move, meaning bet against it and expect it to reverse.
Logical reversals
Sometimes this happens when the data looks good at first glance but the details don’t support it. For example, say the headline is very bullish on German manufacturing numbers but then a minute later it becomes clear the company who releases the data has changed methodology or believes the number is driven by a one-off event. Or maybe the headline number is positive but buried in the detail there is a very negative revision to previous numbers. Fading the initial spike is one way to trade news. Try looking at what the price action is one minute after the event and thirty minutes afterwards on historic releases.
Crazy reversals
Some reversals don't make sense Sometimes a reversal happens for seemingly no fundamental reason. Say you get clearly positive news that is better than anyone expects. There are no caveats to the positive number. Yet the price briefly spikes up and then falls hard. What on earth? This is a pure supply and demand thing. Even on bullish news the market cannot sustain a rally. The market is telling you it wants to sell this asset. Try not to get in its way.
Some key releases
As we have already discussed, different releases are important at different times. However, we’ll look at some consistently important ones in this final section.
Interest rates decisions
These can sometimes be unscheduled. However, normally the decisions are announced monthly. The exact process varies for each central bank. Typically there’s a headline decision e.g. maintain 0.75% rate. You may also see “minutes” of the meeting in which the decision was reached and a vote tally e.g. 7 for maintain, 2 for lower rates. These are always top-tier data releases and have capacity to move the currency a lot. A hawkish central bank (higher rates) will tend to move a currency higher whilst a dovish central bank (lower rates) will tend to move a currency lower. A central banker speaking is always a big event
Non farm payrolls
These are released once per month. This is another top-tier release that will move all USD pairs as well as equities. There are three numbers:
The headline number of jobs created (bigger is better)
The unemployment rate (smaller is better)
Average hourly earnings (depends)
Bear in mind these headline numbers are often off by around 75,000. If a report comes in +/- 25,000 of the forecast, that is probably a non event. In general a positive response should move the USD higher but check recent price action. Other countries each have their own unemployment data releases but this is the single most important release.
Surveys
There are various types of surveys: consumer confidence; house price expectations; purchasing managers index etc. Each one basically asks a group of people if they expect to make more purchases or activity in their area of expertise to rise. There are so many we won’t go into each one here. A really useful tool is the tradingeconomics.com economic indicators for each country. You can see all the major indicators and an explanation of each plus the historic results.
GDP
Gross Domestic Product is another big release. It is a measure of how much a country’s economy is growing. In general the market focuses more on ‘advance’ GDP forecasts more than ‘final’ numbers, which are often released at the same time. This is because the final figures are accurate but by the time they come around the market has already seen all the inputs. The advance figure tends to be less accurate but incorporates new information that the market may not have known before the release. In general a strong GDP number is good for the domestic currency.
Inflation
Countries tend to release measures of inflation (increase in prices) each month. These releases are important mainly because they may influence the future decisions of the central bank, when setting the interest rate. See the FX fundamentals section for more details.
Industrial data
Things like factory orders or or inventory levels. These can provide a leading indicator of the strength of the economy. These numbers can be extremely volatile. This is because a one-off large order can drive the numbers well outside usual levels. Pay careful attention to previous releases so you have a sense of how noisy each release is and what kind of moves might be expected.
Comments
Often there is really good stuff in the comments/replies. Check out 'squitstoomuch' for some excellent observations on why some news sources are noisy but early (think: Twitter, ZeroHedge). The Softbank story is a good recent example: was in ZeroHedge a day before the FT but the market moved on the FT. Also an interesting comment on mistakes, which definitely happen on breaking news, and can cause massive reversals.
Someone posted on here a few days ago asking about forex and forex trading in Kenya, I have gone through the responses and clearly, most people don’t have an idea. It is 3am in the morning and am in a good mood so let me make this post. This will be a comprehensive and lengthy post so grab a pen and paper and sit down. We’ll be here a while. FIRST OF ALL, who am I..? I am a forex trader, in Nairobi, Kenya..i have been actively involved in forex since I found out about it in Feb 2016 when I somehow ended up in a wealth creation seminar (lol) in pride inn Westlands, the one close to Mpaka Rd. Luckily for me, it was not one of those AIM global meetings or I’d be on Facebook selling God knows what those guys sell. I did not take it seriously till August of the same year and I have been active ever since. I don’t teach, mentor or sell a course or signals, I trade my own money. I am also posting from a throwaway account because I don’t want KRA on my ass. What the fuck is forex and forex trading. In simple plain English, forex is like the stock market but for currencies. Stock Market = Shares, forex = currencies. If you want more in-depth explanation, google is your friend. These currencies are pegged on specific countries, united states- dollar, UK- pound, euro zone- euro, Switzerland- Swiss franc, Kenya- Kenya shilling.. you get the point. Now, there are specific events and happenings between these economies that affect the movement and values of the currencies, driving their value (purchasing power up and down). Forex trading exploits these movements to make money. When the value is going up, we buy and vice versa (down –sell) Is forex trading illegal in Kenya? Is it a scam? Illegal, no. scam, no. All the banks in the world do it (KCB made about 4 billion from trading forex in 2019) Have there been scams involving forex in Kenya? Yes. Here is one that happened recently. This one is the most infamous one yet. Best believe that this is not the end of these type of scams because the stupidity, greed and gullibility of human beings is unfathomable. However, by the end of this post, I hope you won’t fall for such silliness. What next how do I make it work..? Am glad you asked. Generally, there are two ways to go about it. One, you teach yourself. This is the equivalent of stealing our dad’s car and hoping that the pedal you hit is the brake and not the accelerator. It is the route I took, it is the most rewarding and a huge ego boost when you finally make it on your own. Typically, this involves scouring the internet for hours upon hours going down rabbit holes, thinking you have made it telling all your friends how you will be a millionaire then losing all your money. Some people do not have the stomach for that. The second route is more practical, structured and smarter. First Learn the basics. There is a free online forex course at www.babypips.com/learn/forex this is merely an introductory course. Basically it is learning the parts of a car before they let you inside the car. Second, start building your strategy. By the time you are done with the babypips, you will have a feel of what the forex market is, what interests you, etc. Tip..Babypips has a lot of garbage. It is good for introductory purposes but not good for much else, pick whatever stick to you or jumps at you the first time. Nonsense like indicators should be ignored. The next step is now the most important. Developing the skill and building your strategy. As a beginner, you want to exhaust your naivety before jumping into the more advanced stuff. Eg can you identify a trend, what is a pair, what is position sizing, what is metatrader 4 and how to operate it, what news is good for a currency, when can I trade, what are the different trading sessions, what is technical analysis, what is market sentiment, what are bullish conditions what is emotion management, how does my psychology affect my trading (more on this later) an I a swing, scalper or day trader etc Mentors and forex courses.. you have probably seen people advertising how they can teach and mentor you on how to trade forex and charging so much money for it. Somehow it seems that these people are focused on the teaching than the trading. Weird, right..? Truth is trading is hard, teaching not quite. A common saying in the industry is “Those who can’t trade, teach” you want to avoid all these gurus on Facebook and Instagram, some are legit but most are not. Sifting the wheat from the chaff is hard but I did that for you. The info is available online on YouTube, telegram channels etc. am not saying not to spend money on a course, if you find a mentor whose style resonates with you and the course is reasonably priced, please, go ahead and buy..it will cut your learning curve in half. People are different. What worked for me might not work for you. Here are some nice YouTube channels to watch. These guys are legit..
After a short period of time, you will be able to sniff out bs teachers with relative ease. You will also discover some of your own and expand the list. Two tips, start with the oldest videos first and whichever of these resonates with you, stick with till the wheels fall off. How long will it take until things start making sense Give yourself time to grow and learn. This is all new to you and you are allowed to make mistakes, to fail and discover yourself. Realistically, depending on the effort you put in, you will not start seeing results until after 6 months. Could take longeshorter so there is no guarantee. Social media, Mentality, Psychology and Books Online, forex trading might not have the best reputation online because it takes hard work and scammers and gurus give it a bad name. However, try to not get sucked into the Instagram trader lifestyle as it is nowhere close to what the reality is. You will not make millions tomorrow or the day after, you might never even make it in this market. But that is the reality of life. Nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed. Your mentality, beliefs and ego will be challenged in this market. You will learn things that will make you blood boil, you will ask yourself daily, how is this possible, why don’t they teach this in school..bla bla bla..it will be hard but growth is painful, if it wasn’t we’d all be billionaires. Take a break, take a walk, drink a glass of whatever you like or roll one..detox. Chill with your girl (or man) Gradually you will develop mental toughness that will set you up for life. Personally, I sorta ditched religion and picked up stoicism. Whatever works for you. Psychology, this is unfortunately one of the most neglected aspects of your personal development in this journey. Do you believe in yourself? Can you stand by your convictions when everyone is against you? Can you get up every day uncertain of the future? There will be moments where you will question yourself, am I even doing the right thing? the right way? It is normal and essential for your growth. People who played competitive sports have a natural advantage here. Remember the game is first won in your head then on the pitch. Books: ironically, books that helped me the most were the mindset books, Think and grow rich, trading for a living, 4 hour work week, the monk who sold his Ferrari..just google mindset and psychology books, most trading books are garbage. Watch and listen to people who have made it in the investing business. Ray Dalio, warren, Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn. This is turning out to be lengthier than I anticipated so I’ll try to be brief for the remaining parts. Brokers You will need to open up an account with a broker. Get a broker who is regulated. Australian ones (IC Market and Pepperstone) are both legit, reliable and regulated. Do your research. I’d avoid local ones because I’ve heard stories of wide spreads and liquidity problems. International brokers have never failed me. There are plenty brokers, there is no one size fits all recommendation. If it ain’t broke..don’t fix it. Money transfer. All brokers accept wire transfers, you might need to call your bank to authorize that, avoid Equity bank. Stanchart and Stanbic are alright. Large withdrawals $10k+ you will have to call them prior. Get Skrill and Neteller if you don’t like banks like me, set up a Bitcoin wallet for faster withdrawals, (Payoneer and Paypal are accepted by some brokers, just check with them.) How much money can I make..? I hate this question because people have perceived ceilings of income in their minds, eg 1 million ksh is too much to make per month or 10,000ksh is too little. Instead, work backwards. What % return did I make this month/ on this trade. Safaricom made 19.5% last year, if you make 20% you have outperformed them. If you reach of consistency where you can make x% per month on whatever money you have, then there are no limits to how much you can make. How much money do I need to start with..? Zero. You have all the resources above, go forth. There are brokers who provide free bonuses and withdraw-able profits. However, to make a fulltime income you will need some serious cash. Generally, 50,000 kes. You can start lower or higher but if you need say 20k to live comfortably and that is a 10% return per month, then you can do the math on how big your account should be. Of course things like compound interest come into play but that is dependent on your skill level. I have seen people do spectacular things with very little funds. Taxes..? Talk to a lawyer or an accountant. I am neither. Family? Friends? Unfortunately, people will not understand why you spend hundreds of hours watching strangers on the internet so it is best to keep it from them. Eventually you will make it work and they will come to your corner talking about how they always knew you’d make it. The journey will be lonely, make some trading buddies along the way. You’d be surprised at how easy it is when people are united by their circumstances (and stupidity) I have guys who are my bros from South Africa and Lebanon who I have never met but we came up together and are now homies. Join forums, ask questions and grow. That is the only way to learn. Ideally, a group of 5-10 friends committed to learning and growth is the best model. Pushing each other to grow and discovering together. Forex is real and you can do amazing things with it. It is not a get rich quick scheme. If you want a quick guaranteed income, get a job. And now it is 5am, fuck. This is oversimplified and leaves out many many aspects. Happy to answer any questions.
Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please do your own research or you will certainly lose money. I'm not a statistician, data scientist, well-seasoned trader, or anything else that would qualify me to make statements such as the below with any weight behind them. Take them for the incoherent ramblings that they are. TL;DR at the bottom for those not interested in the details. This is a bit of a novel, sorry about that. It was mostly for getting my own thoughts organized, but if even one person reads the whole thing I will feel incredibly accomplished.
Background
For those of you not familiar, please see the various threads on this trading system here. I can't take credit for this system, all glory goes to ParallaxFX! I wanted to see how effective this system was at H1 for a couple of reasons: 1) My current broker is TD Ameritrade - their Forex minimum is a mini lot, and I don't feel comfortable enough yet with the risk to trade mini lots on the higher timeframes(i.e. wider pip swings) that ParallaxFX's system uses, so I wanted to see if I could scale it down. 2) I'm fairly impatient, so I don't like to wait days and days with my capital tied up just to see if a trade is going to win or lose. This does mean it requires more active attention since you are checking for setups once an hour instead of once a day or every 4-6 hours, but the upside is that you trade more often this way so you end up winning or losing faster and moving onto the next trade. Spread does eat more of the trade this way, but I'll cover this in my data below - it ends up not being a problem. I looked at data from 6/11 to 7/3 on all pairs with a reasonable spread(pairs listed at bottom above the TL;DR). So this represents about 3-4 weeks' worth of trading. I used mark(mid) price charts. Spreadsheet link is below for anyone that's interested.
System Details
I'm pretty much using ParallaxFX's system textbook, but since there are a few options in his writeups, I'll include all the discretionary points here:
I'm using the stop entry version - so I wait for the price to trade beyond the confirmation candle(in the direction of my trade) before entering. I don't have any data to support this decision, but I've always preferred this method over retracement-limit entries. Maybe I just like the feeling of a higher winrate even though there can be greater R:R using a limit entry. Variety is the spice of life.
I put my stop loss right at the opposite edge of the confirmation candle. NOT at the edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. I'll get into this more below - not enough trades are saved to justify the wider stops. (Wider stop means less $ per pip won, assuming you still only risk 1%).
All my profit/loss statistics are based on a 1% risk per trade. Because 1 is real easy to multiply.
There are definitely some questionable trades in here, but I tried to make it as mechanical as possible for evaluation purposes. They do fit the definitions of the system, which is why I included them. You could probably improve the winrate by being more discretionary about your trades by looking at support/resistance or other techniques.
I didn't use MBB much for either entering trades, or as support/resistance indicators. Again, trying to be pretty mechanical here just for data collection purposes. Plus, we all make bad trading decisions now and then, so let's call it even.
As stated in the title, this is for H1 only. These results may very well not play out for other time frames - who knows, it may not even work on H1 starting this Monday. Forex is an unpredictable place.
I collected data to show efficacy of taking profit at three different levels: -61.8%, -100% and -161.8% fib levels described in the system using the passive trade management method(set it and forget it). I'll have more below about moving up stops and taking off portions of a position.
And now for the fun. Results!
Total Trades: 241
Raw Winrates:
TP at -61.8%: 177 out of 241: 73.44%
TP at -100%: 156 out of 241: 64.73%
TP at -161.8%: 121 out of 241: 50.20%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
TP at -61.8%: 5.22%
TP at -100%: 23.55%
TP at -161.8%: 29.14%
As you can see, a higher target ended up with higher profit despite a much lower winrate. This is partially just how things work out with profit targets in general, but there's an additional point to consider in our case: the spread. Since we are trading on a lower timeframe, there is less overall price movement and thus the spread takes up a much larger percentage of the trade than it would if you were trading H4, Daily or Weekly charts. You can see exactly how much it accounts for each trade in my spreadsheet if you're interested. TDA does not have the best spreads, so you could probably improve these results with another broker. EDIT: I grabbed typical spreads from other brokers, and turns out while TDA is pretty competitive on majors, their minors/crosses are awful! IG beats them by 20-40% and Oanda beats them 30-60%! Using IG spreads for calculations increased profits considerably (another 5% on top) and Oanda spreads increased profits massively (another 15%!). Definitely going to be considering another broker than TDA for this strategy. Plus that'll allow me to trade micro-lots, so I can be more granular(and thus accurate) with my position sizing and compounding.
A Note on Spread
As you can see in the data, there were scenarios where the spread was 80% of the overall size of the trade(the size of the confirmation candle that you draw your fibonacci retracements over), which would obviously cut heavily into your profits. Removing any trades where the spread is more than 50% of the trade width improved profits slightly without removing many trades, but this is almost certainly just coincidence on a small sample size. Going below 40% and even down to 30% starts to cut out a lot of trades for the less-common pairs, but doesn't actually change overall profits at all(~1% either way). However, digging all the way down to 25% starts to really make some movement. Profit at the -161.8% TP level jumps up to 37.94% if you filter out anything with a spread that is more than 25% of the trade width! And this even keeps the sample size fairly large at 187 total trades. You can get your profits all the way up to 48.43% at the -161.8% TP level if you filter all the way down to only trades where spread is less than 15% of the trade width, however your sample size gets much smaller at that point(108 trades) so I'm not sure I would trust that as being accurate in the long term. Overall based on this data, I'm going to only take trades where the spread is less than 25% of the trade width. This may bias my trades more towards the majors, which would mean a lot more correlated trades as well(more on correlation below), but I think it is a reasonable precaution regardless.
Time of Day
Time of day had an interesting effect on trades. In a totally predictable fashion, a vast majority of setups occurred during the London and New York sessions: 5am-12pm Eastern. However, there was one outlier where there were many setups on the 11PM bar - and the winrate was about the same as the big hours in the London session. No idea why this hour in particular - anyone have any insight? That's smack in the middle of the Tokyo/Sydney overlap, not at the open or close of either. On many of the hour slices I have a feeling I'm just dealing with small number statistics here since I didn't have a lot of data when breaking it down by individual hours. But here it is anyway - for all TP levels, these three things showed up(all in Eastern time):
7pm-4am: Fewer setups, but winrate high.
5am-6am: Lots of setups, but but winrate low.
12pm-3pm Medium number of setups, but winrate low.
I don't have any reason to think these timeframes would maintain this behavior over the long term. They're almost certainly meaningless. EDIT: When you de-dup highly correlated trades, the number of trades in these timeframes really drops, so from this data there is no reason to think these timeframes would be any different than any others in terms of winrate. That being said, these time frames work out for me pretty well because I typically sleep 12am-7am Eastern time. So I automatically avoid the 5am-6am timeframe, and I'm awake for the majority of this system's setups.
Moving stops up to breakeven
This section goes against everything I know and have ever heard about trade management. Please someone find something wrong with my data. I'd love for someone to check my formulas, but I realize that's a pretty insane time commitment to ask of a bunch of strangers. Anyways. What I found was that for these trades moving stops up...basically at all...actually reduced the overall profitability. One of the data points I collected while charting was where the price retraced back to after hitting a certain milestone. i.e. once the price hit the -61.8% profit level, how far back did it retrace before hitting the -100% profit level(if at all)? And same goes for the -100% profit level - how far back did it retrace before hitting the -161.8% profit level(if at all)? Well, some complex excel formulas later and here's what the results appear to be. Emphasis on appears because I honestly don't believe it. I must have done something wrong here, but I've gone over it a hundred times and I can't find anything out of place.
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
Winrate: 46.4%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 5.36%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
Winrate: 65.97%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): -1.01% (yes, a net loss)
Now, you might think exactly what I did when looking at these numbers: oof, the spread killed us there right? Because even when you move your SL to 0%, you still end up paying the spread, so it's not truly "breakeven". And because we are trading on a lower timeframe, the spread can be pretty hefty right? Well even when I manually modified the data so that the spread wasn't subtracted(i.e. "Breakeven" was truly +/- 0), things don't look a whole lot better, and still way worse than the passive trade management method of leaving your stops in place and letting it run. And that isn't even a realistic scenario because to adjust out the spread you'd have to move your stoploss inside the candle edge by at least the spread amount, meaning it would almost certainly be triggered more often than in the data I collected(which was purely based on the fib levels and mark price). Regardless, here are the numbers for that scenario:
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 46.4%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 17.97%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 65.97%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 11.60%
From a literal standpoint, what I see behind this behavior is that 44 of the 69 breakeven trades(65%!) ended up being profitable to -100% after retracing deeply(but not to the original SL level), which greatly helped offset the purely losing trades better than the partial profit taken at -61.8%. And 36 went all the way back to -161.8% after a deep retracement without hitting the original SL. Anyone have any insight into this? Is this a problem with just not enough data? It seems like enough trades that a pattern should emerge, but again I'm no expert. I also briefly looked at moving stops to other lower levels (78.6%, 61.8%, 50%, 38.2%, 23.6%), but that didn't improve things any. No hard data to share as I only took a quick look - and I still might have done something wrong overall. The data is there to infer other strategies if anyone would like to dig in deep(more explanation on the spreadsheet below). I didn't do other combinations because the formulas got pretty complicated and I had already answered all the questions I was looking to answer.
2-Candle vs Confirmation Candle Stops
Another interesting point is that the original system has the SL level(for stop entries) just at the outer edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. Out of pure laziness, I set up my stops just based on the confirmation candle. And as it turns out, that is much a much better way to go about it. Of the 60 purely losing trades, only 9 of them(15%) would go on to be winners with stops on the 2-candle formation. Certainly not enough to justify the extra loss and/or reduced profits you are exposing yourself to in every single other trade by setting a wider SL. Oddly, in every single scenario where the wider stop did save the trade, it ended up going all the way to the -161.8% profit level. Still, not nearly worth it.
Correlated Trades
As I've said many times now, I'm really not qualified to be doing an analysis like this. This section in particular. Looking at shared currency among the pairs traded, 74 of the trades are correlated. Quite a large group, but it makes sense considering the sort of moves we're looking for with this system. This means you are opening yourself up to more risk if you were to trade on every signal since you are technically trading with the same underlying sentiment on each different pair. For example, GBP/USD and AUD/USD moving together almost certainly means it's due to USD moving both pairs, rather than GBP and AUD both moving the same size and direction coincidentally at the same time. So if you were to trade both signals, you would very likely win or lose both trades - meaning you are actually risking double what you'd normally risk(unless you halve both positions which can be a good option, and is discussed in ParallaxFX's posts and in various other places that go over pair correlation. I won't go into detail about those strategies here). Interestingly though, 17 of those apparently correlated trades ended up with different wins/losses. Also, looking only at trades that were correlated, winrate is 83%/70%/55% (for the three TP levels). Does this give some indication that the same signal on multiple pairs means the signal is stronger? That there's some strong underlying sentiment driving it? Or is it just a matter of too small a sample size? The winrate isn't really much higher than the overall winrates, so that makes me doubt it is statistically significant. One more funny tidbit: EUCAD netted the lowest overall winrate: 30% to even the -61.8% TP level on 10 trades. Seems like that is just a coincidence and not enough data, but dang that's a sucky losing streak. EDIT: WOW I spent some time removing correlated trades manually and it changed the results quite a bit. Some thoughts on this below the results. These numbers also include the other "What I will trade" filters. I added a new worksheet to my data to show what I ended up picking.
Total Trades: 75
Raw Winrates:
TP at -61.8%: 84.00%
TP at -100%: 73.33%
TP at -161.8%: 60.00%
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 53.33%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 53.33% (yes, oddly the exact same winrate. but different trades/profits)
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
TP at -61.8%: 18.13%
TP at -100%: 26.20%
TP at -161.8%: 34.01%
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 19.20%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 17.29%
To do this, I removed correlated trades - typically by choosing those whose spread had a lower % of the trade width since that's objective and something I can see ahead of time. Obviously I'd like to only keep the winning trades, but I won't know that during the trade. This did reduce the overall sample size down to a level that I wouldn't otherwise consider to be big enough, but since the results are generally consistent with the overall dataset, I'm not going to worry about it too much. I may also use more discretionary methods(support/resistance, quality of indecision/confirmation candles, news/sentiment for the pairs involved, etc) to filter out correlated trades in the future. But as I've said before I'm going for a pretty mechanical system. This brought the 3 TP levels and even the breakeven strategies much closer together in overall profit. It muted the profit from the high R:R strategies and boosted the profit from the low R:R strategies. This tells me pair correlation was skewing my data quite a bit, so I'm glad I dug in a little deeper. Fortunately my original conclusion to use the -161.8 TP level with static stops is still the winner by a good bit, so it doesn't end up changing my actions. There were a few times where MANY (6-8) correlated pairs all came up at the same time, so it'd be a crapshoot to an extent. And the data showed this - often then won/lost together, but sometimes they did not. As an arbitrary rule, the more correlations, the more trades I did end up taking(and thus risking). For example if there were 3-5 correlations, I might take the 2 "best" trades given my criteria above. 5+ setups and I might take the best 3 trades, even if the pairs are somewhat correlated. I have no true data to back this up, but to illustrate using one example: if AUD/JPY, AUD/USD, CAD/JPY, USD/CAD all set up at the same time (as they did, along with a few other pairs on 6/19/20 9:00 AM), can you really say that those are all the same underlying movement? There are correlations between the different correlations, and trying to filter for that seems rough. Although maybe this is a known thing, I'm still pretty green to Forex - someone please enlighten me if so! I might have to look into this more statistically, but it would be pretty complex to analyze quantitatively, so for now I'm going with my gut and just taking a few of the "best" trades out of the handful. Overall, I'm really glad I went further on this. The boosting of the B/E strategies makes me trust my calculations on those more since they aren't so far from the passive management like they were with the raw data, and that really had me wondering what I did wrong.
What I will trade
Putting all this together, I am going to attempt to trade the following(demo for a bit to make sure I have the hang of it, then for keeps):
"System Details" I described above.
TP at -161.8%
Static SL at opposite side of confirmation candle - I won't move stops up to breakeven.
Trade only 7am-11am and 4pm-11pm signals.
Nothing where spread is more than 25% of trade width.
Looking at the data for these rules, test results are:
Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%
I'll be sure to let everyone know how it goes!
Other Technical Details
ATR is only slightly elevated in this date range from historical levels, so this should fairly closely represent reality even after the COVID volatility leaves the scalpers sad and alone.
The sample size is much too small for anything really meaningful when you slice by hour or pair. I wasn't particularly looking to test a specific pair here - just the system overall as if you were going to trade it on all pairs with a reasonable spread.
Raw Data
Here's the spreadsheet for anyone that'd like it. (EDIT: Updated some of the setups from the last few days that have fully played out now. I also noticed a few typos, but nothing major that would change the overall outcomes. Regardless, I am currently reviewing every trade to ensure they are accurate.UPDATE: Finally all done. Very few corrections, no change to results.) I have some explanatory notes below to help everyone else understand the spiraled labyrinth of a mind that put the spreadsheet together.
I'm on the East Coast in the US, so the timestamps are Eastern time.
Time stamp is from the confirmation candle, not the indecision candle. So 7am would mean the indecision candle was 6:00-6:59 and the confirmation candle is 7:00-7:59 and you'd put in your order at 8:00.
I found a couple AM/PM typos as I was reviewing the data, so let me know if a trade doesn't make sense and I'll correct it.
Insanely detailed spreadsheet notes
For you real nerds out there. Here's an explanation of what each column means:
Pair - duh
Date/Time - Eastern time, confirmation candle as stated above
Win to -61.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -61.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -100%? - whether the trade made it to the -100% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -161.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -161.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -61.8% and -100% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -61.8%, but before hitting -100%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -61.8% to -100%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -100% and -161.8% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -100%, but before hitting -161.8%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -100% to -161.8%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Trade Width(Pips) - the size of the confirmation candle, and thus the "width" of your trade on which to determine position size, draw fib levels, etc.
Loser saved by 2 candle stop? - for all losing trades, whether or not the 2-candle stop loss would have saved the trade and how far it ended up getting if so. "No" means it didn't save it, N/A means it wasn't a losing trade so it's not relevant.
Spread(ThinkorSwim) - these are typical spreads for these pairs on ToS.
Spread % of Width - How big is the spread compared to the trade width? Not used in any calculations, but interesting nonetheless.
True Risk(Trade Width + Spread) - I set my SL at the opposite side of the confirmation candle knowing that I'm actually exposing myself to slightly more risk because of the spread(stop order = market order when submitted, so you pay the spread). So this tells you how many pips you are actually risking despite the Trade Width. I prefer this over setting the stop inside from the edge of the candle because some pairs have a wide spread that would mess with the system overall. But also many, many of these trades retraced very nearly to the edge of the confirmation candle, before ending up nicely profitable. If you keep your risk per trade at 1%, you're talking a true risk of, at most, 1.25% (in worst-case scenarios with the spread being 25% of the trade width as I am going with above).
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -61.8% - not going to go into huge detail, see the spreadsheet for calculations if you want. But, in a nutshell, if the trade was a win to 61.8%, it returns a positive # based on 61.8% of the trade width, minus the spread. Otherwise, it returns the True Risk as a negative. Both normalized to the 1% risk you started with.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100% - same as the last, but 100% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -161.8% - same as the last, but 161.8% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100%, and move SL to breakeven at 61.8% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then full TP at 100%.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread take off half of position at -61.8%, move SL to breakeven, TP 100% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you took of half the position and moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then TP the remaining half at 100%.
Overall Growth(-161.8% TP, 1% Risk) - pretty straightforward. Assuming you risked 1% on each trade, what the overall growth level would be chronologically(spreadsheet is sorted by date).
Pairs
AUD/CAD
AUD/CHF
AUD/JPY
AUD/NZD
AUD/USD
CAD/CHF
CAD/JPY
CHF/JPY
EUAUD
EUCAD
EUCHF
EUGBP
EUJPY
EUNZD
EUUSD
GBP/AUD
GBP/CAD
GBP/CHF
GBP/JPY
GBP/NZD
GBP/USD
NZD/CAD
NZD/CHF
NZD/JPY
NZD/USD
USD/CAD
USD/CHF
USD/JPY
TL;DR
Based on the reasonable rules I discovered in this backtest:
Date range: 6/11-7/3
Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%
Demo Trading Results
Since this post, I started demo trading this system assuming a 5k capital base and risking ~1% per trade. I've added the details to my spreadsheet for anyone interested. The results are pretty similar to the backtest when you consider real-life conditions/timing are a bit different. I missed some trades due to life(work, out of the house, etc), so that brought my total # of trades and thus overall profit down, but the winrate is nearly identical. I also closed a few trades early due to various reasons(not liking the price action, seeing support/resistance emerge, etc). A quick note is that TD's paper trade system fills at the mid price for both stop and limit orders, so I had to subtract the spread from the raw trade values to get the true profit/loss amount for each trade. I'm heading out of town next week, then after that it'll be time to take this sucker live!
86 Trades
Date range: 7/9-7/30
Winrate: 52.32%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 20.73%
Starting Balance: $5,000
Ending Balance: $6,036.51
Live Trading Results
I started live-trading this system on 8/10, and almost immediately had a string of losses much longer than either my backtest or demo period. Murphy's law huh? Anyways, that has me spooked so I'm doing a longer backtest before I start risking more real money. It's going to take me a little while due to the volume of trades, but I'll likely make a new post once I feel comfortable with that and start live trading again.
This is the update 7 of my USDJPY Short. After 14 days of consolidation, UJ has finally cracked below 107. That is the reason for this update. So what happened with the trade? I was targeting 10% fall, with 500x leverage. In 1 month, we have gotten 4.5% fall. The target may never come, but glad I have the TSL. The trade is doing well. I've seen some discussion on this pair in the subreddit recently. It's always good seeing that. Here is the current chart: https://www.tradingview.com/x/S6HcAMl4/ Original Trade : https://www.tradingview.com/x/9kK8iRHQ/ The original post is this: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/fouz9k/shorted_usdjpy_expecting_itll_be_my_best_trade/ I have been in this trade for over a month, expecting it will take another month or two at this rate. I don't mind if it takes long, I'm glad my capital is occupied for the next couple months, earning me as I sit and observe. That was the whole point to becoming a swing trader.
I feel I could have done much better this week. The retracement of GPJPY on Friday from the 132.15 high got me out of the week at a profit, but I really think I should have done better. I'll spend the whole weekend dissecting my trades and working out where I may have made mistakes and where I can improve upon these. Part of my reason for joining here was to teach things that work for me, and to learn about things working for others. The best thing for me is for people to provide well thought out and well presented suggestions on ways I can improve upon weaknesses. I've always made my bigger major breakthroughs in trading based on this. Small observations, well explained by people who know what they're talking about. I've had it said to me many times here that I can not take criticism, but that's not true. I assure you, I'll be 1,000 times more critical of my mistakes that anyone else. I will still be working on them long after others forget them. What I am not interested in is comments I've got here that usually amount to, "You're stupid, and I think I am a better person than you". I'm not here to learn how to be egotistical, I already know how to do that. In this post I'll discuss how trading reversals, and particularly how I traded shorts on GBPJPY this week. I'll start by doing a run through of the trades I took. Thing started well, shorting on Monday 129 - 128.25 (Here my sell was stopped out right before it dropped 100 more pips, so I was not happy with this winning trade. I view it as 100 pips loss in some ways). Then I bought the low of 127 with a 128 target, but took profit and reversed 127.40. Stopped out this trade, and sold 128. Stopped out, and sold 128.50. Stopped out, and decided to stop selling. Worked on a more developed plan in case the market continued to go up. Bought 130 area, and took profit 131. 131.50 area started selling again, got some stop outs. Sold high 132.15. All my stops were 10 - 20 pips. Very tight for this pair. Where I'm going to focus here is 131.50 - 132 area. Getting stopped out for 10 pips when the market goes up 300 more is fine for me. I can work on filtering these trades, but as far as I'm concerned I am losing these well. Someone commented on one my GBPJPY sells signals from 128.50 saying I was "Rekt" when it went to 130 ... but I got out for 15 pips. This is exactly the type of useless "feedback" that's obviously worth ignoring. Hopefully this post can be a more constructive conversation. So here is where I am starting to sell GBPJPPY and getting spiked out. I call myself out on the mistake I am making. https://preview.redd.it/g3k0sfndi1l31.png?width=678&format=png&auto=webp&s=dfc6b9c8afeea66a4292301c5b3f143062bf02f7 I then took up my own advice, set some limits. Took some more nominal stop losses for 10 pips or less and got in a good trade 132.15. https://preview.redd.it/87xbdrhcj1l31.png?width=815&format=png&auto=webp&s=33ca2e15bbe216f9fb3fe1b00e885a1c63aaafea https://preview.redd.it/4rmiujljj1l31.png?width=758&format=png&auto=webp&s=7103dfefb681d8db748cefd3c6ab0fcae2b5fd2b Source https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/czyoo6/i_think_a_huge_gbpjpy_sell_is_due/ez7any5/ I added to my sell 132, 132.05 and 131.90. The end result of this was profitable, but I know I can do better. This is one of my known areas of improvement. I'd be interested in sharing ideas and thoughts with people on how to improve here. These have to be comprehensive, though. Including entries, exits and Rprobability assessments. Saying things that amount to cliches and catchphrases do not help. I've also thought of the obvious things.
Options for Trading Reversals
So now we'll get onto some of the options we have to trade this move, and the risks and rewards we get in each one. I've covered what I've done here. My risk is I am going to invariably get whipsaw stop outs, have to re-enter a few times and have random people telling me I got "rekt". I can deal with all of these, because I'm getting into RR situations that have 10 - 20 + pay outs with the ways I structure positions, add to winning trades and trail stops. I need to be successful something like 7% of the time doing this, and I am successful more than that. Makes sense, to me. These are the other ways of trading this I am interested in speaking about. https://preview.redd.it/namn0aahl1l31.png?width=743&format=png&auto=webp&s=02a972ce8f8f42110fb0a3eccf7122950cda68ba We'll take them one at a time, and I will explain these setups as I think the people are saying to trade them. If I'm wrong, kindly correct me. I'm just basing this on what people who usually say this give when asked to elaborate (assuming they do). So here is number one. We wait for a sell signal. https://preview.redd.it/4x504q3ul1l31.png?width=1342&format=png&auto=webp&s=109a2440bd4a424c1e2577ab3ad69fcc76dd7ccb What now? How do we enter? If we enter at the low, we're fair game for stop hunting unless we use the highs. Inside of the swing down leg we can expect price to trade in there, even if it's going to fall more. So if we enter after the signal, we have high stop out probabilities unless above the high. Above the high, we have usually 80 - 100 pip stop. So it seems this is not offering the same RR if we assume the market does top and then fall 500 pips. It's a less profitable trade, or the same, even accounting for it having higher win rate. Our second option is to wait for the retrace and limit in. This is a great trade. https://preview.redd.it/rumv8utfm1l31.png?width=1344&format=png&auto=webp&s=16245690beae9c11d10dc569f1e83e251127db6f Trouble is, this does not always happen. The retrace is not always predictable. So when we use this method, our reward is good entries, good RR, "confirmed" signal. Our risk is missing a big move. For the highly risk adverse, this is probably ideal, but for those who can take small losses for a big win, this is not optimum. Our other option is to place sell stops, so we enter into momentum. I've shown the areas for this in red. https://preview.redd.it/kfyaqwsxm1l31.png?width=1036&format=png&auto=webp&s=b35911a87fe57e2ae1c153d368da2ea905f761c9 We have the same issue on RR. Where to place the stops. Has to be above the high, really. Or we have the same risk of small stop outs we have in my method, but we have a worse price. Here I've circled all the points these alternative confirmed entry strategies flag up sells. https://preview.redd.it/1zu6ydkcn1l31.png?width=819&format=png&auto=webp&s=184d17cb15574dccf5aa849b0cac74a36fd42f86 On all occasions using the breakout rules, they enter at almost the worst possible price. On the retrace rules, they enter at good price but lose. My trades have engaged the same levels of this (apart from me stopping selling before the 129 trap). I've lost 10 -20 pips on them, and these other signals generated losses of 60 - 80 pips. Same bets, same levels. 1/4 losses, and 400% more RR per trade. Could those who have different ways in which they approach these reversals explain their rational for it in the same way I've went through mine here? 1 - What the entry signals is. 2 - Where to enter. 3 - Where to stop. 4 - Applying this to losing signals as well as winners (not cherry picking). If you do this better than I do, I'd be interested in how you do it and your rational for it. I'm also interested in well thought out explanations of mistakes I make/areas I can improve, as long as it's comprehensive. I'm not the best I can be. I want to get better. I am very keen to learn where I can. I always deeply consider constructive critics and ideas based on what I do (or things others do).
This is a post I made about 5 years ago and I'm reuploading it for visibility. Check back often as this will be getting reformatted and edited over the coming days to make sure it's upto date.
Personally, i think this is pure genius! I love it, it's an amazing way to brush up on your chart skills and it's actually pretty cool to see how things went. It throws a random chart at you and you have to day trade it, it'll tell you how you did versus a buy & hold strategy and... well it's just really really good!
Technical & fundamental news on currencies.I would advise newer traders not to trade solely on external opinions because that won't cement your own methodology or reasons for trading.Excellent website for if you want an overview of the markets and daily reports. Also includes a trading journal and a lot of media attention.
This is absolutely amazing! I can't put a value on this! It's one of the best gems of the internet. Podcasts interviewing successful traders, some are notable such as 50pips, Walter Peters & Chris Kapre.
One of the best free online schools which tracks your progress and teaches you heaps on information. The forum is the gem, where many people keep trade journals and put up their strategies. Don't copy them but borrowing concepts and ideas is good.
There's a lot of information out there, it's overwhelming. You might think "Where the hell do I start?!" well here's your answer! The books you have to read... and in what order! Super important for beginners.
Tim Ferris, author of The 4 Hour Work Week interviews Tony Robbins to find out the success behind the worlds best investors. Talking about morning routines, peak performance & mastering money!
SUPER IMPORTANT This website is paramount to your success, still in development but will provide users with an easy way to document trades. Success is determined by your willingness to follow through with the boring bits so keep this one in your bookmarks.
How to get started in Forex - A comprehensive guide for newbies
Almost every day people come to this subreddit asking the same basic questions over and over again. I've put this guide together to point you in the right direction and help you get started on your forex journey. A quick background on me before you ask: My name is Bob, I'm based out of western Canada. I started my forex journey back in January 2018 and am still learning. However I am trading live, not on demo accounts. I also code my own EA's. I not certified, licensed, insured, or even remotely qualified as a professional in the finance industry. Nothing I say constitutes financial advice. Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but everything I've outlined below is a synopsis of some tough lessons I've learned over the last year of being in this business. LET'S GET SOME UNPLEASANTNESS OUT OF THE WAY I'm going to call you stupid. I'm also going to call you dumb. I'm going to call you many other things. I do this because odds are, you are stupid, foolish,and just asking to have your money taken away. Welcome to the 95% of retail traders. Perhaps uneducated or uninformed are better phrases, but I've never been a big proponent of being politically correct. Want to get out of the 95% and join the 5% of us who actually make money doing this? Put your grown up pants on, buck up, and don't give me any of this pc "This is hurting my feelings so I'm not going to listen to you" bullshit that the world has been moving towards. Let's rip the bandage off quickly on this point - the world does not give a fuck about you. At one point maybe it did, it was this amazing vision nicknamed the American Dream. It died an agonizing, horrible death at the hand of capitalists and entrepreneurs. The world today revolves around money. Your money, my money, everybody's money. People want to take your money to add it to theirs. They don't give a fuck if it forces you out on the street and your family has to live in cardboard box. The world just stopped caring in general. It sucks, but it's the way the world works now. Welcome to the new world order. It's called Capitalism. And here comes the next hard truth that you will need to accept - Forex is a cruel bitch of a mistress. She will hurt you. She will torment you. She will give you nightmares. She will keep you awake at night. And then she will tease you with a glimmer of hope to lure you into a false sense of security before she then guts you like a fish and shows you what your insides look like. This statement applies to all trading markets - they are cruel, ruthless, and not for the weak minded. The sooner you accept these truths, the sooner you will become profitable. Don't accept it? That's fine. Don't bother reading any further. If I've offended you I don't give a fuck. You can run back home and hide under your bed. The world doesn't care and neither do I. For what it's worth - I am not normally an major condescending asshole like the above paragraphs would suggest. In fact, if you look through my posts on this subreddit you will see I am actually quite helpful most of the time to many people who come here. But I need you to really understand that Forex is not for most people. It will make you cry. And if the markets themselves don't do it, the people in the markets will. LESSON 1 - LEARN THE BASICS Save yourself and everybody here a bunch of time - learn the basics of forex. You can learn the basics for free - BabyPips has one of the best free courses online which explains what exactly forex is, how it works, different strategies and methods of how to approach trading, and many other amazing topics. You can access the BabyPips course by clicking this link: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex Do EVERY course in the School of Pipsology. It's free, it's comprehensive, and it will save you from a lot of trouble. It also has the added benefit of preventing you from looking foolish and uneducated when you come here asking for help if you already know this stuff. If you still have questions about how forex works, please see the FREE RESOURCES links on the /Forex FAQ which can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index Quiz Time Answer these questions truthfully to yourself: -What is the difference between a market order, a stop order, and a limit order? -How do you draw a support/resistance line? (Demonstrate it to yourself) -What is the difference between MACD, RSI, and Stochastic indicators? -What is fundamental analysis and how does it differ from technical analysis and price action trading? -True or False: It's better to have a broker who gives you 500:1 margin instead of 50:1 margin. Be able to justify your reasoning. If you don't know to answer to any of these questions, then you aren't ready to move on. Go back to the School of Pipsology linked above and do it all again. If you can answer these questions without having to refer to any kind of reference then congratulations, you are ready to move past being a forex newbie and are ready to dive into the wonderful world of currency trading! Move onto Lesson 2 below. LESSON 2 - RANDOM STRANGERS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOU GET RICH IN FOREX This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but that random stranger on instagram who is posting about how he is killing it on forex is not trying to insprire you to greatness. He's also not trying to help you. He's also not trying to teach you how to attain financial freedom. 99.99999% of people posting about wanting to help you become rich in forex are LYING TO YOU. Why would such nice, polite people do such a thing? Because THEY ARE TRYING TO PROFIT FROM YOUR STUPIDITY. Plain and simple. Here's just a few ways these "experts" and "gurus" profit from you:
Referral Links - If they require you to click a specific link to signup for something, it means they are an affiliate. They get a commission from whatever the third party is that they are sending you to. I don't care if it's a brokerage, training program, hell even an Amazon link to a book - if they insist you have to click their super exclusive, can't-get-this-deal-any-other-way-but-clicking-my-link type bullshit, it's an affiliate link. There is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, but you are literally generating money for some stranger because they convinced you to buy something. Some brokers such as ICMarkets have affiliate programs that payout a percentage of the commission you generate - this is a really clever system - whether you profit or blow your entire account, the person who referred you to the broker makes a profit off you. Clever eh?
Signal Services, Education & Training Programs, Courses - If somebody is telling you they are making a killing with a signal service and are trying to convince you to join it, I guarantee they are getting a piece of your monthly fee. And better still, these signal services often work...for about a week. Just long enough to suck a bunch of poor fools into it. You see people making money, you want in so you agree to pay the $200+/month subscription fee. You follow the signals and it looks like it's making money for a few days or weeks. Then it turns sideways, you start losing money hand over fist. Pretty soon you have lost most of your trading account because you blindly followed a signal service. And better still - when you go screaming at the person running the signal service they will be very quick to point you to their No Refunds policy. To add insult to injury, the buttfucker that referred you to the signal service in the past will likely listen to you getting mad, and then come back with something like "Sorry it didn't work out, but I just joined this other amazing service and it's working great, you should come join it to earn your money back. Here's my link..." You get the point here right?
Multi-Level Marketing (MLMs) - These people are scum. They are going to offer you training and education, signals, access to forex experts and gurus, and all kinds of other shit with the promise that you will live the dream and become financially free. They are also loading you into a pyrmaid scheme where you will be hounded to recruit other people and make money off them just like you got roped into it. A really prime example here is iMarkets Live (or IML for short). Don't touch this shit with a 10 foot pole. I don't care what they are claiming, you will lose everything using them.
Fund Managers - These people make my skin crawl. It's a classic scam and it works like this - somebody will post online about how much money they are making trading forex/commodities/stocks/whatever. Most of the time they won't explicitly post they are offering a trading service, rather they just put the message out there and wait for the ignorant masses (that's you) to contact them. They will charm you. They will lie to you. They will promise you the moon if you simply wire them some money or give them API access to your trading account. Care to guess what happens next? If you send a wire transfer (or Western Union...hell any kind of payment to them) they will vanish. Happens usually after they take a bunch of suckers for the ride. You sent them $2,000 and so do 9 other suckers. They just made $20,000 and are gone. With API access to your account, you will find your account gets blown super fast or worse - possibly leaving you open to persecution by the broker you are using.
These are just a few examples. The reality is that very few people make it big in forex or any kind of trading. If somebody is trying to sell you the dream, they are essentially a magician - making you look the other way while they snatch your wallet and clean you out. Additionally, on the topic of fund managers - legitimate fund managers will be certified, licensed, and insured. Ask them for proof of those 3 things. What they typically look like are:
Certified - This varies from country to country, in the US it's FINRA (http://www.finra.org). They need to have their Series 7 certification minimum. You can make the case that other FINRA certifications are acceptable in lieu of Series 7, but the 7 is the gold standard.
Licensed - They need to have a valid business license issued by the government. It must clearly state they are an investment company, preferrably a hedge fund because they have some super strict requirements to operate (and often require $25,000+ in fees just to get their business license, so you know they at least have some skin in the game).
Insured - They need to be backed by an insurance company. I'm not talking general insurance for shit like their office burning down. I'm talking about a government-implemented protection insurance program - in the US I believe that is issued by the Securities Investment Protection Corporation (https://www.sipc.org/).
If you are talking to a fund manager and they are insisting they have all of these, get a copy of their verification documents and lookup their licenses on the directories of the issuers to verify they are valid. If they are, then at least you are talking to somebody who seems to have their shit together and is doing investment management and trading as a professional and you are at least partially protected when the shit hits the fan. LESSON 3 - UNDERSTAND YOUR RISK Many people jump into Forex, drop $2000 into a broker account and start trading 1 lot orders because they signed up with a broker thinking they will get rich because they were given 500:1 margin and can risk it all on each trade. Worst-case scenario you lose your account, best case scenario you become a millionaire very quickly. Seems like a pretty good gamble right? You are dead wrong. As a new trader, you should never risk more than 1% of your account balance on a trade. If you have some experience and are confident and doing well, then it's perfectly natural to risk 2-3% of your account per trade. Anybody who risks more than 4-5% of their account on a single trade deserves to blow their account. At that point you aren't trading, you are gambling. Don't pretend you are a trader when really you are just putting everything on red and hoping the roulette ball lands in the right spot. It's stupid and reckless and going to screw you very quickly. Let's do some math here: You put $2,000 into your trading account. Risking 1% means you are willing to lose $20 per trade. That means you are going to be trading micro lots, or 0.01 lots most likely ($0.10/pip). At that level you can have a trade stop loss at -200 pips and only lose $20. It's the best starting point for anybody. Additionally, if you SL 20 trades in a row you are only down $200 (or 10% of your account) which isn't that difficult to recover from. Risking 3% means you are willing to lose $60 per trade. You could do mini lots at this point, which is 0.1 lots (or $1/pip). Let's say you SL on 20 trades in a row. You've just lost $1,200 or 60% of your account. Even veteran traders will go through periods of repeat SL'ing, you are not a special snowflake and are not immune to periods of major drawdown. Risking 5% means you are willing to lose $100 per trade. SL 20 trades in a row, your account is blown. As Red Foreman would call it - Good job dumbass. Never risk more than 1% of your account on any trade until you can show that you are either consistently breaking even or making a profit. By consistently, I mean 200 trades minimum. You do 200 trades over a period of time and either break-even or make a profit, then you should be alright to increase your risk. Unfortunately, this is where many retail traders get greedy and blow it. They will do 10 trades and hit their profit target on 9 of them. They will start seeing huge piles of money in their future and get greedy. They will start taking more risk on their trades than their account can handle. 200 trades of break-even or profitable performance risking 1% per trade. Don't even think about increasing your risk tolerance until you do it. When you get to this point, increase you risk to 2%. Do 1,000 trades at this level and show break-even or profit. If you blow your account, go back down to 1% until you can figure out what the hell you did differently or wrong, fix your strategy, and try again. Once you clear 1,000 trades at 2%, it's really up to you if you want to increase your risk. I don't recommend it. Even 2% is bordering on gambling to be honest. LESSON 4 - THE 500 PIP DRAWDOWN RULE This is a rule I created for myself and it's a great way to help protect your account from blowing. Sometimes the market goes insane. Like really insane. Insane to the point that your broker can't keep up and they can't hold your orders to the SL and TP levels you specified. They will try, but during a flash crash like we had at the start of January 2019 the rules can sometimes go flying out the window on account of the trading servers being unable to keep up with all the shit that's hitting the fan. Because of this I live by a rule I call the 500 Pip Drawdown Rule and it's really quite simple - Have enough funds in your account to cover a 500 pip drawdown on your largest open trade. I don't care if you set a SL of -50 pips. During a flash crash that shit sometimes just breaks. So let's use an example - you open a 0.1 lot short order on USDCAD and set the SL to 50 pips (so you'd only lose $50 if you hit stoploss). An hour later Trump makes some absurd announcement which causes a massive fundamental event on the market. A flash crash happens and over the course of the next few minutes USDCAD spikes up 500 pips, your broker is struggling to keep shit under control and your order slips through the cracks. By the time your broker is able to clear the backlog of orders and activity, your order closes out at 500 pips in the red. You just lost $500 when you intended initially to only risk $50. It gets kinda scary if you are dealing with whole lot orders. A single order with a 500 pip drawdown is $5,000 gone in an instant. That will decimate many trader accounts. Remember my statements above about Forex being a cruel bitch of a mistress? I wasn't kidding. Granted - the above scenario is very rare to actually happen. But glitches to happen from time to time. Broker servers go offline. Weird shit happens which sets off a fundamental shift. Lots of stuff can break your account very quickly if you aren't using proper risk management. LESSON 5 - UNDERSTAND DIFFERENT TRADING METHODOLOGIES Generally speaking, there are 3 trading methodologies that traders employ. It's important to figure out what method you intend to use before asking for help. Each has their pros and cons, and you can combine them in a somewhat hybrid methodology but that introduces challenges as well. In a nutshell:
Price Action Trading (Sometimes called Naked Trading) is very effective at identifying when trends will start and finish. This gives you the advantage of staying ahead of the market and predicting when a change in trend direction will occur. It has the disadvantage of being really easy to screw it up if you don't plot your support and resistance lines properly and interpret the chart wrong. Because you can identify a change in trend direction, you'll generally make more profit on a new trend than a technical strategy will.
Technical Analytics (or TA) uses math and statistics to try and identify where the market is headed or confirm/reject whether a trend is happening. It has the advantage of being very math and stat driven which is hard to refute the numbers, but it has the disadvantage of being late to the party when it comes to identifying trends (hence why people call TA a lagging strategy). When people fail using TA, it's not because of the math - it's because you misinterpreted what the math is telling you.
Fundamental Analysis (or FA) uses news and macro scale events to predict what is going on. A really good example right now is Brexit, what a clusterfuck that is. Every time some major brexit news breaks it causes all sorts of choas in almost every currency pair. Fundamental trading has the highest potential profitability per trade but it also has the highest potential drawdown per trade.
Now you may be thinking that you want to be a a price action trader - you should still learn the principles and concepts behind TA and FA. Same if you are planning to be a technical trader - you should learn about price action and fundamental analysis. More knowledge is better, always. With regards to technical analysis, you need to really understand what the different indicators are tell you. It's very easy to misinterpret what an indicator is telling you, which causes you to make a bad trade and lose money. It's also important to understand that every indicator can be tuned to your personal preferences. You might find, for example, that using Bollinger Bands with the normal 20 period SMA close, 2 standard deviation is not effective for how you look at the chart, but changing that to say a 20 period EMA average price, 1 standard deviation bollinger band indicator could give you significantly more insight. LESSON 6 - TIMEFRAMES MATTER Understanding the differences in which timeframes you trade on will make or break your chosen strategy. Some strategies work really well on Daily timeframes (i.e. Ichimoku) but they fall flat on their face if you use them on 1H timeframes, for example. There is no right or wrong answer on what timeframe is best to trade on. Generally speaking however, there are 2 things to consider:
Speed - If you are scalping (trading on the really fast candles like 1M, 5M, 15M, etc) odds are your trades are very short lived. Maybe 10 minutes to an hour tops. For the most part, scalping strategies will produce little profit per trade but make up for it in the sheer volume of trades. Whereas swing trading may only make a few trades but each one could be worth a significant amount of money.
Spread (the fee you pay to the broker when you trade) - If you are a scalper, the spread is your worst enemy because you have to overcome it very fast to make a profit on your order. Whereas swing trading the spread hardly impacts you at all.
If you are a total newbie to forex, I suggest you don't trade on anything shorter than the 1H timeframe when you are first learning. Trading on higher timeframes tends to be much more forgiving and profitable per trade. Scalping is a delicate art and requires finesse and can be very challenging when you are first starting out. LESSON 7 - AUTOBOTS...ROLL OUT! Yeah...I'm a geek and grew up with the Transformers franchise decades before Michael Bay came along. Deal with it. Forex bots are called EA's (Expert Advisors). They can be wonderous and devastating at the same time. /Forex is not really the best place to get help with them. That is what /algotrading is useful for. However some of us that lurk on /Forex code EA's and will try to assist when we can. Anybody can learn to code an EA. But just like how 95% of retail traders fail, I would estimate the same is true for forex bots. Either the strategy doesn't work, the code is buggy, or many other reasons can cause EA's to fail. Because EA's can often times run up hundreds of orders in a very quick period of time, it's critical that you test them repeatedly before letting them lose on a live trading account so they don't blow your account to pieces. You have been warned. If you want to learn how to code an EA, I suggest you start with MQL. It's a programming language which can be directly interpretted by Meta Trader. The Meta Trader terminal client even gives you a built in IDE for coding EA's in MQL. The downside is it can be buggy and glitchy and caused many frustrating hours of work to figure out what is wrong. If you don't want to learn MQL, you can code an EA up in just about any programming language. Python is really popular for forex bots for some reason. But that doesn't mean you couldn't do it in something like C++ or Java or hell even something more unusual like JQuery if you really wanted. I'm not going to get into the finer details of how to code EA's, there are some amazing guides out there. Just be careful with them. They can be your best friend and at the same time also your worst enemy when it comes to forex. One final note on EA's - don't buy them. Ever. Let me put this into perspective - I create an EA which is literally producing money for me automatically 24/5. If it really is a good EA which is profitable, there is no way in hell I'm selling it. I'm keeping it to myself to make a fortune off of. EA's that are for sale will not work, will blow your account, and the developer who coded it will tell you that's too darn bad but no refunds. Don't ever buy an EA from anybody. LESSON 8 - BRING ON THE HATERS You are going to find that this subreddit is frequented by trolls. Some of them will get really nasty. Some of them will threaten you. Some of them will just make you miserable. It's the price you pay for admission to the /Forex club. If you can't handle it, then I suggest you don't post here. Find a more newbie-friendly site. It sucks, but it's reality. We often refer to trolls on this subreddit as shitcunts. That's your word of the day. Learn it, love it. Shitcunts. YOU MADE IT, WELCOME TO FOREX! If you've made it through all of the above and aren't cringing or getting scared, then welcome aboard the forex train! You will fit in nicely here. Ask your questions and the non-shitcunts of our little corner of reddit will try to help you. Assuming this post doesn't get nuked and I don't get banned for it, I'll add more lessons to this post over time. Lessons I intend to add in the future:
Demo Trading
Why you will blow your first account and what to do when it happens
Trading Psychology (this will be a beefy one and will take a while to put together)
Exotics vs Majors and which you should focus on as a newbie (aka how to blow your account in a single trade with exotics)
Hedging (there isn't really a good guide written on this anywhere)
Doubling Your Risk to Save Your Ass or Lose a Shit Ton (aka Martingale & Anti-Martingale)
Risk On/Off
Forex Calendars
Currency Strength / Heat Maps
Swap
Margin Calls (What are they and why are you getting them?)
If there is something else you feel should be included please drop a comment and I'll add it to the above list of pending topics. Cheers, Bob
Hey day traders, looking to get suggestions on flairs. Currently our user flair is pretty basic, just beginner, intermediate, or advanced and we don't even verify this. And we don't have any post flairs right now, so this post is going to address those 2 things. I am considering mod only user flair assignment, and even hiring some flair mods from the community to give out flairs when appropriate. Is that actually a good idea? Either way, I'll let users keep choosing their own flair even after I add the new flairs while having mod only assignable flairs for the best of both worlds. For posts: Over at futurestrading I created a ton of post flairs with automod auto assigning them out, and users could still flair their own posts, plus a search by flair in the sidebar, and that worked out extremely well. But here, I don't think we'll need such a broad spectrum of flairs based on futures, maybe just "futures" for all futures products, "forex" for all currency pairs, etc. So these are what I'm planing for post flairs:
stocks
options
futures
forex
crypto
strategy
algo
question
trade review
trade idea
trading setup workstations
trading screens
As for user flairs I'm considering (since we can't discern or completely verify someone's skill level or gains, or have the time for that, none of the flairs will describe someone's skill level, except for them being a new member to the community and for the flairs rewarding someone's advice giving history): mod only assignable flairs
mod
wiki contributor
market wizard (given to users who have consistently given good advice)
sage of daytrading (same as market wizard, for now)
user assignable flairs
new (will make default)
stock trader
penny stock trader
options trader
futures trader
forex trader
crypto trader
algo trader
algo stock trader
algo options trader
algo futures trader
algo forex trader
algo crypto trader
trades everything
trades multiple markets
investor not-a-day-trader
What do you think? Feel free to suggest other flairs that I didn't cover or tell me which flairs are just downright bad. Update added penny stock trader flair to this list, trade idea, trading screens, workstation; expanded user flairs for algo trader; also added "trades everything," "trades multiple markets," investor (if you want to be that guy in the wrong sub) and "not-a-day-trader" to cover everyone who doesn't day trade but does something else like invest/swing I still don't know what to do if you trade more than one thing, I guess for now you would just pick the one you trade the most. I could expand algo trader to "algo stock trader" and so on and that's it, but to get all the combinations for the rest would be an insane list. I think cryptocurreny had a similar problem and then went with a bot that just picked a flair for you based on your comment history, I'm not going to do that. So I added a bunch of new user flairs to the list above that should satisfy everyone, if not, let me know.
I was going through old emails today and came across this one I sent out to family on January 4, 2018. It was a reflection on the 2017 crypto bull market and where I saw it heading, as well as some general advice on crypto, investment, and being safe about how you handle yourself in cryptoland. I feel that we are on the cusp of a new bull market right now, so I thought that I would put this out for at least a few people to see *before* the next bull run, not after. While the details have changed, I don't see a thing in this email that I fundamentally wouldn't say again, although I'd also probably insist that people get a Yubikey and use that for all 2FA where it is supported. Happy reading, and sorry for some of the formatting weirdness -- I cleaned it up pretty well from the original email formatting, but I love lists and indents and Reddit has limitations... :-/ Also, don't laught at my token picks from January 2018! It was a long time ago and (luckliy) I took my own advice about moving a bunch into USD shortly after I sent this. I didn't hit the top, and I came back in too early in the summer of 2018, but I got lucky in many respects. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jan-4, 2018 Hey all! I woke up this morning to ETH at a solid $1000 and decided to put some thoughts together on what I think crypto has done and what I think it will do. *******, if you could share this to your kids I’d appreciate it -- I don’t have e-mail addresses, and it’s a bit unwieldy for FB Messenger… Hopefully they’ll at least find it thought-provoking. If not, they can use it as further evidence that I’m a nutjob. 😉 Some history before I head into the future. I first mined some BTC in 2011 or 2012 (Can’t remember exactly, but it was around the Christmas holidays when I started because I had time off from work to get it set up and running.) I kept it up through the start of summer in 2012, but stopped because it made my PC run hot and as it was no longer winter, ********** didn’t appreciate the sound of the fans blowing that hot air into the room any more. I’ve always said that the first BTC I mined was at $1, but looking back at it now, that’s not true – It was around $2. Here’s a link to BTC price history. In the summer of 2013 I got a new PC and moved my programs and files over before scrapping the old one. I hadn’t touched my BTC mining folder for a year then, and I didn’t even think about salvaging those wallet files. They are now gone forever, including the 9-10BTC that were in them. While I can intellectually justify the loss, it was sloppy and underlines a key thing about cryptocurrency that I believe will limit its widespread adoption by the general public until it is addressed and solved: In cryptoland, you are your own bank, and if you lose your password or account number, there is no person or organization that can help you reset it so that you can get access back. Your money is gone forever. On April 12, 2014 I bought my first BTC through Coinbase. BTC had spiked to $1000 and been in the news, at least in Japan. This made me remember my old wallet and freak out for a couple of months trying to find it and reclaim the coins. I then FOMO’d (Fear Of Missing Out”) and bought $100 worth of BTC. I was actually very lucky in my timing and bought at around $430. Even so, except for a brief 50% swing up almost immediately afterwards that made me check prices 5 times a day, BTC fell below my purchase price by the end of September and I didn’t get back to even until the end of 2015. In May 2015 I bought my first ETH at around $1. I sent some guy on bitcointalk ~$100 worth of BTC and he sent me 100 ETH – all on trust because the amounts were small and this was a small group of people. BTC was down in the $250 range at that point, so I had lost 30-40% of my initial investment. This was of the $100 invested, so not that much in real terms, but huge in percentages. It also meant that I had to buy another $100 of BTC on Coinbase to send to this guy. A few months after I purchased my ETH, BTC had doubled and ETH had gone down to $0.50, halving the value of my ETH holdings. I was even on the first BTC purchase finally, but was now down 50% on the ETH I had bought. The good news was that this made me start to look at things more seriously. Where I had skimmed white papers and gotten a superficial understanding of the technology before FOMO’ing, I started to act as an investor, not a speculator. Let me define how I see those two different types of activity:
Investors buy because the price is less than the value they see in the investment. Speculators buy because they think that someone will pay more in the future than they are paying now.
Investors trade on information (The white paper was really well-written, had a clear technical advantage over other alternatives, and addresses a need that I can understand and value.) Speculators trade on sentiment. (Buy the rumor! Sell the news!)
Investors usually look at the investment and themselves and can describe why they purchase in those terms (ABC-Coin provides (service) that isn’t addressed yet and matches (requirements) for an investment.) Speculators usually describe why they bought something in terms of how other people think (I think that other people think that the price will rise, so I want to get ahead of that.)
Investors don’t necessarily check the price every day. The can, and very often I do, but it isn’t required because fundamentals don’t often change on a dime. Speculators need to be glued to a price feed, because sentiment very often changes on a dime.
Investors like ideas, people, business plans, and market opportunities. Good ones are like Spock. Speculators like trends. They are tribal.
Investors have a longer time horizon than speculators. In cryptoland, the notion of a “longer” time horizon is still laughably small (months) compared to traditional markets, but it certainly isn’t weeks or days or hours, which is whre speculators often live.
So what has been my experience as an investor? After sitting out the rest of 2015 because I needed to understand the market better, I bought into ETH quite heavily, with my initial big purchases being in March-April of 2016. Those purchases were in the $11-$14 range. ETH, of course, dropped immediately to under $10, then came back and bounced around my purchase range for a while until December of 2016, when I purchased a lot more at around $8. I also purchased my first ICO in August of 2016, HEAT. I bought 25ETH worth. Those tokens are now worth about half of their ICO price, so about 12.5ETH or $12500 instead of the $25000 they would be worth if I had just kept ETH. There are some other things with HEAT that mean I’ve done quite a bit better than those numbers would suggest, but the fact is that the single best thing I could have done is to hold ETH and not spend the effort/time/cost of working with HEAT. That holds true for about every top-25 token on the market when compared to ETH. It certainly holds true for the many, many tokens I tried to trade in Q1-Q2 of 2017. In almost every single case I would have done better and slept better had I just held ETH instead of trying to be smarter than Mr. Market. But, I made money on all of them except one because the crypto market went up more in USD terms than any individual coin went down in ETH or BTC terms. This underlines something that I read somewhere and that I take to heart: A rising market makes everyone seem like a genius. A monkey throwing darts at a list of the top 100 cryptocurrencies last year would have doubled his money. Here’s a chart from September that shows 2017 year-to-date returns for the top 10 cryptocurrencies, and all of them went up a *lot* more between then and December. A monkey throwing darts at this list there would have quintupled his money. When evaluating performance, then, you have to beat the monkey, and preferably you should try to beat a Wall Street monkey. I couldn’t, so I stopped trying around July 2017. My benchmark was the BLX, a DAA (Digital Asset Array – think fund like a Fidelity fund) created by ICONOMI. I wasn’t even close to beating the BLX returns, so I did several things.
I went from holding about 25 different tokens to holding 10 now. More on that in a bit.
I used those funds to buy ETH and BLX. ETH has done crazy-good since then and BLX has beaten BTC handily, although it hasn’t done as well as ETH.
I used some of those funds to set up an arbitrage operation.
The arbitrage operation is why I kept the 11 tokens that I have now. All but a couple are used in an ETH/token pair for arbitrage, and each one of them except for one special case is part of BLX. Why did I do that? I did that because ICONOMI did a better job of picking long-term holds than I did, and in arbitrage the only speculative thing you must do is pick the pairs to trade. My pairs are (No particular order):
ETH/XMR
ETH/ICN
ETH/DNT
ETH/QTUM
ETH/ZRX
ETH/CFI
ETH/OMG
I also hold PLU, PLBT, and ART. These two are multi-year holds for me. I have not purchased BTC once since my initial $200, except for a few cases where BTC was the only way to go to/from an altcoin that didn’t trade against ETH yet. Right now I hold about the same 0.3BTC that I held after my first $100 purchase, so I don’t really count it. Looking forward to this year, I am positioning myself as follows:
ETH will still be my core holding. It is the “deepest in the stack” crypto investment that I have. “Deep in the stack” is a programming term that gets at the idea that most software is built on other software. If you just think about your notebook, you have your OS, and programs run on that. But even inside the OS there is a stack. The bottom of your stack is the kernel, and on top of that are the drivers, protocols, and other layers that allow the programs to talk to the OS, the hard drive, the screen, the mouse, your printer, etc. You can change your mouse or printer easily. Changing things deeper in the stack becomes harder and harder. ETH is deep in the crypto stack, so is very hard to dislodge – Around 60 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap run on top of Ethereum, so getting rid of Ethereum is something that would take a long time to do.
DNT, QTUM, ZRX, and OMG are all, to varying degrees, “deep in the stack” tokens that, once established, will be very hard to dislodge.
That said, I am peeling away some of my holdings into USD right now, because big changes are afoot and they are going to cause market disruptions. I’m going to come right out and admit that this is speculative, but I’m also going to back it up with some non-speculative facts.
The SEC has been sending out hundreds of subpoenas to cryptocurrency organizations over the past 3-4 months. These subpoenas are simply asking for information and nobody has been charged with any crimes or misdoings, but it is clear that the SEC is getting together information so that they can begin to regulate cryptoland. When that happens, other countries will follow, and that means:
Some tokens will be deemed outright scams and people will be prosecuted.
Some tokens will be deemed securities and will be regulated.
Some tokens will not be deemed scams or securities and will continue as they have.
Looking at this, it is clear to me that the tokens that escape prosecution and regulation should do better, but the short-term impact will be brutal and ugly. It would not surprise me at all to see a 50% drop in overall market cap within Q1-Q2, with Q1 being more likely.
Cryptoland has always been a bit nuts, but it is more nuts now than I have ever seen it. Back in 2011-2014 it was a freaks-n-geeks show where people were all about the technology and I would sit around for a 3-day weekend installing a *nix VM on my Windows machine so that I could compile the most recent source and run a CUDA SHA-256 routine rather than thrash my CPU. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you wouldn’t have even thought about being involved.
Now, people see Bitcoin advertisements in their Facebook feed and think “I gotta get on the BTC train!” before going to Coinbase and buying some with a credit card. They don’t know anything about crypto, and they are getting eaten alive – It is no coincidence that BTC peaked after the Thanksgiving holidays when people sat around the table and Janice got Uncle Mike and Cousin Bob all excited as she talked about going to Cancun for Christmas because of her crypto winnings. Huge amounts of fiat got transferred from newbies to BTC whales during this period, and once the whales were done, BTC had dropped from $20,000 to $12,000. It’s now back at $15,000, but for people who bought at a higher level, this sucks. As a result many have moved from BTC to ETH, with the single biggest money flow in crypto in December being the BTC à ETH flow. As a result, it’s no coincidence that ETH is at all-time highs now. The thing is, though, that even most people that moved from BTC to ETH really have no idea what they are doing. They are acting on buzzwords and emotion. They are speculators and are going to get crushed.
The stock market is quite high right now, but people are starting to worry that it is too high and that we are going to enter into a period of inflation again. This has caused gold to go up a lot the last quarter and is likely also responsible a bit for the rise in cryptos. If this view is correct, then cryptos stay stronger than if that pressure wasn’t there. If wrong, then cryptos will swing down as money exits cryptoland for more traditional markets.
I am spending most of my time and money on the arbitrage effort. The nice thing about arbitrage is that it works as the markets go up, and it works as the markets go down. When markets are too volatile, however, arbitrage can get very messy and dangerous, with each trade generating a loss instead of a profit, so I am working right now to tune the algorithms to take into account rate-of-change and add in some circuit breaker triggers. Once this is done I will expand those operations.
I am getting much more serious about systems security.
I have a Nano Ledger and recommend that anyone with >$1000 of crypto have one. The Trezor is also supposed to be good, but I haven’t used it.
I will set up a dedicated *nix notebook that is used for nothing except my crypto work. All it takes is one keylogger to get on your PC/Mac and your crypto is gone. What is on your Nano Ledger will be OK, but they will sweep out your exchange account or Coinbase account faster than you can type. A standard Linux installation with Chrome and nothing else is as about as secure as you can get in the civilian world.
If you don’t use LastPass or a similar password manager yet, you need to do that. Your password to LastPass should be at least 16 characters long and should not have a recognizable English word in it. If you think that “Iluvu4evah” is a secure password, you’re wrong.
Hackers know that “4”=”for” and “u”=”you”. Writing a script to substitute those in is trivial if they want to write the script, but it’s much easier for them to download one of the many, many programs out there that already do this.
If your password contains any string of numbers from anything that can be associated with you at any time in your life, it is insecure. Take those numbers out of the character count because they are an insignificant barrier to cracking your account.
The good news is that you probably won’t be targeted, but if you ever mention online that you are doing anything significant in crypto, that chance increased enormously.
*Never* talk with *anyone* about how much you have in crypto. You’ll notice that I haven’t here. There is no reason to tell even a family member how much you have unless you are sharing a tax form. Sure, you may trust them, but all it takes if for someone to overhead someone else mention at a party that a relative got into crypto a long time ago and made a bunch of money. That person can also then be subjected to the $10 hack and force you to send all your crypto to them.
Your password to LastPass (Or equivalent.) should look something like this -> 6k0jQMoziX&D#4W8
Yes, it’s a headache. Imagine your headache, though, were you to open your account one day and find all of your money gone.
Looking at my notes, I have two other things that I wanted to work into this email that I didn’t get to, so here they are:
Just like with free apps and other software, if you are getting something of value and you didn’t pay anything for it, you need to ask why this is. With apps, the phrase is “If you didn’t pay for the product, you are the product”, and this works for things such as pump groups, tips, and even technical analysis. Here’s how I see it.
People don’t give tips on stocks or crypto that they don’t already own that stock or token. Why would they, since if they convince anyone to buy it, the price only goes up as a result, making it more expensive for them to buy in? Sure, you will have friends and family that may do this, but people in a crypto club, your local cryptocurrency meetup, or online are generally not your friends. They are there to make money, and if they can get you to help them make money, they will do it. Pump groups are the worst of these, and no matter how enticing it may look, stay as far away as possible from these scams. I even go so far as to report them when I see them advertise on FB or Twitter, because they are violating the terms of use.
Technical analysis (TA) is something that has been argued about for longer than I’ve been alive, but I think that it falls into the same boat. In short, TA argues that there are patterns in trading that can be read and acted upon to signal when one must buy or sell. It has been used forever in the stock and foreign exchange markets, and people use it in crypto as well. Let’s break down these assumptions a bit.
i. First, if crypto were like the stock or forex markets we’d all be happy with 5-7% gains per year rather than easily seeing that in a day. For TA to work the same way in crypto as it does in stocks and foreign exchange, the signals would have to be *much* stronger and faster-reacting than they work in the traditional market, but people use them in exactly the same way. ii. Another area where crypto is very different than the stock and forex markets centers around market efficiency theory. This theory says that markets are efficient and that the price reflects all the available information at any given time. This is why gold in New York is similar in price to gold in London or Shanghai, and why arbitrage margins are easily <0.1% in those markets compared to cryptoland where I can easily get 10x that. Crypto simply has too much speculation and not enough professional traders in it yet to operate as an efficient market. That fundamentally changes the way that the market behaves and should make any TA patterns from traditional markets irrelevant in crypto. iii. There are services, both free and paid that claim to put out signals based on TA for when one should buy and sell. If you think for even a second that they are not front-running (Placing orders ahead of yours to profit.) you and the other people using the service, you’re naïve. iv. Likewise, if you don’t think that there are people that have but together computerized systems to get ahead of people doing manual TA, you’re naïve. The guys that I have programming my arbitrage bots have offered to build me a TA bot and set up a service to sell signals once our position is taken. I said no, but I am sure that they will do it themselves or sell that to someone else. Basically they look at TA as a tip machine where when a certain pattern is seen, people act on that “tip”. They use software to see that “tip” faster and take a position on it so that when slower participants come in they either have to sell lower or buy higher than the TA bot did. Remember, if you are getting a tip for free, you’re the product. In TA I see a system when people are all acting on free preset “tips” and getting played by the more sophisticated market participants. Again, you have to beat that Wall Street monkey.
If you still don’t agree that TA is bogus, think about it this way: If TA was real, Wall Street would have figured it out decades ago and we would have TA funds that would be beating the market. We don’t.
If you still don’t agree that TA is bogus and that its real and well, proven, then you must think that all smart traders use them. Now follow that logic forward and think about what would happen if every smart trader pushing big money followed TA. The signals would only last for a split second and would then be overwhelmed by people acting on them, making them impossible to leverage. This is essentially what the efficient market theory postulates for all information, including TA.
OK, the one last item. Read this weekly newsletter – You can sign up at the bottom. It is free, so they’re selling something, right? 😉 From what I can tell, though, Evan is a straight-up guy who posts links and almost zero editorial comments. Happy 2018.
How we plan technical trades in anticipation of high impact news.
When we have high impact news events, we have a pretty sure 'known'. That is, the market will probably move fast. In this posts I'll cover how we use this information to plan technical trades in fast moving markets driven by news releases. I've explained various times in many ways how there are parts of market cycles in which is it a common tendency for markets to move fast. What we look for is setups that imply a fast moving market. From there we can extrapolate what sort of price action we may see if price moves fast, and where our smart areas of engagement will be. So you can see this being done from fresh analysis, I'll use a pair I've not posted analysis on previous and have no current analysis I have not shared. In fact, I'll be using a pair I've not looked at in multiple years. I've not been trading Canadian dollar for a long time. Not been following it. Not even peeked in on it from time to time. Since I see there is Cad interest rates, I now expect there to be the possibility of there being opportunities in this currency. https://preview.redd.it/6b8d857c53v31.png?width=576&format=png&auto=webp&s=1295d34129ac6e4d6857e0148e339f91f55262ec First thing I want to do is see if there is anything I can marry up with the cad news that goes along with the general mood I think we have in the markets. I think we're entering into risk off markets. This tells me there may be weakness in Cad. It also tells me I want to trade it against 'safe' currencies. My go to here is Yen, but since I already have extensive Yen analysis I will use another. I'll use CHF (another currency I've not been following). So, before I open the chart I have a few things in mind.
I am looking for possible volatile and strong one way moves.
I'm looking for opportunities to short the risk currency against the safe currency.
If there is to be a big trend move, I am looking for whipsaws to make it hard for most people to follow.
Before I even open the charts, I have a pretty good idea one of my best setups I can see here is the foreshadowing of a ping swing. https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/ctifde/forecasting_the_end_of_major_corrections_and/ https://preview.redd.it/3rwsleup63v31.png?width=1356&format=png&auto=webp&s=46f35e3c9d195bf29d11cc4a9163606f0bc4ca6d And will wonders never cease ... there is it. I further know before the ping swing happens, the market is probably going to want to punk everyone. It's just what it does. This tells me I can probably find risk efficient opportunities if the market dips in the run up to the news event. Lo and behold, I also find in this messy looking range the formations of harmonic patterns indicating to me if price drops to this level I have buying opportunities where I can use small stops and target the big RR ping swing move. https://preview.redd.it/54zxsc1e73v31.png?width=1360&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f7a85e4d0b8439a4305b05cea029674bfbd7339 And boom! I have my trade plan. If I see sharp dips to the lows completing the harmonics, I buy. If I see sharp rallies to spike out the 61.8 I sell. I know very specifically my areas of engagement if the market moves fast. A lot of this I can do with limit orders. If either of these swings happen, I'll do pretty well. If they both happen, I will bank. If neither one of these happen, I'll do nothing ... and all I've lost is the 10 minutes it took me to mark out my areas of engagement. Simple as that. Bring on the news.
Quick background for those new here. This started with me saying that if a person gets suitable good at entering the market and finding places to get high RR trades, it is entirely possible to flip small amounts of money into larger ones relatively quickly. To demonstrate this, I said Id flip $40-50 into over $1,000 over a year and link up Myfxbook to track all my trades. I’d also run versions of the strategy with the info posted for people to log into the accounts, see the trades and copy them if they want (see ForexCopy). The first one I bust on day one. I tried to do it really quickly ($1,000 in a week or so from $40). I got up around 200% - 250% and then zero’d it. The trades I lost in where not really good opportunities, and I as overly aggressive with them. Was dumb. The second one I tried running via a copy trader, it messed up early trades and vitaly went bust in the opening hours (I do not think it ever went into profit). The “I can flip $40 to $1,000 as long as I can keep reloading $40s” challenge is far less impressive. So, I have been reloading that account with tiny amounts, trying to get from $2 or so up to a more useful equity figure. I have failed doing this various times, but it has been down to accuracy being less sharp that it may have been rather than this not being viable. This is viable. It is fucking hard. Don’t get me wrong. Entering the market when you have 5 - 7 pips before you get margin called is tricky. Kinda fun, too. Good training in getting entries. With a couple good entries, though, entirely viable. $2 can get to $5, $5 can get to $15 and that is enough pips at 0.01 to have a damn good cracking at catching some big moves. Realistically, I think it only takes 10 really good trades to have a fairly useful bankroll. So let’s just write the $40 - $1,000 thing off. I bombed that. I am willing to up the ante. Rather than $40 - $1,000 over 12 months, I think I can do $2 or $3 to $5,000 in 18 months. This is contingent upon a couple things;
I may need to rebuy a few more times (although, maybe not).
I need the markets to trend in the nice structured way that currently are through the next year (or be super volatile and be well positioned for that).
This may sound outlandish and crazy, but the maths behind this are fairly solid. All it takes is catching a few 50 - 100 pip trades. A few of these can take $2 to $30, a few more and it is over $100. I can get 1:10 - 1:15 risk reward trades, and can increase risk:reward with in-trade management and adding positions (or hedging positions in profit). So using 5 - 10% risk in really prime opportunities, and it does not take many of them in a row to make some decent money compounding an account from $100. Technical Details on Margin Requirements You may be wondering how this can even be feasible. It may seem logical that even the best trader in the world could not get started from $2, but actually with the right brokerage conditions and pair selection, this can be done. I am using IC Markets. I have 1:500 leverage. Commission per trade is 0.6 of a lot (so, about $0.04-0.06 per trade with my position sizes). My spreads are usually under a pip. They sometimes go to zero spread. Pair selection. NZD and JPY are the lowest margin requirement currencies, and these can trend well. So I focus on these for starting out. I am trading NZDJPY, I require $1.33 margin to open 0.01 lots. So this means if I close all my trades and have under $1.33 I can not open any more trades. However, my stop out level is 50% of my margin requirements. So I get stopped out when I have $0.65 equity. This gives me about 15 pips from $2. I can also hedge this, and can use ways to manipulate margin requirements to get the most bang for my buck (which can be good or bad, it goes both ways, but it gives me more options). So with these settings, to take $2 to $10 is not all that hard. Catch 50 pips or so a couple times without the first trade drawing down 10+ pips. With $10, I have 100 pips at 0.01 (or the option of far more creative positioning), I think 100 pips is plenty margin for error to get into a few good trades and get going. I’ve pinned the Myfxbook for this to start from today (16th January 2019) since this is the first day I am taking this seriously. https://www.myfxbook.com/members/inweedwetrust/40-1000/2893650 Deposit $1.50 + account balance $0.65 = Slightly over $2 to start. The net deposit on this account is now around $66. Update. I want to quash this idea that the only way someone can make large returns in FX is using reckless risk and gambling. Obviously many people do this ,but some just know ways to get far more reward for their risks. Here is a trade I am. I had about $3.50 equity when opening the first two trades. 5 pips and 2 pips stops. I was risking about $0.50. https://preview.redd.it/ljohtjwqdwa21.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=24d62c7296c8afdc15907dbe42a18a37f389e1fd Then as the move has developed, I have adjusted my stops and added to the position. I am targeting 60 pips or so here, about $20 pay off. I have nothing at risk now. I will end the trade really close to breakeven, if not slightly up. I have turned $0.50 risk into potentially $20 profit, and done this in the space of 10 pips. **I am not saying this is easy**. It has taken me years of studying price moves to know how, and far more importantly when to do this. I am saying it something that can be learned, and when applied well ... can be surprisingly profitable. Update. https://preview.redd.it/1jptz02cfwa21.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8af8bd06a16058ae2369fe634215116d806fc31 Now I have set hedging orders on an area I know price often pulls back from. If it pulls back to the level I expect, I can exit the hedges and have the buy stops under there. If it then goes higher, I banked an extra X% on the gain with the hedges. I have set a hedging order above the high for if price blows through the take profits (making me short) and continues upwards. The worse case scenario sees me lose rather little, the best case (price filling take profits and then coming down to make the sells profitable, or the price retracing so the sells are profitable then it making a high) yield substantial profit potential. Piling up potential profit, without adding on much potential risk. Update. https://preview.redd.it/v70pqc9qiwa21.png?width=1362&format=png&auto=webp&s=a252499e2dc4f5ffc782fb6e44ffc5d8b8fb0fa6 Then I use the rules of the Extreme Edge strategy to trail stops. To get my line in the sand. I now have locked in a profti (albeit small) and can potentially make somewhere in the $25 - $30 range or perhaps more from my $0.50 risk. https://www.reddit.com/Forexnoobs/comments/af15l9/extreme_edge_strategy_detailed/ Update. This never worked out (I screwed it up). It is a lot harder with $2 on a 1 minute chart whilst posting live updates. However later you will see how I can take these same principles that can make $0.50 risk into $20 and use them to get into positions where $10 risk can be $300. Or where $100 can be several thousand. Update. So I was a bit early on that move, but this is what it looks like when it works. Occasions to position like this happen fairly frequently. I can get myself into these positions where I am risking a nominal amount for much larger gains many times in a day. I can take the same principles and apply them to weekly charts and position for "flash crashes", and other volatile moves. This is obviously on an account with more equity, I got margin called on the small one, will try again tomorrow. I was probably 2 pips away from going to $2 to close to $100 today (assuming the trades come through as I think). Will be abl to check what it could have been. If I'd hit the first trade, it would have mirrored the trades in the account that is copying my account *2 risk. If these swings hit, this account may make about $50 in them. Which will put it up about 100% (trading only 2x 0.01 at any time) since we fixed the margin/FIFO copying issues. Bit early to be counting chickens, but we'll see. https://www.myfxbook.com/members/drcherrypoppemt4-9084923/2910254 https://preview.redd.it/xhqv5tf55za21.png?width=1359&format=png&auto=webp&s=e63d97b4d7ef32573071afff3c31f67a98f725e6
[educational] Technical analysis, patterns, and charts analysis for the day trader
Chart patterns form a key part of day trading. Candlestick and other charts produce frequent signals that cut through price action “noise”. The best patterns will be those that can form the backbone of a profitable day trading strategy, whether trading stocks, cryptocurrency of forex pairs. Every day you have to choose between hundreds of trading opportunities. This is a result of a wide range of factors influencing the market. Day trading patterns enable you to decipher the multitude of options and motivations – from hope of gain and fear of loss, to short-covering, stop-loss triggers, hedging, tax consequences and plenty more. Candlestick patterns help by painting a clear picture, and flagging up trading signals and signs of future price movements. Whilst it’s said you’ll need to use technical analysis to succeed day trading with candlestick and other patterns, it’s important to note utilizing them to your advantage is more of an art form than a rigid science. You have to learn the power of chart patterns and the theory that governs them in order to identify the best patterns to supplement your trading style and strategies.
Use In Day Trading
Used correctly trading patterns can add a powerful tool to your arsenal. This is because history has a habit of repeating itself and the financial markets are no exception. This repetition can help you identify opportunities and anticipate potential pitfalls. RSI, volume, plus support and resistance levels all aide your technical analysis when you’re trading. But crypto chart patterns play a crucial role in identifying breakouts and trend reversals. Mastering the art of reading these patterns will help you make smarter trades and bolster your profits, as highlighted in the highly regarded, ‘stock patterns for day trading’, by Barry Rudd.
Breakouts & Reversals
In the patterns and charts below you’ll see two recurring themes, breakouts and reversals.
Breakout – A breakout is simply when the price clears a specified critical level on your chart. This level could by any number of things, from a Fibonacci level, to support, resistance or trend lines.
Reversal – A reversal is simply a change in direction of a price trend. That change could be either positive or negative against the prevailing trend. You may also hear it called a ‘rally’, ‘correction’, or ‘trend reversal’.
Candlestick Charts
Candlestick charts are a technical tool at your disposal. They consolidate data within given time frames into single bars. Not only are the patterns relatively straightforward to interpret, but trading with candle patterns can help you attain that competitive edge over the rest of the market. They first originated in the 18th century where they were used by Japanese rice traders. Since Steve Nison introduced them to the West with his 1991 book ‘Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques’, their popularity has surged. Below is a break down of three of the most popular candlestick patterns used for day trading.
Shooting Star Candlestick
This is often one of the first you see when you open a chart with candlestick patterns. This bearish reversal candlestick suggests a peak. It is precisely the opposite of a hammer candle. It won’t form until at least three subsequent green candles have materialized. This will indicate an increase in price and demand. Usually, buyers lose their cool and clamber for the price to increasing highs before they realize they’ve overpaid. The upper shadow is usually twice the size of the body. This tells you the last frantic buyers have entered trading just as those that have turned a profit have off-loaded their positions. Short-sellers then usually force the price down to the close of the candle either near or below the open. This traps the late arrivals who pushed the price high. Panic often kicks in at this point as those late arrivals swiftly exit their positions. https://preview.redd.it/gf5dwjhbrdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=437ff856bfd6ebc95da34528462ba224d964f01f
Doji Candlestick
One of the most popular candlestick patterns for trading forex is the doji candlestick (doji signifies indecision). This reversal pattern is either bearish or bullish depending on the previous candles. It will have nearly, or the same open and closing price with long shadows. It may look like a cross, but it can have an extremely small body. You will often get an indicator as to which way the reversal will head from the previous candles. If you see previous candles are bullish, you can anticipate the next one near the underneath of the body low will trigger a short/sell signal when the doji lows break. You’ll then see trail stops above the doji highs. Alternatively, if the previous candles are bearish then the doji will probably form a bullish reversal. Above the candlestick high, long triggers usually form with a trail stop directly under the doji low. These candlestick patterns could be used for intraday trading with forex, stocks, cryptocurrencies and any number of other assets. But using candlestick patterns for trading interpretations requires experience, so practice on a demo account before you put real money on the line. https://preview.redd.it/4yo650lcrdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=b2aa3cdeef23e44e1e3e3047bbe2604fce0a4768
Hammer Candlestick
This is a bullish reversal candlestick. You can use this candlestick to establish capitulation bottoms. These are then normally followed by a price bump, allowing you to enter a long position. The hammer candlestick forms at the end of a downtrend and suggests a near-term price bottom. The lower shadow is made by a new low in the downtrend pattern that then closes back near the open. The tail (lower shadow), must be a minimum of twice the size of the actual body. The tails are those that stopped out as shorts started to cover their positions and those looking for a bargain decided to feast. Volume can also help hammer home the candle. To be certain it is a hammer candle, check where the next candle closes. It must close above the hammer candle low. Trading with Japanese candlestick patterns has become increasingly popular in recent decades, as a result of the easy to glean and detailed information they provide. This makes them ideal for charts for beginners to get familiar with. https://preview.redd.it/7snzz8qdrdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=f83ff82f0980dd30c33bc6886ae7e7ed3a98b72f
More Popular Day Trading Patterns
Using Price Action
Many strategies using simple price action patterns are mistakenly thought to be too basic to yield significant profits. Yet price action strategies are often straightforward to employ and effective, making them ideal for both beginners and experienced traders. Put simply, price action is how the price is likely to respond at certain levels of resistance or support. Using price action patterns from pdfs and charts will help you identify both swings and trendlines. Whether you’re day trading stocks or forex or crypto with price patterns, these easy to follow strategies can be applied across the board.
This empty zone tells you that the price action isn’t headed anywhere. There is no clear up or down trend, the market is at a standoff. If you want big profits, avoid the dead zone completely. No indicator will help you makes thousands of pips here.
The Red Zone
This is where things start to get a little interesting. Once you’re in the red zone the end goal is in sight, and that one hundred pip winner within reach. For example, if the price hits the red zone and continues to the upside, you might want to make a buy trade. It could be giving you higher highs and an indication that it will become an uptrend. This will be likely when the sellers take hold. If the price hits the red zone and continues to the downside, a sell trade may be on the cards. You’d have new lower lows and a suggestion that it will become a downtrend.
The End Zone
This is where the magic happens. With this strategy, you want to consistently get from the red zone to the end zone. Draw rectangles on your charts like the ones found in the example. Then only trade the zones. If you draw the red zones anywhere from 10-20 pips wide, you’ll have room for the price action to do its usual retracement before heading to the downside or upside.
Outside Bar At Resistance Or Support
You’ll see a bullish outside bar if today’s low exceeded yesterdays, but the stock still rallies and closes above yesterday’s high. If the complete opposite price action took place, you’d have yourself the perfect bearish example. Unfortunately, it isn’t as straightforward as identifying an outside candlestick and then just placing a trade. It’s prudent to find an outside day after a major break of a trend. https://preview.redd.it/egb0lp6grdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0170eceea5006464e5832bc3a9083c72ee677ad
Spring At Support
The spring is when the stock tests the low of a range, but then swiftly comes back into trading zone and sets off a new trend. One common mistake traders make is waiting for the last swing low to be reached. However, as you’ve probably realized already, trading setups don’t usually meet your precise requirements so don’t stress about a few pennies. https://preview.redd.it/q82lap2hrdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e40f0bc25c2df06a1d93edb68b293c858a32592
Little To No Price Retracement
Put simply, less retracement is proof the primary trend is robust and probably going to continue. Forget about coughing up on the numerous Fibonacci retracement levels. The main thing to remember is that you want the retracement to be less than 38.2%. This means even when today’s asset tests the previous swing, you’ll have a greater chance that the breakout will either hold or continue towards the direction of the primary trend. https://preview.redd.it/ey997b2irdh31.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=c938aac51e3b3bbf1f45a11c46f4ae3dfd1b6dd4 Trading with price patterns to hand enables you to try any of these strategies. Find the one that fits in with your individual trading style. Remember, you’ll often find the best trading chart patterns aren’t overly complex, instead they paint a clear picture using minimal indicators, reducing the likelihood of mistakes and distraction.
Consider Time Frames
When you start trading with your short term price patterns pdf to hand, it’s essential you also consider time frames in your calculations. In your market, you’ll find a number of time frames simultaneously co-existing. This means you can find conflicting trends within the particular asset your trading. Your stock could be in a primary downtrend whilst also being in an intermediate short-term uptrend. Many traders make the mistake of focusing on a specific time frame and ignoring the underlying influential primary trend. Usually, the longer the time frame the more reliable the signals. When you reduce your time frames you’ll be distracted by false moves and noise. Many traders download examples of short-term price patterns but overlook the underlying primary trend, do not make this mistake. You should trade-off 15-minute charts, but utilize 60-minute charts to define the primary trend and 5-minute charts to establish the short-term trend.
Wrapping Up
Our understanding of chart patterns has come along way since the initial 1932 work of Richard Schabacker in ‘Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits’. Schabacker asserted then, ‘any general stock chart is a combination of countless different patterns and its accurate analysis depends upon constant study, long experience and knowledge of all the fine points, both technical and fundamental…’ So whilst there is an abundance of patterns out there, remember accurate analysis and sustained practice is required to fully reap their benefits. The source : https://www.daytrading.com/patterns
It is a swing trading strategy used to detect the simple moving averages in the market trend. This strategy is used for 10 to 20 days. It is used for short term trade and long term trade. 9. MACD CROSSOVERS. This strategy is used to detect the fast-moving averages in the market trend. It is also used to detect short term trade and long term trade. What Forex Pairs to Swing Trade. There are lots of forex pairs that I look through. Going through this many pairs may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. You can set up a chart for each pair in a simple trading platform like MetaTrader, and then quickly glance at each chart to see if it has a setup you trade. If it doesn’t, jump to ... This is the first video in the free Forex Swing Trading in 20 Minutes Course (links to the rest of the course are provided at the end of the article). Forex Pairs to Trade and Setting Up Charts. I currently follow 28 “normal pairs” and 19 “exotic pairs” plus oil, natural gas, silver, gold and the S&P 500. Dynamics of New York, London, and Asian trading sessions is important so a trader can pick the best currency pair to trade. Everyone is different. New York or London sessions may not be the best solution for your plans. Sometimes it may be at night. This article will help to find out when is the best time to trade. Which pairs you opt to day trade or swing trade will depend on your trading style. We'll talk a bit about that, and then discuss which forex pairs to trade. Main Takeaway Points. 1-minute chart ...
How many Forex pairs should you trade or watch? http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/forex/forex-trading.html PLEASE LIKE AND SHARE THIS VIDEO SO WE CAN D... Discover which are the best Forex pairs to trade for trend and range markets. 👇 SUBSCRIBE TO RAYNER'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👇 https://www.youtube.com/subscript... The So Darn Easy Forex™ Movement help THOUSANDS of Forex traders from all across the world achieve extraordinary results in long term and short term trades. ... How to pick forex pairs for beginners. When it comes to choosing forex pairs, you need to pick the right ones. Most people start out wanting to know the easi... #forex #forexlifestyle #forextrader Want to join the A1 Trading Team? See trades taken by our top trading analysts, join our live trading chatroom, and acces...
![[educational] Technical analysis, patterns, and charts analysis for the day trader](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/zB219ugWd47_-OG7ec740zpU0nTr_hGKiu5WvdJkM9I.jpg "[educational] Technical analysis, patterns, and charts analysis for the day trader")
