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Forex Trading in Kenya.
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.
The majority of this sub is focused on technical analysis. I regularly ridicule such "tea leaf readers" and advocate for trading based on fundamentals and economic news instead, so I figured I should take the time to write up something on how exactly you can trade economic news releases. This post is long as balls so I won't be upset if you get bored and go back to your drooping dick patterns or whatever.
How economic news is released
First, it helps to know how economic news is compiled and released. Let's take Initial Jobless Claims, the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits around the United States from Sunday through Saturday. Initial in this context means the first claim for benefits made by an individual during a particular stretch of unemployment. The Initial Jobless Claims figure appears in the Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, which compiles information from all of the per-state departments that report to the DOL during the week. A typical number is between 100k and 250k and it can vary quite significantly week-to-week. The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report contains data that lags 5 days behind. For example, the Report issued on Thursday March 26th 2020 contained data about the week ending on Saturday March 21st 2020. In the days leading up to the Report, financial companies will survey economists and run complicated mathematical models to forecast the upcoming Initial Jobless Claims figure. The results of surveyed experts is called the "consensus"; specific companies, experts, and websites will also provide their own forecasts. Different companies will release different consensuses. Usually they are pretty close (within 2-3k), but for last week's record-high Initial Jobless Claims the reported consensuses varied by up to 1M! In other words, there was essentially no consensus. The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is released each Thursday morning at exactly 8:30 AM ET. (On Thanksgiving the Report is released on Wednesday instead.) Media representatives gather at the Frances Perkins Building in Washington DC and are admitted to the "lockup" at 8:00 AM ET. In order to be admitted to the lockup you have to be a credentialed member of a media organization that has signed the DOL lockup agreement. The lockup room is small so there is a limited number of spots. No phones are allowed. Reporters bring their laptops and connect to a local network; there is a master switch on the wall that prevents/enables Internet connectivity on this network. Once the doors are closed the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is distributed, with a heading that announces it is "embargoed" (not to be released) prior to 8:30 AM. Reporters type up their analyses of the report, including extracting key figures like Initial Jobless Claims. They load their write-ups into their companies' software, which prepares to send it out as soon as Internet is enabled. At 8:30 AM the DOL representative in the room flips the wall switch and all of the laptops are connected to the Internet, releasing their write-ups to their companies and on to their companies' partners. Many of those media companies have externally accessible APIs for distributing news. Media aggregators and squawk services (like RanSquawk and TradeTheNews) subscribe to all of these different APIs and then redistribute the key economic figures from the Report to their own subscribers within one second after Internet is enabled in the DOL lockup. Some squawk services are text-based while others are audio-based. FinancialJuice.com provides a free audio squawk service; internally they have a paid subscription to a professional squawk service and they simply read out the latest headlines to their own listeners, subsidized by ads on the site. I've been using it for 4 months now and have been pretty happy. It usually lags behind the official release times by 1-2 seconds and occasionally they verbally flub the numbers or stutter and have to repeat, but you can't beat the price! Important - I’m not affiliated with FinancialJuice and I’m not advocating that you use them over any other squawk. If you use them and they misspeak a number and you lose all your money don’t blame me. If anybody has any other free alternatives please share them!
How the news affects forex markets
Institutional forex traders subscribe to these squawk services and use custom software to consume the emerging data programmatically and then automatically initiate trades based on the perceived change to the fundamentals that the figures represent. It's important to note that every institution will have "priced in" their own forecasted figures well in advance of an actual news release. Forecasts and consensuses all come out at different times in the days leading up to a news release, so by the time the news drops everybody is really only looking for an unexpected result. You can't really know what any given institution expects the value to be, but unless someone has inside information you can pretty much assume that the market has collectively priced in the experts' consensus. When the news comes out, institutions will trade based on the difference between the actual and their forecast. Sometimes the news reflects a real change to the fundamentals with an economic effect that will change the demand for a currency, like an interest rate decision. However, in the case of the Initial Jobless Claims figure, which is a backwards-looking metric, trading is really just self-fulfilling speculation that market participants will buy dollars when unemployment is low and sell dollars when unemployment is high. Generally speaking, news that reflects a real economic shift has a bigger effect than news that only matters to speculators. Massive and extremely fast news-based trades happen within tenths of a second on the ECNs on which institutional traders are participants. Over the next few seconds the resulting price changes trickle down to retail traders. Some economic news, like Non Farm Payroll Employment, has an effect that can last minutes to hours as "slow money" follows behind on the trend created by the "fast money". Other news, like Initial Jobless Claims, has a short impact that trails off within a couple minutes and is subsequently dwarfed by the usual pseudorandom movements in the market. The bigger the difference between actual and consensus, the bigger the effect on any given currency pair. Since economic news releases generally relate to a single currency, the biggest and most easily predicted effects are seen on pairs where one currency is directly effected and the other is not affected at all. Personally I trade USD/JPY because the time difference between the US and Japan ensures that no news will be coming out of Japan at the same time that economic news is being released in the US. Before deciding to trade any particular news release you should measure the historical correlation between the release (specifically, the difference between actual and consensus) and the resulting short-term change in the currency pair. Historical data for various news releases (along with historical consensus data) is readily available. You can pay to get it exported into Excel or whatever, or you can scroll through it for free on websites like TradingEconomics.com. Let's look at two examples: Initial Jobless Claims and Non Farm Payroll Employment (NFP). I collected historical consensuses and actuals for these releases from January 2018 through the present, measured the "surprise" difference for each, and then correlated that to short-term changes in USD/JPY at the time of release using 5 second candles. I omitted any releases that occurred simultaneously as another major release. For example, occasionally the monthly Initial Jobless Claims comes out at the exact same time as the monthly Balance of Trade figure, which is a more significant economic indicator and can be expected to dwarf the effect of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. USD/JPY correlation with Initial Jobless Claims (2018 - present) USD/JPY correlation with Non Farm Payrolls (2018 - present) The horizontal axes on these charts is the duration (in seconds) after the news release over which correlation was calculated. The vertical axis is the Pearson correlation coefficient: +1 means that the change in USD/JPY over that duration was perfectly linearly correlated to the "surprise" in the releases; -1 means that the change in USD/JPY was perfectly linearly correlated but in the opposite direction, and 0 means that there is no correlation at all. For Initial Jobless Claims you can see that for the first 30 seconds USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the difference between consensus and actual jobless claims. That is, fewer-than-forecast jobless claims (fewer newly unemployed people than expected) strengthens the dollar and greater-than-forecast jobless claims (more newly unemployed people than expected) weakens the dollar. Correlation then trails off and changes to a moderate/weak positive correlation. I interpret this as algorithms "buying the dip" and vice versa, but I don't know for sure. From this chart it appears that you could profit by opening a trade for 15 seconds (duration with strongest correlation) that is long USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is lower than the consensus and short USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is higher than expected. The chart for Non Farm Payroll looks very different. Correlation is positive (higher-than-expected payrolls strengthen the dollar and lower-than-expected payrolls weaken the dollar) and peaks at around 45 seconds, then slowly decreases as time goes on. This implies that price changes due to NFP are quite significant relative to background noise and "stick" even as normal fluctuations pick back up. I wanted to show an example of what the USD/JPY S5 chart looks like when an "uncontested" (no other major simultaneously news release) Initial Jobless Claims and NFP drops, but unfortunately my broker's charts only go back a week. (I can pull historical data going back years through the API but to make it into a pretty chart would be a bit of work.) If anybody can get a 5-second chart of USD/JPY at March 19, 2020, UTC 12:30 and/or at February 7, 2020, UTC 13:30 let me know and I'll add it here.
Backtesting
So without too much effort we determined that (1) USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the Initial Jobless Claims figure for the first 15 seconds after the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (when no other major news is being released) and also that (2) USD/JPY is strongly positively correlated with the Non Farms Payroll figure for the first 45 seconds after the release of the Employment Situation report. Before you can assume you can profit off the news you have to backtest and consider three important parameters. Entry speed: How quickly can you realistically enter the trade? The correlation performed above was measured from the exact moment the news was released, but realistically if you've got your finger on the trigger and your ear to the squawk it will take a few seconds to hit "Buy" or "Sell" and confirm. If 90% of the price move happens in the first second you're SOL. For back-testing purposes I assume a 5 second delay. In practice I use custom software that opens a trade with one click, and I can reliably enter a trade within 2-3 seconds after the news drops, using the FinancialJuice free squawk. Minimum surprise: Should you trade every release or can you do better by only trading those with a big enough "surprise" factor? Backtesting will tell you whether being more selective is better long-term or not. Hold time: The optimal time to hold the trade is not necessarily the same as the time of maximum correlation. That's a good starting point but it's not necessarily the best number. Backtesting each possible hold time will let you find the best one. The spread: When you're only holding a position open for 30 seconds, the spread will kill you. The correlations performed above used the midpoint price, but in reality you have to buy at the ask and sell at the bid. Brokers aren't stupid and the moment volume on the ECN jumps they will widen the spread for their retail customers. The only way to determine if the news-driven price movements reliably overcome the spread is to backtest. Stops: Personally I don't use stops, neither take-profit nor stop-loss, since I'm automatically closing the trade after a fixed (and very short) amount of time. Additionally, brokers have a minimum stop distance; the profits from scalping the news are so slim that even the nearest stops they allow will generally not get triggered. I backtested trading these two news releases (since 2018), using a 5 second entry delay, real historical spreads, and no stops, cycling through different "surprise" thresholds and hold times to find the combination that returns the highest net profit. It's important to maximize net profit, not expected value per trade, so you don't over-optimize and reduce the total number of trades taken to one single profitable trade. If you want to get fancy you can set up a custom metric that combines number of trades, expected value, and drawdown into a single score to be maximized. For the Initial Jobless Claims figure I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 25 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 30 seconds elapsed) and only trade when the difference between consensus and actual is 7k or higher. That leads to 30 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... -0.0093 yen per unit per trade. Yep, that's a loss of approx. $8.63 per lot. Disappointing right? That's the spread and that's why you have to backtest. Even though the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has a strong correlation with movement in USD/JPY, it's simply not something that a retail trader can profit from. Let's turn to the NFP. There I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 75 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 80 seconds elapsed) and trade every single NFP (no minimum "surprise" threshold). That leads to 20 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... +0.1306 yen per unit per trade. That's a profit of approx. $121.25 per lot. Not bad for 75 seconds of work! That's a +6% ROI at 50x leverage.
Make it real
If you want to do this for realsies, you need to run these numbers for all of the major economic news releases. Markit Manufacturing PMI, Factory Orders MoM, Trade Balance, PPI MoM, Export and Import Prices, Michigan Consumer Sentiment, Retail Sales MoM, Industrial Production MoM, you get the idea. You keep a list of all of the releases you want to trade, when they are released, and the ideal hold time and "surprise" threshold. A few minutes before the prescribed release time you open up your broker's software, turn on your squawk, maybe jot a few notes about consensuses and model forecasts, and get your finger on the button. At the moment you hear the release you open the trade in the correct direction, hold it (without looking at the chart!) for the required amount of time, then close it and go on with your day. Some benefits of trading this way: * Most major economic releases come out at either 8:30 AM ET or 10:00 AM ET, and then you're done for the day. * It's easily backtestable. You can look back at the numbers and see exactly what to expect your return to be. * It's fun! Packing your trading into 30 seconds and knowing that institutions are moving billions of dollars around as fast as they can based on the exact same news you just read is thrilling. * You can wow your friends by saying things like "The St. Louis Fed had some interesting remarks on consumer spending in the latest Beige Book." * No crayons involved. Some downsides: * It's tricky to be fast enough without writing custom software. Some broker software is very slow and requires multiple dialog boxes before a position is opened, which won't cut it. * The profits are very slim, you're not going to impress your instagram followers to join your expensive trade copying service with your 30-second twice-weekly trades. * Any friends you might wow with your boring-ass economic talking points are themselves the most boring people in the world. I hope you enjoyed this long as fuck post and you give trading economic news a try!
I wanted to write a quick post in answer to the people who routinely make claims I have a history of stealing from people in my previous company and base this upon a blog they read. If you would like to discuss this further, please make a post and link it to me to engage on. I will do so as long as we deal with the facts of how a PAMM company really works. I won't engage in circular debates where the essential point is, "I don't believe you". You don't have to - that's not how any of this works. Just fact check.
Anti-SEO:
I want to avoid Google ranking on this post. Although for my personal 'PR' it would be beneficial to aim to rank something answering claims, at some points in this some others involved in the company will not really come over in the best light. I assume it's likely these people are still involved things (Not spoke with them for 5 yrs) - It'd be unfair to rank bad PR on them. The failure of the company was squarely due to me. Anything anyone else did either would not have happened or not have mattered if I'd done better. I do not want anything I do now to further hinder anyone. So I will refer to names by only one letter (or number if applicable).
Ponzi Claims:
I found it strange at the time this ended up centred around the ponzi scheme side of things. There was a reasonable question to be asked and answered as to if it was a pyramid scheme. Were people signing up just to sign people up, or was there a core product of fair market value. The services sold I'd previously ran at the same sort of price point direct to market - so I felt on fairly good ground on that. Initially I's actually been a bit excited initially, because I was a reader of the blog in question and I liked the work they'd done on pyramid schemes. I thought I'd be able to either validate I was doing things right, or learn how I should be doing them better. I never thought the ponzi side of it would take any more than a few minutes to clear up. But that was not so ... A ponzi scheme was to all intents and purposes impossible. All of our business was done via three different brokers and all of our results publicly tracked with close to real time updates for marketing purposes. Of the three brokers we were using, two of them had good regulation. An off-shore broker had to be used for US clients, so this is the only one with any sort of question mark. All of our results over all the brokers were almost identical (Some execution/costs variance). The two regulated brokers were under different regulators. Most, if not all, the brokers held clients funds in segregated accounts. All brokers would have to have been fully complicit in the scam - and it costs more to get regulated than there was to steal. Logically, it could not have been so. We were using a PAMM model. This works by the client opening a brokerage account and signing a LPoA to allow trades to be copied onto their account. The LPoA grants the company no access to the funds. Money laundering laws also dictate the funds can only be redeemed to same source they were funded. PAMMs are big business. Protection of all parties is built into it, it's a well trusted model. This should have taken no less than 5 minutes to self verify. It could not have been a ponzi.
£50,000 Fine:
That happened. Turns out if you set up a PAMM in the Netherlands and then let a bunch of people refer investment to it this is classed as running a ... I can't remember exactly and even at the time it was in Dutch so I didn't personally read it all. The underlying problem was not the model in any way. We were told at the time we basically jut had to pay £2,000 for each country we did business in. We were global. At this time the company had neither the money to do that, or pay the fine they gave us for not having the money to do that. My mistaken assumption was that since when you run a PAMM you are basically piggybacking off the broker's licence, all was well and good. This was true - but the problem was sourcing. Paying people to refer investment was what we were fined for when you get right down to it.
$180,000 Stolen:
This was just a headline. In many ways it's misleading. Firstly, nothing was stolen or even taken. It was lost or given away to clients who'd lost in the PAMMs that went bad. All the money lost was lost trying to get enough money to make good all the PAMMs. So it was not stolen, and there is nothing in anyway to imply that's a suitable word to use. In the blog, no explanation of that is offered. What seems to be inferred is that this was commissions due out to clients that the company kept. Even outside the above mentioned this would be wrong. All affiliates were paid. You will not find a single one who says they were not. Further to that, of all the funds invested into the company (We'll call the company '5') somewhere in the 60 - 70% range was sourced directly by me. Other funds were sourced by my co-founder. Investments were made through passive advertising without them being attributed to a refer. All in all, assuming we did not pay the affiliates and we had this much, $18,000 would be the number. Of the $180,000 somewhere a bit over $100,000 would have been mine. I never took that, and could not have "Stolen" it. I don't see the point in getting super technical on everything by going through how, but the number also probably wasn't $180,000. I think this was an overestimate made in a throw away comment by my co-founder (We'll call her 'M') who was (Justifiably) extremely angry at me at the time she came up with the number and added it in a post (Of this multi paragraph post, this one line and one number was taken - if memory servers, all context was left out when the blogger cited this as stolen. Which would make sense. The post was berating me for losing the money. That didn't fit the narrative.
What Backs the Story?
Of all of the claims of wrongdoing (Apart from the fine, which is documented and true) - there is no evidence proposed for any of the claims made. All of it hinges on a story told to the blogger by one person, who was another of my co-founders 'We'll call her 'E'. E was either a late teenager or very early 20s at the time. In the founding of 5, E was essential. Before 5 I'd been running a service selling trading signals and selling them at $5 a week subscription. I was generating a lot of business (Working all day, every day and having fun with it. Like I did here for a while, but at that time I really was marketing). 5 - 10 people a day could be signing up. I knew nothing at all about how to structure an online business. No listing of new clients to send emails. Nothing about making membership sites with password access etc. I was working off a Wix site I made myself with no on-boarding system in place. The volume of people joining was crushing me. I could not process them and was getting a lot of PayPal disputes. I wanted to send them the stuff. Just did not have the process to ensure this was being done. E stepped in and saved me on that. She made original 5 website (On Wordpress, I believe it was later upgraded to something else). Set up memberships payments. Automated listing. Also she suggested changing the name to what the company became. E made the work I was doing work. After that, she had varying performance. Her gripe in the blog is she was not paid for helping to found the company. Left out of this is the fact she was not paid because she was head of marketing and we were not getting enough clients. Almost all of them coming from me hitting the DMs and signing people up the old fashioned way. On results of trading, everything was going well (and this was my area). Things were going so well people legit through it must be a ponzi! But we did not have in-flow of clients. On this I again blame myself. I sort of assumed this would all work itself out and did not put focus on fixing problems before they became problems. There was a lot of pressure on everyone. E got into a new romantic relationship. I think she was heavily influenced by this person (I found E to be good hearted on the whole). E and M started to get along less and less. Then E and M seemed to hate each other. It all seemed to come from nowhere, but it quickly got to the point me and M felt it was not working with E, and she thought the same. Pretty much everything is based upon the story told to the blogger by E. As I've said before I found her to be a good heart overall and believe she was influenced into doing what she did, and would not have done it on her own gumption. Therefore I won't rip into her; but if you're reading, 'E' (Won't be lol) - that was a bit naughty, wasn't it? Little 'Economic with the truth'.
Why would the blogger post such big claims with no evidence?
People should ask themselves this on the first read through of the blog, to be fair. If you're a single source reporting on a story - tell how you know it's true. I think this mainly came down to revenge. After the ponzi thing I wrote blog line by line ripping the initial blog to bits. It was written in a very cheeky sort of tone, and what I was saying was right. He then played, "My blog's bigger than your blog" , on which he was right. If you think there is some smoking gun here in any way, just email the blogger and ask them how they know. What evidence were they ever given any money was stolen. There was none.
Money taken from the company:
In it's sad and drawn out end, cash on hand and assets within the company got down to around $10,000 and we were due out over 10* this to clients who I wanted to pay back. I was not bringing in new business (It seemed unethical to do until I fixed old problems - this was a miscalculation. No business was the big problem) and there was the 50K fine. The company was essentially bankrupt. I wanted to use the remaining 10K to have one last ditch effort to re-coup losses, or randomly select clients to pay the 10K to. M didn't. At this time we fell out (Forever). I have no idea what happened to that 10K. I think M probably kept it. At the time I was livid about that - but to be honest, after all the work she did she deserved something. Losing was not her fault. To 'M' if you're reading (Won't be), I'm sorry.
What went wrong?
I was not good enough. When I got ahead I thought I was coasting. I came from a background of having nothing and as soon as I started to make a few grand I assumed I was gliding to being a millionaire. I stopped learning. Stopped improving. I never watered what I planted, and it withered and died. I fail. Turns out you can not coast up a learning curve without ending up on your arse.
COSS exchange was taken offline on January 7th 2020 with immediate notice to all users. The plan was to begin migration to a white label platform after proceeding with account-level snapshots. The migration was halted mid-way as COSS entered and finalised acquisition negotiations, followed by audits of the existing technology, user data and wallets. With the audits completed, the new management decided to do away with the old exchange platform and introduce a much more advanced engine for its users. This is the platform which goes online this week with many added features including derivatives with up to 100x leverage, as well as an Exchange Swap Engine for instant conversions.
New Management
We apologise for the downtime — unconditionally.
The decision to shut down the exchange was not in our control and we, unfortunately, were handed over a shut exchange. We have done our best to re-enable the exchange for all users quickly and assure you that such missteps will be avoided at all costs in the future. The new COSS is a group of investors, professional traders, and financial technology specialists. Who strongly believes in the original vision of COSS — a one-stop platform for modern digital assets whose success is dependent on and shared with all its users — a unique approach to decentralised finance.
The idea is in line with the original concept of creating a shared ‘digital economy’ instead of mirroring a system where the traditional institutional lenders and service providers benefit while the people pay fees to use and access their own assets.
The investment group has appointed a board of directors and is currently assessing nominations for the role of CEO. The board will leave the day-to-day operations to the CEO and their team with a clear mandate — to restore and build COSS the brand for success. Rune and the previous technology, operations and marketing teams will no longer be involved with COSS. We appreciate their work in the past and wish them all the best for future endeavours. Satyarth will continue to remain on board with us and support the community management, marketing and PR team.
New Technology Partner
The new management has carefully evaluated several options to ensure COSS has a stable, scalable and continuously improving technology platform. We have partnered with XHUB — a financial and trading technology company. The XHUB team has vast experience in working with brokers, hedge funds, and proprietary trading firms. XHUB maintains one of the largest cryptocurrency liquidity and order routing systems in the industry, and a trading platform which has been exclusively and extensively used in-house by large trading firms. The XHUB technology team will extend its support to COSS API consumers and encourage them to keep building trading applications for the community. Consumers will have access to extensive historical and real-time market data which will allow them to create advanced strategies supported by back-testing.
Roadmap
A general roadmap of the board’s vision for the immediate future is included below. We remain focused on ensuring that COSS provides a reliable trading platform for retail and professional traders alike.
Q1–2020
Exchange Relaunch
COSS will relaunch the exchange platform and enable full trading on supported pairs
Current COSS account holders will be sent new login credentials via email and an invitation to begin trading
COS holders will be allocated 100% of the fees generated by the exchange until the FSA dashboard is completed and launched
Balance transfers from previous exchange platform are initiated by the account login. This begins the final-phase of the account audit.
Withdrawal of audited portfolios / balances will be available within 48 hrs of the account portfolio transfer
API Release
REST and Websocket access to market data
REST access to account and trade endpoints
Websocket access to account end points
FIX Engine quote and trade functional release
Mobile Trading App (iOS, Android)
Beta release of the full-featured mobile app
Full public launch of the trading app
Listing Policy Release
Compliant with all regulatory requirements
API Community Development
GitHub community to showcase public projects
Technical support
Budget allocated for development competitions
Q2–2020
Mobile Wallet App (v2) (iOS, Android)
Release of the full-featured wallet/payment and proximity peer to peer payment app
Metaquotes MT5
Release full scale derivative trading platform for Windows, iOS and Android
Enabling:
Cryptocurrency arbitrage between popular exchanges
Forex, Commodities and Indices with institutional enterprise grade liquidity
Expert Advisors, MQL5, back testing and bot trading
Regulatory Licensing
Leverage trading will be reduced as the final step for licensing
Vendor and Payments API
Release of web and mobile payment processing for merchants
Roadmap will be updated in the first and third quarter every year, and will cover plans for that period. Relaunch FAQ The exchange will be operational on 4th March, 2020. To adhere to existing anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and know your customer regulations, existing users will need to complete level-1 KYC. This can be done with a single government-issued photo identity document. Final phase account audit clearance is subject to KYC approval. COS token trading will be available on the COS_USD pair. More pairs will be added as trading activity improves. Maker and taker fees will be set at 0.05% and 0.1% respectively. Trading fee discount and negative maker fees will be discontinued. An updated COS holding based fee tier system may be introduced in the future. The Fee Split Allocation (FSA) dashboard is under development. However, FSA will be tracked and accrue from day one. COS held in private wallets will need to be re-identified and linked to your new user accounts once the dashboard is launched. We will initiate a delisting procedure for some assets. A complete list of pairs and the withdrawal process for the same will be released at a later date. Crypto deposits will remain at 0 fees. A fee schedule for crypto withdrawals will be published on the website. Fiat deposits will be available via Epay and transfers from Epay wallet to COSS will be at 0 fees. Deposits through credit and debit cards will be introduced at 4% fees. We will add more fiat options including withdrawals in the coming weeks. Thank you for all your support and feedback. We are expecting a rush to access COSS accounts and will complete verification for all applicants as quickly as possible. We apologise for any unforeseen delays during the process. You can reach us on [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) in case you require any further assistance.
T3 Newsbeat Live is run by Mark Melnick, a 20-year veteran trader from New York. According to him, he made his first million at the age of 19 during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. He claims that his trading room is the fastest growing trading room at T3 and also the Wall Street’s #1 trading room. You can see this in the description of his videos on Youtube. He is a big proponent of reaching the highest win rate possible in trading. He openly shares some of his trading strategies in free videos and claims that some of his strategies are batting over 70% or even 80 %. He also often says that some of the members enjoy a win rate over 90% using his strategies. I will let you be the judge of this. Self-Promotion He makes a lot of videos to attract new people into his trading room. His daily videos are uploaded on Facebook and Youtube almost daily even on Weekends (mostly excluding Friday evening & Saturdays). In so many videos you’d hear him talking about how his trading room has an edge over other trading rooms while bashing other trading rooms as a whole. He often talks about how his trading room bought stocks/options at the near bottom or shorted at the near top using his “algorithmic analysis” which can be applied to all markets (stocks, future, forex, crypto). Piques your curiosity, right? In fact, that’s how I got to give his trading room a try. “Who in the hell wouldn’t want to catch the top & bottom in the markets, right?” So, you would think people in his room and himself are making a killing using his algorithmic analysis? Not so fast… (in fact, his algorithmic analysis is just drawing trendlines and identifying the most probable support and resistance) When it works (of course, nothing works 100% of the time), you are able to catch just few cents off the top and bottom when it works if you follow his trade. However, you have no idea how long you’d have to hold your position. Mark doesn’t know either. So, he usually goes for nickels and dimes and rarely holds a position longer than 5 minutes. Even if he’s good at picking bottoms and tops, you’d often risk more than nickels and dimes just to make nickels and dimes. Make sense, right? ……. ……. ……. Also, because he gets out of his positions fast, he misses out on riding some potentially big trades. Oh, how I wish stay in that position a bit longer. He doesn’t say but one can surmise that he often leave too much on the table. Of course, it’s important to take your profit fast when you scalp but you consistently leave too much on the table like he does, one has to wonder if he has any system for taking profits (otherwise, it’s all discretionary guessing). This type of bottom/top picking is not his main strategy, though. The strategy that makes him the most amount of money might surprise you. I will get to this later. How Mark Trades (Mark’s Trading Setups and Strategies) Mainly, he scans the market in the morning for earnings reports, analysts’ upgrades/downgrades and other catalysts that have potential to make moves in the market. He openly shares his mockery or insult of analysts, calling certain analysts “idiots” or “imbeciles”. He puts on his first trade(s) early in the morning (from 9:30AM to 10:00AM Eastern Standard Time) when the market move is the most volatile. Some of his strategies use market order during this period of volatile time using options. You can see why this can be very risky and especially on thinly traded options with side spread. He does point out this but sometimes you hear people in the room stuck in an options position that they can’t get out. Just like his trades from calling the top/bottom of a stock, he gets in and gets out of a position within minutes if not seconds while going for nickels and dimes while staring at 1minute and 5-minutes charts. That applies to most, if not all of his strategies. (Yes, sometimes he does catch bigger moves than nickels and dimes.) When you trade during the most volatile time in the morning, you’re subjected to wild moves in both directions. If you’re overly prudent or inexperienced in trading, your stop (unless very wide), has a very high chance of hitting. A lot of times it might stop you out and go in the direction that you predicted. So, when you’ve been trading during this time, you’d probably don’t set a stoploss order or a hard stop to avoid getting fleeced. You do have to be proactive at cutting your loss as quickly as possible. Otherwise you’d find yourself scrambling to get out your position while the bid keeps dropping. I have to say that Mark is very cautious and he does get out of trades very fast if he has doubt. A lot of times he lets out exhausting, heavy sighs and even murmurs some swear words when things don’t seem to go the way he wants in a trade. Besides calling certain analysts, “imbeciles” and “idiots”, this is quite unprofessional but no one in the room has the gut to point things out like this. The irony is that he is the “head of trading psychology” at T3 and it doesn’t seem like that he doesn’t have much control over his trading psychology and let alone his emotion. People in trading chatrooms, like a herd of sheep, as a whole exhibit herd mentality. Even in an online chatroom, you don’t often see someone ruffling feathers and say what they really want to say. This is probably because of the certain amount of people believing whatever he says without questioning the validity and quality of his comments. He has several strategies and according to him all of them have win rate over %70. However, he also comes up with new strategies as often as every month. He either comes up with new strategy or tweaks his existing strategies. According to him, the reason is that the market is always evolving and you need to constantly adapt yourself to the ever-changing market environment. What do you think? Does this sound like someone with an edge? And for someone who scalps for nickels and dimes, he claims to have the highest Sharpe Ratio that he has ever seen in the industry. I’m NOT making this up. He often utters remarks like “My Sharpe Ratio is one of the highest I’ve seen in my twenty-year trading career.”, “I want to create a of traders with a very high Sharpe Ratio. How can you achieve a high Sharpe Ratio when you scalp all the time? And let’s not even talk about commissions generated from frequent scalping. Who cares about commissions when you can be a scalper with high Sharpe Ratio? Now, I want to talk about something controversial about his most profitable strategy. Chatters According to him, he makes the most amount of money using what he calls “Chatters”. He admits he bets on this kind of trades heavily. His chatter trades are based on the “newsflow” of big funds making a move in certain stocks and piggybacking on the same trade before others catch on. No one knows how he exactly gets his “newsflow” and he doesn’t give a straight answer when asked. Maybe he pays a lot for this kind of information or maybe it’s given to him for free. Who knows? But it makes sense. The name of the room is Newsbeat Live. Without this the name wouldn’t be the same. This is probably the only real edge that he has and it’s understandable that he doesn’t want to reveal how he get this kind of newsflow and from where. By joining his trading room he’ll make a callout on these trades for you to take advantage of. In order to do this kind of trade, you have to be very quick on your trigger finger. Almost always the initial move is done within a couple of minutes, if not seconds. If you get in late, you find yourself a sucker buying at or near the top. Also, because you want to get in as soon as you hear his “chatter” announcements, he advised people to get in within 5 seconds of each chatter announcement and use market order to get in. He said that if he had a small account, he’d bet 100% on this kind of “high-octane” chatter trades and get in and get out fast for “easy” money. This was how chatter trades were done …Until one they when many people got burned badly. Back in September or October of 2019, a lot of people in the room lost a lot money because they market ordered call options contracts on a chatter trade. The spread on that trade was something like BID: 0.5 ASK: 5.00 few seconds after he announced it. I didn’t take that trade. No way, I’m going to buy something that has a spread like that. If you’ve been trading options you know that this kind of spread can happen. Many people that day in the room marketed-in on the trade, taking the offer at ASK. They found themselves buying at $5.0 per contract when someone probably bought the same contract at $0.40 or $0.50 just few seconds ago. Someone walked away with decent profits on that trade. This was the biggest trading chatroom fiasco I’ve ever seen. People in the room grieving and throwing numbers of how much they had just lost. 10K, 20K, 30K and even $60K. Could it be also that someone who lost more and didn’t want to talk about it because it’d hurt too much? And how embarrassing to talk about such a loss. I give credit to people who spoke up about it. People were obviously distressed and what did Mr. Mark Melnick do at this moment? Initially, he didn’t say much. But what he said he was going to walk away from the trading desk to clear his mind. It took a while for him to come back and he mentioned that it hurt him a lot that people lost a lot of money and encouraged people not to hesitate to contact him. I don’t think he ever said anything about that he made a mistake insinuating to load up on chatter trades. No apology since everyone who took the trade did it at their own risk. He advised people to reach out to their broker and do whatever it takes to get their trades annulled because the market makers in that trades were despicable crooks and evil. But let’s get one thing clear. Perhaps the cold hard truth. Since Mark is the one who announces chatter trades. he basically frontruns everyone who gets in on these trades after him. There were times when he doesn’t take his own chatter trades and lets the room have it. But when he does, it’s a guarantee win for him. He has some sycophantic followers in his trading room and these people are always hungry for chatter plays. I can imagine drooling over the idea of next chatter trades. It’s human to naturally seek the least path of resistance and this type of trade requires no skill but having fast trigger finger and a platform that allows fast execution. By taking his chatter trades, you are most likely to make money as long as you act fast to get in and get out. The thing is, you don’t know when it’s exactly the next chatter trade is going to happen. If you take a bathroom break, you just miss it. If you take a phone call or answer a door bell, you just missed it. So, it requires you to be glued to your monitor(s) if you want to make the most of your subscription. So, we went over Mark’s most profitable strategy. But wait we haven’t yet to talk about his overnight swing trades. Mark’s Swing Trades His overnight swing trades jokes. Yes, jokes. A lot of his overnight trades are done just before earnings announcements when implied volatility is at the highest. You’ve ever bought a call option just before earnings, predicted the right direction but only to find out that you still lost money next morning? This is because of the implied volatility crush post earnings. A lot of people new to options don’t know this and get taken advantage by veterans this way. I don’t know if Mark knows or not but I witnessed him buying options this way. I think he understand the concept of implied volatility but why he gets on such trades is a mystery. I haven’t exactly checked the result of all of his swing trades but I wouldn’t be surprised if people lost more money following his swing trades than anything in the room. Final Word Mark offers “free-consultation” on the phone for people who struggle in their trading. He said that he takes a lot of phone calls but often you’d get the feeling that he is distracted, unable to give an undivided attention for his consultation. “How would you like to get on a free consultation with a millionaire scalper who can take your trading to the next level?” Appealing isn’t it? But would you want to get on the phone with someone who is going to give a consultation, even if he or she is distracted? Oh, it’s a free consultation. Ok, why not? What do I got to lose? In his videos, you’d hear him saying that he cares for everyone in his trading room and considers them as part of his family. And he runs the trading room out of his good heart and intention more than making money. Besides he says that he makes more money from his trading than running the room. My suggestion is that you have a look and you’d be the judge. He does hold “open house” for his trading room from time to time. Also, I believe that if you try his trading room for the first time, you try it for a month for about $50. As for me, he’s just another front runner using his trading room to profit with a bad sense of humor and exaggeration that make you cringe.
Preparing for the Impulse - GBPUSD, Traps to Expect and Trades to Make
Part One Perquisite Posts; https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/clbxk2/shorting_noobs_common_trend_following_mistakes_im/ https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/clx0v9/profiting_in_trends_planning_for_the_impulsive/ https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/ctyr3p/gbpusd_shaping_up_for_good_sell_but_not_quite_yet/ It will benefit your understanding of this to take some time to read through at least all of these post, and also my other ones. Over the last weeks I've introduced some concepts I think are useful, demonstrated how a person could use them to make profit and presented for consideration ways you can go and test if what I am saying is true in your trading. Now I am going to start to bring this all together to show you how a person can plan well ahead and be well prepared to profit in Forex. Three weeks ago I gave a swing analysis on GBPUSD (as part of speaking about a broader idea of trend following). It said this. https://preview.redd.it/q60ia0ophhi31.png?width=691&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf7495e47ea212e5f094bae232f49d700805579a Source https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/clbxk2/shorting_noobs_common_trend_following_mistakes_im/ Long term bearish picture here of 1.190. An area I expect us to have a big move in possibly feature a 100 plus pip candle (dare I speculate ... news event, or random fundamental). We got into 1.199s, and then price started to stall. I then explain by "ping swing" theory and pointed out all the indicators this ping swing was coming. https://preview.redd.it/wsdjmcb9ihi31.png?width=685&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aad9d994b85d076397a6f07493a0d174012d144 https://preview.redd.it/oe7823ncihi31.png?width=756&format=png&auto=webp&s=91dd90e89bf8d3514e63fe0abd6ac6ecdeba26d1 When explaining what the ping swing was all about, I said it set up the really big move in the other direction. The breakout. What I more commonly refer to as the impulse leg. https://preview.redd.it/bqd1nzmpihi31.png?width=702&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5a20bc5373448056b37b2fc155c7889ce7a3739 Source https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/clx0v9/profiting_in_trends_planning_for_the_impulsive/ So based upon all of these factors I am prepared to trade a move that may be surprisingly strong from a really specific area (will get into trades later). Everything in my analysis form and strategies design allow me to be ready and position my trades to profit from some wild event there may be in the coming week or two weeks (maybe three ... four, eeek. I'm hedging). Now I'm not saying I know there is going to be a certain type of Brexit news ... I do not care. I'm not saying we should think it's very possible the FOMC spikes high and then fucking crashes (surely something to do with that illusive "pricing in" thing) ... I do not care. I am not predicting these fundamental events. What I am saying is based upon the information I have shared with you so far, a person can design a trade plan that would position them for this sort of price action, and this sort of price action almost always happens when there's a news event. Got that? Think it's very possible there is a huge swing coming, entirely unrelated to any news events that may happen in the future that I could not know about now. What sort of price action could we expect ... ? We already have the trade plan for that last week. https://preview.redd.it/ymsbcbc7khi31.png?width=723&format=png&auto=webp&s=77468b23e015a36b2fffc693f7a899facd7b82e1 Source https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/ctyr3p/gbpusd_shaping_up_for_good_sell_but_not_quite_yet/ GBPUSD closed near the high on some of my brokers but crashed 30 pips in the last minute of the day on another, and this probably means it's opening up gap low. Exactly what we'd expect. Why? https://preview.redd.it/uai4g2blkhi31.png?width=893&format=png&auto=webp&s=df1c62af4605534a942753a5a311c28f8ae6b1ac Do this experiment, find this double top pattern. Find the "confirmation" move I explained, and then honestly think where you'd set a stop "safe above the highs" here. Count how many pips it went past that. Probably about 5 - 7 and then crashed. That's the trap. Lays the next trap. For this let's recap the traps I've shown you and see where we are in the cycle of possible mistakes. https://preview.redd.it/2mkipd82lhi31.png?width=711&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc48f68d785cef1a46c3d4e96fbe675c2cf056dd Last week I said we were at the transition from black to blue. Then "the news" made that happen. Then late in the week I said look for spike out trend continuations. All this happened. So selling into that event was either devastatingly unlucky, there was nothing you can do about it and it is what it is if it happens again (frequently). Or, it was selling mistake #2 (shown as 4 here near the low) https://preview.redd.it/4xrmb3pilhi31.png?width=717&format=png&auto=webp&s=825bc81b68fc5a465b65d87634f7888a4be87c97 What do we have after selling mistake number #2. Selling mistake number #3 (no need to re-invest the wheel). #3 is a 5 (just to be confusing), and this is "deep correction" selling mistake. Would you think it would be fair to agree anyone selling the double top like move we've discussed here would have made the mistake of thinking a deep correction was a trend continuation? People will have. They do every cycle. This is why I can "predict" it. Or, it's lucky and there's no way you can know. Pick your flavor. Mistake #4 . Single candle price action. In this case I am forecasting this to be the crash pre-close (on some brokers) or the gap down (a gap is just a big swing). This looks like the real deal on the trend continuation. People will sell into this early in the week. It may be in the form of a big gap down, it making it's low early in the week and then people sell the gap fill (or part retrace). Anyway, the better trade is on the other side of this. We have not yet hit the 61.8 fib and this sort of sell off would be a "known" seller trap. #5 tends to form when price first hits the 61.8, There is an immediate and dramatic sell off. Then there is a spike out of the 61.8 and the real trend move begins. We should watch for this sort of action Tue/Wed and should expect to be seeing it (very specifically) close to 1.2343. Which is no surprise to see shaping up since this specific PA is what I started speaking about when it was at the lows. https://preview.redd.it/frstw4dinhi31.png?width=609&format=png&auto=webp&s=97b635c00a004352b990e322524d48400b809888 So if we see these further confirms; 1 - Price spikes/gaps down and then returns aggressively to the high 2 - Price hits 61.8 and falls quickly 3 - These things happen in the immediate foreshadow of a news event (FOMC?) All of these things would be consistent with things that happen before the following scenario: 1 - News is released. It's unexpected. Either the number is off, it was random (tweet etc) or the market just moved totally different from how it would be expected to (cue theories to fill gaps). 2 - Price moves rapidly up. It makes a "new breakout" of a "key level", and then capitulates. 100 + pips can be moved in very short periods of time. 3 - After this move has happened, there is a sharp low made and we uptrend for the next few weeks. I am not "predicting the future", but this is a viable trade plan for the coming week(s). We sell GBPUSD 1.2340 area. Stop 1.2410 or so. We target 1.1900. Then we look for the market to make a low (after a very volatile fall) in the 1.1850 sort of area. As a rule of thumb (and I am not being flippant, this is true), if you see people in forums asking what just happened, that will probably be your cue to go and find this trade on your chart. This is a regular indicator. I think if this is to happen this week, the high will be made Wed/Thurs and crash late week. If it's not to happen this week, a ranging week may be ahead. Even a couple weeks. These would not invalidate the analysis, for the market to range a few weeks to form a "strong high" and then do this take out move I've described is also something to be expected. I would be surprised to not see GBPUSD drop 300 pip from the high in coming month. Prepare for the Impulse!
Hi all! Recently we had a bunch of great questions that were asked in the Reddit, right over here: https://www.reddit.com/genesisvision/comments/bbtolk/straight_questions_to_the_gv_team_ten_so_fa We took some time to prepare a reply and here it is! Hello. I am Ruslan Kamenskiy, the person responsible for the GV products in our team. Thank you for the many questions. I will try to answer them as fully as possible, but before answering, I would like to make a small introduction so that members of the community understand more why things are happening anyway. - Development of any project is always a series of trade-offs. Resources are always limited and the need to choose where to send them is always present. Our task is to distribute our resources optimally considering short-term missions and long-term objectives. - We have a very active and large community. It consists of many different representatives. Everyone has their own needs, expectations, problems and pains. And often in some decisions, you need to look for a middle ground, and you can not please everyone. Investors want maximum security, minimum commissions and maximum profits. Managers want huge investments, minimum responsibility and maximum opportunities. Brokers and exchanges want maximum trading volumes from us. And many requirements of different market participants contradict each other. Therefore, we must always look for optimal solutions. - As I said, we have a vast and active community. And as a result, we have a tremendous amount of feedback and suggestions. Every day they come to us from all channels (feedback portal, social networks, Reddit, support mail, and even private messages in telegram). Right now in our task tracker in backlog 160 feedbacks are hanging for implementation. We appreciate the feedback of our users, but unfortunately, due to limited resources, we cannot implement everything at the same time, so we prioritise requests and suggestions. It is excruciating for us to receive messages from our users stating "I suggested this a month ago, but this has not been implemented yet," but we hope for understanding. We are trying. - Investors want the maximum possible profit with minimal risk. But this is impossible. If we go the route of the maximum of investors' safety (for example, we prohibit trading with leverage, we make maximum stop-outs, etc.), this will minimise the potential investor's profit and make the platform uninteresting for managers. We try to find the right balance between protecting investors from rogue managers and allowing investors to make informed on their decisions based on the analytical tools we provide to create transparency in the managers’ trading strategies. However, we do not believe that restricting managers too much is the best path forward for the ecosystem. We view our job as creating a fully transparent system that allows participants to make highly educated decisions => it is then up to them to take ownership of said decision. - Almost every day we get the questions "When exactly this will be." We have internal deadlines for the implementation of various functions, but to make public statements about the exact date of the implementation of some functionality is not always the best idea, because there are many factors affecting the real state of affairs. And the delay, even for a couple of hours, is always perceived by the community as extremely negative. But we do not refuse to share information about our current work and immediate plans. Why do you allow numerous programs by the same manager? Do you intend to curtail it to a limited number? If yes, how many? When will you implement? Allowing managers to have several programs is necessary for the following reasons:
A trader may have several different trading strategies.
A trader can trade in different markets/exchanges.
A manager's account can not only represent a single person but a whole fund with many traders.
All information on the number and performance of all programs is public and available to investors. Do you intend to pose restrictions on entry and success fees to prevent exploitative fees? If yes, what restrictions and when will you implement? Restrictions on maximum fees are already present. At the same time, this information is available in the program details, which allows the investor to evaluate all the sizes of the commissions before making a decision on investing. Additionally, in order to avoid exploitative fees, the entry fee is charged only for programs that have reached level 3. All this together provides, in our opinion, a fairly transparent system of commissions, in which the investor has all the necessary information to make an educated decision. However, if you have any specific constructive suggestions for improving the system, we are always happy to listen and take them into account. Do you intend to start adopting some form of intervention when a trader goes on downward money losing spiral? Some form of trading floor manager action after x% losses? If yes, how and when? If not, why not? We have introduced the Stop-out functionality, just designed to limit the loss of investors. This is an industry standard solution that helps solve the problem described. Do you intend to impose a cool-down time limit or even fee increase limit to prevent managers to close a program and immediately reopen another one? If yes, what/when will you implement? Managers close and open new programs for various reasons, which is a normal workflow, and we do not want to artificially limit them in this. At the same time, information about the number of manager’s programs, as well as their performance, is public and available to investors for analysis. This information, in our opinion, should be sufficient to determine how honest a particular manager acts. Do you intend to implement some form of deletion? In which way? When? The level system is currently being analyzed and re-thought. At the same time, our community takes an active part in this process. Actual information can be obtained in our telegram (work on this is going right now). Do you intend to return entree fees when a program that is announced for a period of X days terminates the program before the end of the period? When? Entry fee is charged starting from 3rd level programs. This means that this is not a new program, but already having a certain history of successful trading. However, your proposal is absolutely reasonable, and in some situations, returning an entry fee may be a fair decision. We are currently working on this issue and are considering how to improve the current situation. Do you intend to implement a policy so that entry fees only vest if the manager makes more profit, net of success fees, than what was charged in the entry fee? When? If you think about it, then this is quite a delicate issue, and we cannot count everything only by profit. I will give a specific example - in the first case, the investor invests 1 BTC in the Forex program, according to the results of the period, the manager does not show a substantial profit (say, he does not cover the entry fee minus the success fee), but during this time the whole crypto market has fallen by 50% (and we all know that this happens). Formally, the conditions for obtaining the entry fee you described are not met, but the manager has helped the investor save (and even multiply) his BTC holdings. Here’s another situation - the investor invests the same 1 BTC in the ETH program, the manager shows a profit sufficient to pay the entry fee according to your policy, but due to a significant drop in the cost of the ETH, the investor is still in the red. So who of these managers really deserves the entry fee? We believe both. Entry Fee is available to programs only from level 3, which means that the manager has successful trading experience, although even with many programs this value is set to zero. A performance-based fee is a success fee, and the entry fee, taking into account all factors, is wiser to leave unconditional, in order to observe the interests of all categories of users. Do you intend to review the way the GVT token is used in the platform to actually create demand for the token? What are the ideas that you have recently been discussing? When are any of those ideas likely to be implemented? Yes, we are constantly working on this issue. Some ideas have been described in recent blog posts (GVT burning, profit distribution in GVT, payment of a subscription for copying in GVT) Nowadays, while the platform have programs with not too much capital, the amount of GVT required to get a discount does not make economic sense. Would you consider a temporary reduction in the number of GVT one needs to hold to get discounts on fees, in the same vein that Binance had very friendly reduced fees in its first year? We have a discount for GVT holders selling on GM in the same way asBinance has discounts for holding BNB on their exchange. And you need to understand that Binance had very friendly fees during a completely different state of the crypto market. The capitalization of all cryptocurrency grew and was much easier to keep them low then it is now. But we are working in this direction. We already know you are planning a new level system. What are some additional concrete investor protection actions the GV team plans to implement? When can we expect them to be implemented? The system of levels is now being revised with the participation of the community. Actual information can be obtained in our telegram (i.e., work on this is underway right now) Will you rethink the functionality and design of the reinvestment toggle, and add clear labels so that users do not have their money tied up in funds that they do not wish to invest in? If yes, when? The reinvest button has already been renamed to “Reinvest profit” for better understanding. When and how will the UI be revamped (The dashboard, so it is clearer how investments are performing; More filters; Display of overall manager performance across all their programs)? Regarding the question “how”, I can not answer shortly. For the answer, you would need to write a whole article, but you can be sure that we are constantly working on improving the UI based on your feedback. If you have been following the development of the platform for a long time, you might notice that with each major update, the UI changes significantly. This is due to the fact that Genesis Vision is a complex system with a lot of information, so it is often possible to find the right balance between informational content and convenience only through trial and error and only with the active participation of product users. Will there be a way to withdraw everything at the next ending of a period? When/how are you going to implement this? Yes, it is already being worked on, but we cannot point to an exact date at the moment. Could you study a way to enable investors to withdraw invested money before the end of the reporting period, in particular if there is money not currently allocated to a trade? What is your thinking about alternative ways to implement this? This issue is not so obvious. If you withdraw funds during the trading period, this can disrupt the manager's trading strategy. Even if these funds are now free, they can be used to maintain margins when trading with leverage. And if you take the money, then Margin Call will happen (and then Stop out) and all investors will lose money, because funds are not enough to maintain the position.
What T4B, RoboForex & other brokers bring to the table + why im still bullish af going forward for GVT
Pretty lengthy reply so thought id reply with a new thread for visibility: @koalaindisguise -> ''Before the project launch, partnership with these forex companies was announced with a big hype. They were not US/UK financial institutions but at least they were companies with legal entities. I was thinking/hoping that we would be able to entrust our tokens to professional brokers working under these companies. In the end, we have to deal with noname finance gurus on the internet who wants to gamble other people's savings with 50% success fee. We are just slowly bleeding out one way or the other. I don't think US adoption will turn the table because of tokenomics.'' Before i start:
You talk about dealing with some noname finance gurus on the internet, and you would quite happily entrust your tokens to a 'professional broker'. This is the problem with the current industry. There is no transparency. You are entrusting your tokens blindly and you have no idea how your funds are actually being managed nor past performance of these brokers. Genesis Vision gives you the freedom to diversify your investments across multiple different managers, brokers, account types (forex/crypto/stocks) as well as GV Funds & even copytrading soon. With all past and real time results on display.
Some of these noname finance gurus might actually be pretty poor traders, in which case they will drop to the bottom of the pile and their trading history open for all to see. There are some good traders too, following all available investment advice would see you wait to make an investment in the right manager based on their program metrics.
TLDR - There are good eggs and there are bad eggs, blame the manager for their bad trades, not the platform. Also remember it was your choice to invest in that manager and all the metrics were available for you to view before you did.
Back to your question regarding partnerships: Tools4Brokers:
T4B engage in technological maintenance and software development for brokerage companies, mainly in forex markets.
T4B provides solutions to over 250 companies from thirty different countrys
Aleksey Kutsenko CEO of Tools For Brokers is the co-founder & CBDO of Genesis Vision
Aleksey is responsible for the implementation strategy of the Genesis Vision platform in the Forex industry
T4B supply Genesis Vision with ready codebase solutions.
IMO this is a very valuable partnership to have. T4B already had an existing portfolio of brokers prior to the release of the GVT platform. This will have proved greatly beneficial in relation to B2B networking for Genesis Vision, not to mention any techical knowledge and business advice T4B will have bought to the table. Going forward im sure this would continue to be greatly beneficial. RoboForex:
RoboForex supports a roster of approximately 9400 assets from eight different categories, those being forex, stocks, indices, ETFs, commodities, metals, energies and even cryptocurrencies with liquidity for them provided by eight separate liquidity providers.
Genesis Vision managers have a “pro standard” account type, meaning that they have access to 36 currency pairs, metals, CFDs and cryptocurrencies.
GV Managers can trade with a leverage of up to 1:100
The RoboForex broker is just another broker to add to the list of tools and markets available for GV managers to trade on. I have not personally traded on RoboForex so cannot offer an opinion on how good of a broker they are, but at current they just add an addition choice for trading in the GV ecosystem. This goes for other Crypto/Forex brokers that will arrive in the platform shortly and are currently integrated. With more and more tools and opportunites becoming available for both the current and future GV managers, the higher chances of creating a successful happy manager MY reasons for continuing to be bullish on GVT
The team continue to focus on development that attracts more managers and investors to the platform (Okex, Huobi, Exante, Chinese translation, Copytrading etc.)
Im not saying every manager will be profitable, far from it, but more managers = more profits that flow through to buy pressure on GVT.
A new leveling system is being developed that rewards managers based on individual performance rather than creating competition between one another
Funds are extremely underrated
Some did not agree, but the addition of the multicurrency wallet was the BEST step to take. This will allow for further adoption of the platform and growth in the long run, some of you have seen this as a negative step because you are under the impression it has caused the price in sats to go down. I would like to see more assets added to the multicurrency wallet, not less.
The token has solid use cases & if you see the latest AMA their are discussions for additional use cases. These usecases scale heavily with adoption.
I check their Github daily. They are building out this platform making more tools and brokers available, which will only lead to increased adoption by Crypto/Forex Managers & Investors. Then the marketing comes after the development is complete and the platform is perfected
We will see hundreds and in time thousands of managers longer term. If we take a conservative guess and say 20% of these managers are making profit, all this profit will flow through the GVT token. There is now only buy pressure on the token, the sell pressure was removed with the addition of the multicurrency wallet.
Some of you have previously said 'Well wont the investor just sell their profits distributed in GVT?'. Of course they can, if they choose too. But alternatively they can also hold GVT for reduced trading fees, reinvest their GVT to another program, invest in a GV Fund, subscribe to a copy trader using GVT as the subscription fee. The latter again, positively effects the Genesis Vision Token.
Heres my other reasons (Yes i've been watching GVT a long time):
Finding Trading Edges: Where to Get High R:R trades and Profit Potential of Them.
TL;DR - I will try and flip an account from $50 or less to $1,000 over 2019. I will post all my account details so my strategy can be seen/copied. I will do this using only three or four trading setups. All of which are simple enough to learn. I will start trading on 10th January. ---- As I see it there are two mains ways to understand how to make money in the markets. The first is to know what the biggest winners in the markets are doing and duplicating what they do. This is hard. Most of the biggest players will not publicly tell people what they are doing. You need to be able to kinda slide in with them and see if you can pick up some info. Not suitable for most people, takes a lot of networking and even then you have to be able to make the correct inferences. Another way is to know the most common trades of losing traders and then be on the other side of their common mistakes. This is usually far easier, usually everyone knows the mind of a losing trader. I learned about what losing traders do every day by being one of them for many years. I noticed I had an some sort of affinity for buying at the very top of moves and selling at the very bottom. This sucked, however, is was obvious there was winning trades on the other side of what I was doing and the adjustments to be a good trader were small (albeit, tricky). Thus began the study for entries and maximum risk:reward. See, there have been times I have bought aiming for a 10 pip scalps and hit 100 pips stops loss. Hell, there have been times I was going for 5 pips and hit 100 stop out. This can seem discouraging, but it does mean there must be 1:10 risk:reward pay-off on the other side of these mistakes, and they were mistakes. If you repeatedly enter and exit at the wrong times, you are making mistakes and probably the same ones over and over again. The market is tricking you! There are specific ways in which price moves that compel people to make these mistakes (I won’t go into this in this post, because it takes too long and this is going to be a long post anyway, but a lot of this is FOMO). Making mistakes is okay. In fact, as I see it, making mistakes is an essential part of becoming an expert. Making a mistake enough times to understand intrinsically why it is a mistake and then make the required adjustments. Understanding at a deep level why you trade the way you do and why others make the mistakes they do, is an important part of becoming an expert in your chosen area of focus. I could talk more on these concepts, but to keep the length of the post down, I will crack on to actual examples of trades I look for. Here are my three main criteria. I am looking for tops/bottoms of moves (edge entries). I am looking for 1:3 RR or more potential pay-offs. My strategy assumes that retail trades will lose most of the time. This seems a fair enough assumption. Without meaning to sound too crass about it, smart money will beat dumb money most of the time if the game is base on money. They just will. So to summarize, I am looking for the points newbies get trapped in bad positions entering into moves too late. From these areas, I am looking for high RR entries. Setup Examples. I call this one the “Lightning Bolt correction”, but it is most commonly referred to as a “two leg correction”. I call it a “Lightning Bolt correction” because it looks a bit like one, and it zaps you. If you get it wrong. https://preview.redd.it/t4whwijse2721.png?width=1326&format=png&auto=webp&s=c9050529c6e2472a3ff9f8e7137bd4a3ee5554cc Once I see price making the first sell-off move and then begin to rally towards the highs again, I am waiting for a washout spike low. The common trades mistakes I am trading against here is them being too eager to buy into the trend too early and for the to get stopped out/reverse position when it looks like it is making another bearish breakout. Right at that point they panic … literally one candle under there is where I want to be getting in. I want to be buying their stop loss, essentially. “Oh, you don’t want that ...okay, I will have that!” I need a precise entry. I want to use tiny stops (for big RR) so I need to be cute with entries. For this, I need entry rules. Not just arbitrarily buying the spike out. There are a few moving parts to this that are outside the scope of this post but one of my mains ways is using a fibs extension and looking for reversals just after the 1.61% level. How to draw the fibs is something else that is outside the scope of this but for one simple rule, they can be drawn on the failed new high leg. https://preview.redd.it/2cd682kve2721.png?width=536&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4d081c9faff49d0976f9ffab260aaed2b570309 I am looking for a few specific things for a prime setup. Firstly, I am looking for the false hope candles, the ones that look like they will reverse the market and let those buying too early get out break-even or even at profit. In this case, you can see the hammer and engulfing candle off the 127 level, then it spikes low in that “stop-hunt” sort of style. Secondly I want to see it trading just past my entry level (161 ext). This rule has come from nothing other than sheer volume. The amount of times I’ve been stopped out by 1 pip by that little sly final low has gave birth to this rule. I am looking for the market to trade under support in a manner that looks like a new strong breakout. When I see this, I am looking to get in with tiny stops, right under the lows. I will also be using smaller charts at this time and looking for reversal clusters of candles. Things like dojis, inverted hammers etc. These are great for sticking stops under. Important note, when the lightning bolt correction fails to be a good entry, I expect to see another two legs down. I may look to sell into this area sometimes, and also be looking for buying on another couple legs down. It is important to note, though, when this does not work out, I expect there to be continued momentum that is enough to stop out and reasonable stop level for my entry. Which is why I want to cut quick. If a 10 pips stop will hit, usually a 30 pips stop will too. Bin it and look for the next opportunity at better RR. https://preview.redd.it/mhkgy35ze2721.png?width=1155&format=png&auto=webp&s=a18278b85b10278603e5c9c80eb98df3e6878232 Another setup I am watching for is harmonic patterns, and I am using these as a multi-purpose indicator. When I see potentially harmonic patterns forming, I am using their completion level as take profits, I do not want to try and run though reversal patterns I can see forming hours ahead of time. I also use them for entering (similar rules of looking for specific entry criteria for small stops). Finally, I use them as a continuation pattern. If the harmonic pattern runs past the area it may have reversed from, there is a high probability that the market will continue to trend and very basic trend following strategies work well. I learned this from being too stubborn sticking with what I thought were harmonic reversals only to be ran over by a trend (seriously, everything I know I know from how it used to make me lose). https://preview.redd.it/1ytz2431f2721.png?width=1322&format=png&auto=webp&s=983a7f2a91f9195004ad8a2aa2bb9d4d6f128937 A method of spotting these sorts of M/W harmonics is they tend to form after a second spike out leg never formed. When this happens, it gives me a really good idea of where my profit targets should be and where my next big breakout level is. It is worth noting, larger harmonics using have small harmonics inside them (on lower time-frames) and this can be used for dialling in optimum entries. I also use harmonics far more extensively in ranging markets. Where they tend to have higher win rates. Next setup is the good old fashioned double bottoms/double top/one tick trap sort of setup. This comes in when the market is highly over extended. It has a small sell-off and rallies back to the highs before having a much larger sell-off. This is a more risky trade in that it sells into what looks like trending momentum and can be stopped out more. However, it also pays a high RR when it works, allowing for it to be ran at reduced risk and still be highly profitable when it comes through. https://preview.redd.it/1bx83776f2721.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c76c3085598ae70f4142d26c46c8d6e9b1c2881 From these sorts of moves, I am always looking for a follow up buy if it forms a lightning bolt sort of setup. All of these setups always offer 1:3 or better RR. If they do not, you are doing it wrong (and it will be your stop placement that is wrong). This is not to say the target is always 1:3+, sometimes it is best to lock in profits with training stops. It just means that every time you enter, you can potentially have a trade that runs for many times more than you risked. 1:10 RR can be hit in these sorts of setups sometimes. Paying you 20% for 2% risked. I want to really stress here that what I am doing is trading against small traders mistakes. I am not trying to “beat the market maker”. I am not trying to reverse engineer J.P Morgan’s black boxes. I do not think I am smart enough to gain a worthwhile edge over these traders. They have more money, they have more data, they have better softwares … they are stronger. Me trying to “beat the market maker” is like me trying to beat up Mike Tyson. I might be able to kick him in the balls and feel smug for a few seconds. However, when he gets up, he is still Tyson and I am still me. I am still going to be pummeled. I’ve seen some people that were fairly bright people going into training courses and coming out dumb as shit. Thinking they somehow are now going to dominate Goldman Sachs because they learned a chart pattern. Get a grip. For real, get a fucking grip. These buzz phrases are marketeering. Realististically, if you want to win in the markets, you need to have an edge over somebody. I don’t have edges on the banks. If I could find one, they’d take it away from me. Edges work on inefficiencies in what others do that you can spot and they can not. I do not expect to out-think a banks analysis team. I know for damn sure I can out-think a version of me from 5 years ago … and I know there are enough of them in the markets. I look to trade against them. I just look to protect myself from the larger players so they can only hurt me in limited ways. Rather than letting them corner me and beat me to a pulp (in the form of me watching $1,000 drop off my equity because I moved a stop or something), I just let them kick me in the butt as I run away. It hurts a little, but I will be over it soon. I believe using these principles, these three simple enough edge entry setups, selectiveness (remembering you are trading against the areas people make mistakes, wait for they areas) and measured aggression a person can make impressive compounded gains over a year. I will attempt to demonstrate this by taking an account of under $100 to over $1,000 in a year. I will use max 10% on risk on a position, the risk will scale down as the account size increases. In most cases, 5% risk per trade will be used, so I will be going for 10-20% or so profits. I will be looking only for prime opportunities, so few trades but hard hitting ones when I take them. I will start trading around the 10th January. Set remind me if you want to follow along. I will also post my investor login details, so you can see the trades in my account in real time. Letting you see when I place my orders and how I manage running positions. I also think these same principles can be tweaked in such a way it is possible to flip $50 or so into $1,000 in under a month. I’ve done $10 to $1,000 in three days before. This is far more complex in trade management, though. Making it hard to explain/understand and un-viable for many people to copy (it hedges, does not comply with FIFO, needs 1:500 leverage and also needs spreads under half a pip on EURUSD - not everyone can access all they things). I see all too often people act as if this can’t be done and everyone saying it is lying to sell you something. I do not sell signals. I do not sell training. I have no dog in this fight, I am just saying it can be done. There are people who do it. If you dismiss it as impossible; you will never be one of them. If I try this 10 times with $50, I probably am more likely to make $1,000 ($500 profit) in a couple months than standard ideas would double $500 - I think I have better RR, even though I may go bust 5 or more times. I may also try to demonstrate this, but it is kinda just show-boating, quite honestly. When it works, it looks cool. When it does not, I can go bust in a single day (see example https://www.fxblue.com/users/redditmicroflip). So I may or may not try and demonstrate this. All this is, is just taking good basic concepts and applying accelerated risk tactics to them and hitting a winning streak (of far less trades than you may think). Once you have good entries and RR optimization in place - there really is no reason why you can not scale these up to do what may people call impossible (without even trying it). I know there are a lot of people who do not think these things are possible and tend to just troll whenever people talk about these things. There used to be a time when I’d try to explain why I thought the way I did … before I noticed they only cared about telling me why they were right and discussion was pointless. Therefore, when it comes to replies, I will reply to all comments that ask me a question regarding why I think this can be done, or why I done something that I done. If you are commenting just to tell me all the reasons you think I am wrong and you are right, I will probably not reply. I may well consider your points if they are good ones. I just do not entering into discussions with people who already know everything; it serves no purpose. Edit: Addition. I want to talk a bit more about using higher percentage of risk than usual. Firstly, let me say that there are good reasons for risk caps that people often cite as “musts”. There are reasons why 2% is considered optimum for a lot of strategies and there are reasons drawing down too much is a really bad thing. Please do not be ignorant of this. Please do not assume I am, either. In previous work I done, I was selecting trading strategies that could be used for investment. When doing this, my only concern was drawdown metrics. These are essential for professional money management and they are also essential for personal long-term success in trading. So please do not think I have not thought of these sorts of things Many of the reasons people say these things can’t work are basic 101 stuff anyone even remotely committed to learning about trading learns in their first 6 months. Trust me, I have thought about these concepts. I just never stopped thinking when I found out what public consensus was. While these 101 rules make a lot of sense, it does not take away from the fact there are other betting strategies, and if you can know the approximate win rate and pay-off of trades, you can have other ways of deriving optimal bet sizes (risk per trade). Using Kelly Criterion, for example, if the pay-off is 1:3 and there is a 75% chance of winning, the optimal bet size is 62.5%. It would be a viable (high risk) strategy to have extremely filtered conditions that looked for just one perfect set up a month, makingover 150% if it was successful. Let’s do some math on if you can pull that off three months in a row (using 150% gain, for easy math). Start $100. Month two starts $250. Month three $625. Month three ends $1,562. You have won three trades. Can you win three trades in a row under these conditions? I don’t know … but don’t assume no-one can. This is extremely high risk, let’s scale it down to meet somewhere in the middle of the extremes. Let’s look at 10%. Same thing, 10% risk looking for ideal opportunities. Maybe trading once every week or so. 30% pay-off is you win. Let’s be realistic here, a lot of strategies can drawdown 10% using low risk without actually having had that good a chance to generate 30% gains in the trades it took to do so. It could be argued that trading seldomly but taking 5* the risk your “supposed” to take can be more risk efficient than many strategies people are using. I am not saying that you should be doing these things with tens of thousands of dollars. I am not saying you should do these things as long term strategies. What I am saying is do not dismiss things out of hand just because they buck the “common knowns”. There are ways you can use more aggressive trading tactics to turn small sums of money into they $1,000s of dollars accounts that you exercise they stringent money management tactics on. With all the above being said, you do have to actually understand to what extent you have an edge doing what you are doing. To do this, you should be using standard sorts of risks. Get the basics in place, just do not think you have to always be basic. Once you have good basics in place and actually make a bit of money, you can section off profits for higher risk versions of strategies. The basic concepts of money management are golden. For longevity and large funds; learned them and use them! Just don’t forget to think for yourself once you have done that. Update - Okay, I have thought this through a bit more and decided I don't want to post my live account investor login, because it has my full name and I do not know who any of you are. Instead, for copying/observing, I will give demo account login (since I can choose any name for a demo). I will also copy onto a live account and have that tracked via Myfxbook. I will do two versions. One will be FIFO compliant. It will trade only single trade positions. The other will not be FIFO compliant, it will open trades in batches. I will link up live account in a week or so. For now, if anyone wants to do BETA testing with the copy trader, you can do so with the following details (this is the non-FIFO compliant version). Account tracking/copying details. Low-Medium risk. IC Markets MT4 Account number: 10307003 Investor PW:lGdMaRe6 Server: Demo:01 (Not FIFO compliant) Valid and Invalid Complaints. There are a few things that can pop up in copy trading. I am not a n00b when it comes to this, so I can somewhat forecast what these will be. I can kinda predict what sort of comments there may be. Some of these are valid points that if you raise I should (and will) reply to. Some are things outside of the scope of things I can influence, and as such, there is no point in me replying to. I will just cover them all here the one time. Valid complains are if I do something dumb or dramatically outside of the strategy I have laid out here. won't do these, if I do, you can pitchfork ----E Examples; “Oi, idiot! You opened a trade randomly on a news spike. I got slipped 20 pips and it was a shit entry”. Perfectly valid complaint. “Why did you open a trade during swaps hours when the spread was 30 pips?” Also valid. “You left huge trades open running into the weekend and now I have serious gap paranoia!” Definitely valid. These are examples of me doing dumb stuff. If I do dumb stuff, it is fair enough people say things amounting to “Yo, that was dumb stuff”. Invalid Complains; “You bought EURUSD when it was clearly a sell!!!!” Okay … you sell. No-one is asking you to copy my trades. I am not trading your strategy. Different positions make a market. “You opened a position too big and I lost X%”. No. Na uh. You copied a position too big. If you are using a trade copier, you can set maximum risk. If you neglect to do this, you are taking 100% risk. You have no valid compliant for losing. The act of copying and setting the risk settings is you selecting your risk. I am not responsible for your risk. I accept absolutely no liability for any losses. *Suggested fix. Refer to risk control in copy trading software “You lost X trades in a row at X% so I lost too much”. Nope. You copied. See above. Anything relating to losing too much in trades (placed in liquid/standard market conditions) is entirely you. I can lose my money. Only you can set it up so you can lose yours. I do not have access to your account. Only mine. *Suggested fix. Refer to risk control in copy trading software “Price keeps trading close to the pending limit orders but not filling. Your account shows profits, but mine is not getting them”. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours. * Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Buy limit orders will need to move up a little. Sell limit orders should not need adjusted. “I got stopped out right before the market turned, I have a loss but your account shows a profit”. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours. ** Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Stop losses on sell orders will need to move up a bit. Stops on buy orders will be fine. “Your trade got stopped out right before the market turned, if it was one more pip in the stop, it would have been a winner!!!” Yeah. This happens. This is where the “risk” part of “risk:reward” comes in. “Price traded close to take profit, yours filled but mines never”. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours. (Side note, this should not be an issue since when my trade closes, it should ping your account to close, too. You might get a couple less pips). *** Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Take profits on buys will need to move up a bit. Sell take profits will be fine. “My brokers spread jumped to 20 during the New York session so the open trade made a bigger loss than it should”. Your broker might just suck if this happens. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. My trades are placed to profit from my brokerage conditions. I do not know, so can not account for yours. Also, if accounting for random spread spikes like this was something I had to do, this strategy would not be a thing. It only works with fair brokerage conditions. *Suggested fix. Do a bit of Googling and find out if you have a horrific broker. If so, fix that! A good search phrase is; “(Broker name) FPA reviews”. “Price hit the stop loss but was going really fast and my stop got slipped X pips”. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours. If my trade also got slipped on the stop, I was slipped using ECN conditions with excellent execution; sometimes slips just happen. I am doing the most I can to prevent them, but it is a fact of liquidity that sometimes we get slipped (slippage can also work in our favor, paying us more than the take profit would have been). “Orders you placed failed to execute on my account because they were too large”. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. Margin requirements vary. I have 1:500 leverage available. I will not always be using it, but I can. If you can’t, this will make a difference. “Your account is making profits trading things my broker does not have” I have a full range of assets to trade with the broker I use. Included Forex, indices, commodities and cryptocurrencies. I may or may not use the extent of these options. I can not account for your brokerage conditions. I think I have covered most of the common ones here. There are some general rules of thumb, though. Basically, if I do something that is dumb and would have a high probability of losing on any broker traded on, this is a valid complain. Anything that pertains to risk taken in standard trading conditions is under your control. Also, anything at all that pertains to brokerage variance there is nothing I can do, other than fully brief you on what to expect up-front. Since I am taking the time to do this, I won’t be a punchbag for anything that happens later pertaining to this. I am not using an elitist broker. You don’t need $50,000 to open an account, it is only $200. It is accessible to most people - brokerage conditions akin to what I am using are absolutely available to anyone in the UK/Europe/Asia (North America, I am not so up on, so can’t say). With the broker I use, and with others. If you do not take the time to make sure you are trading with a good broker, there is nothing I can do about how that affects your trades. I am using an A book broker, if you are using B book; it will almost certainly be worse results. You have bad costs. You are essentially buying from reseller and paying a mark-up. (A/B book AKA ECN/Market maker; learn about this here). My EURUSD spread will typically be 0.02 pips or so, if yours is 1 pip, this is a huge difference. These are typical spreads I am working on. https://preview.redd.it/yc2c4jfpab721.png?width=597&format=png&auto=webp&s=c377686b2485e13171318c9861f42faf325437e1 Check the full range of spreads on Forex, commodities, indices and crypto. Please understand I want nothing from you if you benefit from this, but I am also due you nothing if you lose. My only term of offering this is that people do not moan at me if they lose money. I have been fully upfront saying this is geared towards higher risk. I have provided information and tools for you to take control over this. If I do lose people’s money and I know that, I honestly will feel a bit sad about it. However, if you complain about it, all I will say is “I told you that might happen”, because, I am telling you that might happen. Make clear headed assessments of how much money you can afford to risk, and use these when making your decisions. They are yours to make, and not my responsibility. Update. Crazy Kelly Compounding: $100 - $11,000 in 6 Trades. $100 to $11,000 in 6 trades? Is it a scam? Is it a gamble? … No, it’s maths. Common sense risk disclaimer: Don’t be a dick! Don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose. Do not risk money doing these things until you can show a regular profit on low risk. Let’s talk about Crazy Kelly Compounding (CKC). Kelly criterion is a method for selecting optimal bet sizes if the odds and win rate are known (in other words, once you have worked out how to create and assess your edge). You can Google to learn about it in detail. The formula for Kelly criterion is; ((odds-1) * (percentage estimate)) - (1-percent estimate) / (odds-1) X 100 Now let’s say you can filter down a strategy to have a 80% win rate. It trades very rarely, but it had a very high success rate when it does. Let’s say you get 1:2 RR on that trade. Kelly would give you an optimum bet size of about 60% here. So if you win, you win 120%. Losing three trades in a row will bust you. You can still recover from anything less than that, fairly easily with a couple winning trades. This is where CKC comes in. What if you could string some of these wins together, compounding the gains (so you were risking 60% each time)? What if you could pull off 6 trades in a row doing this? Here is the math; https://preview.redd.it/u3u6teqd7c721.png?width=606&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b958747b37b68ec2a769a8368b5cbebfe0e97ff This shows years, substitute years for trades. 6 trades returns $11,338! This can be done. The question really is if you are able to dial in good enough entries, filter out enough sub-par trades and have the guts to pull the trigger when the time is right. Obviously you need to be willing to take the hit, obviously that hit gets bigger each time you go for it, but the reward to risk ratio is pretty decent if you can afford to lose the money. We could maybe set something up to do this on cent brokers. So people can do it literally risking a couple dollars. I’d have to check to see if there was suitable spreads etc offered on them, though. They can be kinda icky. Now listen, I am serious … don’t be a dick. Don’t rush out next week trying to retire by the weekend. What I am showing you is the EXTRA rewards that come with being able to produce good solid results and being able to section off some money for high risk “all or nothing” attempts; using your proven strategies. I am not saying anyone can open 6 trades and make $11,000 … that is rather improbable. What I am saying is once you can get the strategy side right, and you can know your numbers; then you can use the numbers to see where the limits actually are, how fast your strategy can really go. This CKC concept is not intended to inspire you to be reckless in trading, it is intended to inspire you to put focus on learning the core skills I am telling you that are behind being able to do this.
In forex trading, important news that impacts the markets could be Central Bank minutes and members press conferences, inflation reports as well as national and international economic news and data. One of the first lessons for new traders is that when trading you should keep out of the market during major news releases. Some forex brokers allow their traders to trade directly on the world’s top social trading network. Proprietary solutions are often interesting, though in some cases less than optimal. For traders who base their strategies on the use of EAs and VPS, a proprietary platform that does not support such features, is useless. 1 Based on IG US's numerous awards including: Investopedia's 2019 Best Brokers Awards (Determined by award winners, Investopedia's team evaluated more than 70 online brokers, considering thousands of variables across trading technology, mobile capabilities, user interfaces, research tools, costs and fees.), awarded Best Customer Service Broker, Best Value for Money, and Best Educational ... List of Top 25 The Best Forex Brokers in 2020 for buy sell major currency, Lets compare our fully regulated online trading company and platforms. 1 Minute Review. IG is a comprehensive forex broker that offers full access to the currency market and support for over 80 currency pairs. The broker only offers forex trading to its U.S.-based ...
Forex Trading and the Best way to make Money with it ! ($847 / day )
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