The simple truth about FX trading

1) noone can predict market. There are honest lucky guys and many cheats who will try convince you otherwise

2) leverage will kill you. Avoid brokers that push you to use it. Never excceed x5

3) spread will kill you. Use a broker with the smallest spread

4) only trade in positive swap direction

5) dont use Stop Losses orders.

6) learn programming and implement your system as a robot/script. Test it on TICKS data (max minutes)
6.a) read real science articles about: statistical analysis, searching for signal in the noise, etc. Dont waste your time on "indicators" and "levels"

7) set realistic goals. Stable 20% per YEAR is a HUGE Success. If you are get there - other investors will find you and give you the money


that's enough

I dont agree with you.
1)If we can never predict the market, then we have no place here. The difference is that it is not the prediction that novice traders think you have to make. It is not a prediction of TP and SL. But you alredy make a prediction with every trade - that your exit price will be more favorable than your entry price and you will make more than you lose ! Market is unpredictable in the way that most want it to be. They want an exact level, exact time, exact gain, they want too much certainty.
2) leverage is not the thing that will kill you. it is incompetence, lack of information, skills etc.. leverage is just a way of boosting your money. It has NOTHING to do with your edge and the fact that you simply dont have it. Leverage and the need for it depend on the system itself and it is just stupid to say leverage is good or bad, it is just a tool.
3) spread will kill us. also not true. If you have average expectancy of 20 pips per trade, do you really think that 1.0pip spread will kill you ??? I dont think so. Again - depends on the system.
4) swap direction. it depends on the system. perhaps in long term positions swap really plays a role in total p/l , but on an intraday level swap rate does not matter. even if you hold it for a few nights, if you catch enough move, it doesnt matter.
5)Use of stoplosses. Personally i dont use them too, but it is dangerous. If one can find a good profitable way of trading with stops, it is always better to have some protection. I didnt find such a way, that is why i dont use them, but maybe other people have different strategies. Still - it depends on the strategy
6) i agree on the dont lose time on indicators and levels, for the programming part, i dont have programming skills and feel it as a total disadvantage, so you a re right. However, i dont think that it is absolutely necessary to automate the system. I use a few scripts here and there and still do the trades manually. Making a good robot is certainly very hard, it is much more easier to concentrate on a manual way of trading and more practical for those who have no clue for programming like myself.
7)realistic goals. 20% a year ? are we making a deposit at a bank or what.this here is speculation, you make as much as you can. Why do you put a psych limit on your profits ? If you can make 25,000% in a year, so be it. my personal view is that forex is way too much risk to aim for small gains. Especially if people follow the no stop loss advice ! When you trade without a stoploss, you always have a small probability to lose all your account and even more ( ask snb victims). So tell me, are you going to put on the table 200k that can evaporate any minute on some black swan , only to make 40k per year ? Which is not even a good regular salary? Or maybe you will compound your money for the rest of your life and pray to be on the right side of any market crash that is going to happen.
I see your join date and seriously- dont think that you give too good advice for someone that obviously has at least 10 years experience with this stuff.

Too much people slowed their learning curves because of such posts, me included.

the best way to argue here- monitored account for a decent period of time (>5 years)

do you have 20% per year for 5 years in a row?

Monitored by who ?! lets not turn this in to a dick measurement contest as it is of no use to anyone. I monitor my accounts and you can monitor your accounts.

Is sucess measured by 20% per year multplied by few years? 20% per year for 5 years is not as easy to achieve, but thanks God it is not necessary to be achieved. And it is EXACTLY because of what i wrote in my post which you probably dont read. Forex is a risky environment. There is always a very high chance to blow your account especially without stops. I have blown many accounts. And we perfectly know that in 5 years the chance to blow an account is pretty high. And it grows with every year,month,week,day,hour... The thing with trading is the followin - if something can happen with any small degree of probability, it WILL happen sometime. So why not make the most we can and try to extract money before we get into trouble ? 5 years by 20% is about 100-150% increase. Which in this game is NOTHING, especially when you trade without stops. I have made such gains in months, sometimes i can make them in weeks, and there were lucky streaks when i did them in days. and if i blow the account it all ends.
The aim of trading should be to make money, not to manage money. You are not playing a fund here, aiming at 10% an year and being happy if you beat that. Traders are different players in the market. When are you going to get the money that you trade for ? Iin 20-30 years ? When exactly ? You trade now to live tomorrow, you dont trade 30 years to have some money for retirment, that is called a pension fund.

lets assume that I have made 20% over 5 years and I have started with 50k , which by most means is a large ammount for a starting capital and trading without stop, especially when you dont have a clue about professional trading . So I have been exposed to 5 years of risk inthe market and I made 100%, so now I have 150k.. which is not a lot of money for 5 years of risking 50k and losing valuable time. If I get back my initial investment out of the margin, now I have 100k... So what did I do ? I lost 5 years of my life, and if I got a little luck, not being punished someday by a market crash, I ended up with 100k, taking out my initial 50, that have been at risk that whole time. So what I did - I did nothing. And lets not forget that is is veery hard to surive 5 years without stoploss in forex. You can do it if you trade infrequently. Take 1 trade a month for those 5 years, maybe you will make it . But it is still a waste of time ! This is investment kind of thinking, not trading. Trading is about making money today to spend it tomorrow ( or trade it perhaps ), it is about making as much as you can. It is about starting small and making it really big. Of course not starting with 50 dollars and not hoping to make hundreds of millions, being realistic is important, but its definately not about putting some money and waiting half of your life on earth to turn it 5 times, or perhaps lose it one sunny afternoon in 5 minutes on some swan.
Success in trading is measured by one thing only - MONEY. How much does one make. And if you aim at 20% per year without stops, you are not in for some large gains soon. If we humans lived for 1000 years, 20% gain for an year could be worth the risk taken.

your signature says - another pointless day where i accomplish nothing.
so what about some pointless 5,10 years ? How would you feel when 4years and 11 months after you started trading your account, the market takes back everything you had and even more?

I write my post entirely with good feelings and really not going to take more time for this thread here. Nobody says my advice is worthy. It just happens that I have free time today to write to you. Everyone has to decide for himself ! But I think you are still viewing this with the wrong glasses.

If your explorer is truly authentic and you have spend your lasts 195weeks and 19,500 trades to generate that performance, you should consider my points very seriously. Good luck

And thats only for point no.7 ! Other absurd points we cant even discuss them as anyone that thinks for himself and does not absorb common knowledge, will come to the same conclusions. Spread is going to kill me... Most probably I am going for a natural death if I wait to make money with 20% goals.

I have done some work and test with automated trading and from my experience, manual trading is the way to go.

Automated trading it is not a thing I would recommend for starters either. You have to know what you are doing.

Just my opinion.

Do you ?

The edge for a good trader is to predict direction over a small timeframe. Those that try to pick bottoms and tops will always lose.
Not all indicators are useless. Some can show you direction.

The secret to making it in FX is to accumulate tiny gains on a regular basis. Trade in tiny lots so that your losses are also tiny. If you get greedy and try to conquer it in a day or a week or a month, you will get burnt. I have done it often enough to know what I am talking about.

I try to make 1% a day. I mostly succeed.

This forum is very dangerous and will lose you money. There are so many egos and novices as well as pros that want to sucker you.

By the way the more you trust your own insitincts the better a trader you will become.

Have a happy weekend.

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you killed it. done some formatting to make your points stand out

I agree 100%
6.b) read real science articles about: data-snooping, data-dredging, overfitting
6.c) read real science articles about: risk, money management, position sizing

agree some and not some,
please read technical analysis fallacy thread by master FTI, and will more deep know about

One thing is for sure, reading too much into price action/candles is for idiots, or do you think bank traders sit at their desk with a 5 minute chart examining doji candles?

In all honesty I think patterns is a myth that doesn't actually exist and that retail traders are so obsessed about.

"Do you think it will be easier or harder to make money when a bank trader is on the other side of your trade as opposed to another retail trader?"

You almost answered the whole truth with this phrase alone. keep going!!!

exactly, so if thats the way it is, does price action mean anything? LOL...keep going!

you are majorly mistaken here. first of all trading for a bank and retail trading at home have nothing in common, at all. You cant even compare them nor would you ever even want to trade like a bank. They probably don't even make money from actual 'trades' ! A bank is merly a liquidity provider, they just hedge orders and print more money. They don't engage in speculative transactions for profit, or rarely-that make majority of money. A bank is merely a guy who lends you and collects interest.

secondly you think price action chart analysis doesn't work? Search Peter Brandt. He has been trading forex and futures since 1975 using only this and he has made hundreds of percent gains annually consistently.


actually it doesn't matter, most of the time I trade with an ECN broker so I am getting a bank on the other side of my trades, but I don't think they really give a shit because every retail trader is a small fish.

Let's check with Excel Let's say he started in 1976 with 1000 USD and every year he made 200% (so minimum on your statement). Question how much does he have now?
Year>>>>Capital
1976>>>>1,000
1977>>>>3,000
1978>>>>9,000
1979>>>>27,000
1980>>>>81,000
1981>>>>243,000
1982>>>>729,000
1983>>>>2,187,000
1984>>>>6,561,000
1985>>>>19,683,000
1986>>>>59,049,000
1987>>>>177,147,000
1988>>>>531,441,000
1989>>>>1,594,323,000
1990>>>>4,782,969,000
1991>>>>14,348,907,000
1992>>>>43,046,721,000
1993>>>>129,140,163,000
1994>>>>387,420,489,000
1995>>>>1,162,261,467,000
1996>>>>3,486,784,401,000
1997>>>>10,460,353,203,000
1998>>>>31,381,059,609,000
1999>>>>94,143,178,827,000
2000>>>>282,429,536,481,000
2001>>>>847,288,609,443,000
2002>>>>2,541,865,828,329,000
2003>>>>7,625,597,484,987,000
2004>>>>22,876,792,454,961,000
2005>>>>68,630,377,364,883,000
2006>>>>205,891,132,094,649,000
2007>>>>617,673,396,283,947,000
2008>>>>1,853,020,188,851,840,000
2009>>>>5,559,060,566,555,520,000
2010>>>>16,677,181,699,666,600,000
2011>>>>50,031,545,098,999,700,000
2012>>>>150,094,635,296,999,000,000
2013>>>>450,283,905,890,997,000,000
2014>>>>1,350,851,717,672,990,000,000
2015>>>>4,052,555,153,018,980,000,000


Pls help me: how do we call 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 ? Do we even have such money on Earth?

Pls show me where he is in Forbes ? Which place?

Your excel sheet theory is largely flawed:
-This is assuming he always compounded every single dollar every single time never withdraw.
-This assume that he always trading fixed % increase.
-This assume that broker will let you trade 9999999 lots.
-This assume that broker will allow you to have a balance of 90000 million.

You can take your excel sheet back to where it came from. Thank you

there is diminishing returns once an account reaches $10million dollars.. because of volume restrictions etc

you cannot grow infinity