I have found that brokers who give trading bonuses have ridiculous spreads so what they give in one hand is taken away with the other. you could google 'no deposit bonus' or enter in contests to learn trading.
Assume no one makes money and even if they do it won’t necessarily translate to a teachable method. Sadly testing out things on your own is the only way. U less you know a profitable forex trader personally anyone selling you an education is likely not going to help you much otherwise why would they sell their time for $100/month or $300 videos. Anyone doing this for years should have at the very least 1 student a year who has been able to master the teaching and make money I don’t see anyone like that in futures or forex
It will take you five years if you work hard to become profitable trading Forex, do you have the energy. But first you have to throw away every trading book you have because they are all misleading. They set you up to believe the standard trading rules will make you a better trader when they will just lose money. Basically don’t trade trends or believe in resistance levels, do look at trading at extreme price movements at the edge of the chart.
Indeed it is, my friend. I also traded the sim for relatively long period (about a year or so) before I felt confident enough in my ability/system execution to move into live markets. That was about three weeks ago, the past two weeks have been positive and hopefully this one will too. What I believe should be your ultimate goal though is to come up with a system you can rely on, so that you'll be making consistent, statistically sound decisions over the long term. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by your plan, because (sadly) a lot of people invest a lot of time into sterile practices/studies or don't really have progressive goals to guide them. Remember, your goal here is to understand the markets, economics, and a whole lot of things insofar as these things help you get to a point where you can turn a consistent profit from the markets. A real turning point for me was reading Mark Douglas' Trading in the Zone, which helped me understand that trading is, in essence, quite simple (which doesn't mean it's easy): develop an edge and trade that edge with discipline. I used to fret over the many possible combinations of factors that could weigh into a market, from indicators to macroeconomic analysis. Then I focused on creating one edge, back testing it then forward testing it, training my entry/exits and applying that. In any case, always remember the words of the great Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." Find a specific market phenomenon which you can profit from and trade the hell out of it. Best of luck to you!
Thank you 10,000 so much andre.salmero. I really appreciate your humbling post. In your opinion, how does a trader know when they have a trading edge? Thanks
Bonuses are nothing more but marketing. We have to take it with a grain of salt because marketing costs should eventually be covered by new traders. But anyway no deposit bonuses from Tickmill or Hotforex are worth to try especially for news trades.
You're welcome, friend! I'm glad to be of help. A trading edge is simply a set of variables that, when combined, indicate that one thing is statistically more likely to happen than another. So, by definition, you'll know you have an edge if you can statistically demonstrate that your trading system has a higher chance of delivering positive returns over an X number of trades in a given market. Do bear in mind that the "traditional" methods of technical "analysis" (i.e. price patterns; overbought/oversold levels) will most likely get you nowhere. They're simply too simple, but you should nonetheless try and learn from them. Particularly why they don't work and how you can employ the idea behind them -- that market behavior and price movements can be studied to produce a statistically positive trading strategy -- to your advantage. What you should aim to do is combine some of these tools to find a specific, statistically exploitable phenomenon, which you can employ systematically to your long term advantage. From the top of my head: the ADX measures the strength of directional movements in price (that is, moves that go beyond the scope of the range established in the past N periods). Bollinger bands show you 2 standard deviations from a 20 period moving average (default settings) and price tends not to excede these boundaries. So, if ADX is printing a low value (which means the markets are moving sideways) and price closes outside either band, it (hypothetically) tends to move away from this area -- since there is no directional strength to continue in that direction. You can use Average True Range to determine your stop loss -- if the idea holds true, price shouldn't be able to push beyond 1xATR or 2xATR unless it starts to pick momentum or behave "abnormally". What you do next is you test this idea using past price data for a given market (say, EURUSD) over 25 trades; if it holds, test 25 more trades and so on, to see if it'll hold it's positive return rates. Then you apply that to live markets on a simulator, see if that works. Finally, if you succeed, move onto live markets. If not, you can either tweak the system if you think you can improve it or you can altogether formulate a different market hypothesis and start testing again. It's not exciting, it's not glamorous and it's certainly not the kind of stuff trading coaches will advertise. But it is the disciplined, patient and safest way to approach this risky, yet fascinating, field.
your strategy outlined is a good one ......and quite workable.......if managed properly. but why is it workable?: i suspect it is because everyone can understand it this concept of edge comes from game theory or a casino type environment . this is an closed or controlled environment. markets are not 'closed' with new information coming in all the time: the 'game' keeps changing continuously. if an edge means having something that no one else possesses, some 'secret', then this is useless in the market. if you buy because of something only you know, then no one else will buy and they may even sell and do you think the market will move and give you a profit: if you buy and the market moves 100 ticks do you think it was your buying that caused that? this is why the simplest of strategies works well in the markets because everyone can see what is happening without the benefit of esoteric theories that only Nobel prize winners can understand. small wonder then that LTCM blew itself out, two Noble prize winners non withstanding.
Padu, although new information is constantly reaching the Markets (not all of which is public), we need not (or rather can't) keep track of all of it. That's why we gotta set up a pre-defined number of variables that, ideally, allow us to be correct most of the time. So although the "game" overall keeps changing, the way we play it stays the same (thus granting at least some consistency of results, hopefully positive ones). The whole idea behind these systems does not have to be that we find out some piece of technical information that everyone can see or, alternatively, that only we can see, because neither affects the market as a whole. What does affect market prices is the collective behavior of its participants. In that sense, any system needs to provide a concrete explanation as to why prices might move one way or another (thus constituting an edge). In the ADX/BB example I gave, it's not because both hit a given value, but rather because of what the calculations produced by these indicators allow us to conclude. The reason why it could work is not that a lot of people will be monitoring and acting upon that same info (there is very, very little chance that'll be the case). Rather, it is because we're using this to understand and analyze market behavior, which in essence everyone is looking at (in countless different ways). In that sense, indicators don't serve the purpose of producing signals but rather as tools for observation and analysis. The RSI can work if you sell overbought, for instance, but not because it hit the overbought level, but, rather, because the market was weak at that point - something that, in this particular case, the RSI was able to point out, but which was also something that happened regardless of the indicators themselves. That's why I tend to question how "analytical" most technical analysts are. If you're not extracting any insights from your indicators, but rather just operating upon the values they print, you're not analyzing anything but the indicator. Any particular piece of information produced by an indicator or set of indicators should reflect something that is present at the market as a whole, regardless of the indicators themselves - weakness to the upside, for instance. It should indicate something which is universally present in the market at any given time.
i repeat if an edge means a secretive thing which no one else knows....then I have already explained it is useless because a secret cannot move markets..... that is all I am saying