I never found pivot points useful in my futures or fax trading, though I'm sure others will say they're indispensable. My fx charts are pretty clean - just a few linear regression lines and heiken ashi candles do it for me. That said, your advice about NOT watching the market tick-for-tick is absolutely 100% right. You *will* get antsy, trade out of boredom, and likely lose money that way.
You shouldn't be too impressed! There's quite a few other women in the forex chat room I trade in often. I wasn't always a profitable trader, the first 3 years were HARD! Somebody should write a book about what NEVER to do as a trader, would have saved me about $50,000 which was about what I was down before I figured it out. Trade Station's easy language isn't too hard and TopGun's VB code came with so many examples I just took their template.txt sample code and modified it to setup my audio and cell phone alerts as they created those tools for some of the scripts they released to their mentor students which I'm one. Here's the URL's for both support pages. TopGun's VB Code http://www.leveragefx.com/scripting/ Trade Station's Easy Language Forum https://www.tradestation.com/Discussions/Main.aspx I also had the benefit of going to all their classes on the VB code where the instructor went over it line by line. Trust me its not too impressive. One guy Reza wrote an auto fib tool in TopGun that works amazingly well and its about 2,000 lines of code and he gave it to all of us FREE. He's a professional programmer though. Most of you in here probably haven't heard of TopGun, they don't advertise much and are more interested in making money from trading than getting customers it seems to me. But I think thats also the reason why their tools work. If you try Reza's auto fib tool I find it works best on 30 min charts and longer.
I traded with Heiken ashi candles for a long time, found them more useful on 15, 30 and longer min bars than shorter ones but you can see in this chart when trend's down and heiken ashi turns red go short and get out when trailing stop gets hit. I never used to use them for exits ONLY ENTRIES. I've put what I use more now which is a longer term fx multimap trend colored onto the bars. This is a 3 hour trend which looks at all the GBP pairs and all the USD pairs not just the chart data which is the limitation with the heiken ashi. It shows 11 shades of green and 11 shades of red which give me more of an intuitive feel. I was shorting the GBP/USD all morning because the GBP was the weakest pair and USD pretty strong since 6:30am EST.
I'll be the first to say often my analysis is wrong, DEAD WRONG and what you THINK is likely to happen doesn't even compare with what is happening NOW ! I was wrong about the GBP, the previous day's strength in the GBP didn't continue and not only that it was often the WEAKEST of all the pairs today! Boy was I wrong! You can't ever get married to your opinions, the chart has the answer and if you don't have the tools I have look at a bunch of GBP charts, EURGBP going down, GBPJPY going down, GBPCHF going down and so on, etc, etc. GPB is weak so you have to be crazy to buy it! On the other hand my prediction that CADJPY would go down worked as expected. It's almost impossible to be wrong on ALL the pairs and when your analysis happens REAL TIME trade that trend and ride it. I use the hourly 20 period simple moving avg and as long as a weak pair stays under it or isn't too strong statistically at my sell area I'll sell it. Here's the CADJPY chart. I only took the last short at 9:40am in this up near hourly MA resistance but I've put lines on other areas I feel are GOOD shorts based on how I trade trending pairs. I traded LARGER lots in this one as it did what I anticipated it doing and I thought it would be the weakest pair today of the ones I watch. It wasn't but weak enough for me to take a bigger bet on it. I often get out near the red lines as they are statistically likely to be the bottom. I just got out of this trade. I didn't take the earlier ones but they all worked as you can see how weak this currency pair is.
If those are standard (100,000 units) lots you are refering to, that is not small at all,...that is HUGE!!...are these standard or micro/mini lots you refer to?
I unfortunately did NOT trade the USD/CAD. As anticipated the CAD was weak and CADJPY fell and USDCAD went up. Here are areas I would have bought had I been up and trading. I gave my iphone to my sister's son to play games and I turned volume down as it was annoying us and thus didn't hear my alerts levels last night! It's crazy the kind of stuff that can cost you money in trading that nobody tells you about. I hope this helps anybody reading this though. I like to buy strong currencies on pullbacks or SIDEWAYS consolidation breakouts near the lows after a pullback. STOPS under the swings so as you can see most of these trades have VERY TIGHT 10 to 15 pip stops max and most moves were 25 to 70 pips! That's the KEY to trading. small tiny losses and BIG WINS ! And when you're 50 to 75% right on most trades and have 2 to 3x bigger wins you make a great living trading. Some profitable traders may wonder why I'm giving away so much. It really bothers me when I see so many people losing their homes and we have some friends who have and I'm hoping that somebody can make a little extra money trading Forex and keep their house or lifestyle after losing a job. You can become a profitable Forex trader but its very hard for most and there's really no source of GOOD info on the web so hopefully I can help some people. Your goal should be 10 to 20 pips CONSISTENTLY a day. Once at 20 pips try to protect that profit and I'd rather see you quit trading for the day than give it back to the market.
Yes they are full size lots however for the account size I'm trading its small risk per trade. Many days I usually have 2 or 3 minimum trades going on at same time and I feel nervous when trading larger than this. I've found psychologically I can't seem to contain my anxiety when trading larger than this so I take money out of trading account each month. I once did a 50 lot trade to try to get myself trading bigger and I was so nervous I got out of the trade with about a 10 pip profit and it had nothing to do with the trade, it went on for another 30 to 40 pips before my rules would have had me out. I was shaking I was so nervous. If anybody has any ideas on how they've broken through the SIZE barrier I'd LOVE to hear how they did so.
The only way I can do it is trade setups as if they were poker hands or black jack card counts. This sounds totally against the "treat trading as a business" mantra but it is not. I've got 2-3 setups that are basically pocket aces. And like pocket A's, to get max value it's sometimes best to bet small and lure money into the pot instead of just going all-in right off the bat. As I mentioned in another post, my fishing with a net style is tiny risk up front, big profits on exit. Whenever I move to a new trading size level, it's not up front. Only on the add-ins by either increasing my add-on amounts or increasing the frequency of add-ons. This is the only way I can feel comfortable "stepping" it up. For example, my broker's spread on gbp/jpy is a sucky 12 pips. At my current level I can get 5-7 lots into that pair with add ons, but up front staring at -12 pips at my full allotted amount as soon as a position starts just doesn't sit well with me psychologically. So I always start with 1 and then pile it on once the market proves me correct. Then I have no problem piling it on up to and sometimes surpassing my allotted amount because then my analysis is usually proven correct. On the flip side, if I'm not correct, losing on 1 lot even with a somewhat wide stop loss is not big deal at all psychologically nor financially. Same as folding suited connectors that miss on the flop.
Excellent advice thank you. I've scaled into positions in the past as they've gone slightly against me but not too much with winning trades. I'll have to try that but not sure it will work for me as I'm often out in 30 mins to 5 hours and don't hold for days where it would really be profitable. Do you add on positions say you buy and it moves up, has a THRUST move and then pulls back, add AS IT GOES UP at the bottom of the pullback? Do you count the waves and if its just the first wave up add but after the second or third rarely so? For my style of trading intraday markets tend to move 3 waves in the trend, ie down, then a pullback up or sideways, then down again followed by another pullback up and down one more time. GBP/USD great example of that today but it may have made 4 waves down but then had a big counter trend move at the Fib target of last move down.