Wow, a blast from the past. We were with PFG, Currenex feed with Neoticker. We are now using Currenex with ADM and of course NEO. I also use MB trading with Neo for strategery development. The Ever Forgetting to post VIPER
"tom123 Registered: Jan 2008 Posts: 120 06-25-08 02:15 PM Sudden crash and blast off at the same time ...10 minutes ago. Can anyone explain what just happened ??" Yeah, REAL professionals. ROFLMAO... Especially if you like and enjoy after the fact trades and analysis.
Hi All, Glad to see there is a Forex thread after all... I've been in FX for 20 years (going from bank market maker to running a bank fx desk to being a pure - salaried -prop trader to my present situation as an independent self employed hedgie...). I came to ET only recently, mainly to learn a bit more about stocktrading, but I'm willing to contribute/participate in an fx thread (although it's very trough that making a living in daytrading FX makes you humble. Very humble. We rarely discuss nominal profits with each other and we do tend to keep our cards close to our chest when it comes to very specific trading rules and edges. This has nothing to do with narrow mindedness, rather out of necessity to protect your little niche or edge). Very valid and interesting points were made by most of you. I subscribe to the fact that fx is a very very tough business to make money in as daytrader without big orderflows behind you or without a peak into the large orderbooks of banks. It's these orders that make the FX markets gap very hard for no apparent reason (data and event risks aside). Algo trading has become mega important and it's the hedge funds who trade their models in clips of $ 500M + for 20 odd pips several times per day that seem to rule the market these days. It's very hard to compete with these as a leveraged discretionary daytrader (but if you do get it right, it's very rewarding and very fulfilling indeed as was mentioned by some of you). But nonetheless, systematic trading is definitely gaining the upperhand and taking over from discretionary trading, at least for now. As a discretionary guy, it takes years to develop an edge, and just as you think you got a decent edge, your edge disappears again and you have to work on a new one. I used to be very much a momentum trader, going for breakouts. That worked well for 5 years (late nineties), but nowadays it is guaranteed egg in your face. These last few years, the best intraday strategy is unquestionably a "fading strategy", depending what markets you look at. Right now, I work with several discretionary strategies to make things work for me, often in combination with options. Next to those strategies I'm actually starting (admittedly, a bit late) with algo trading and developing models to trade those alongside my discretionary trading. More later perhaps. If not, good luck to y'all!