Tag Archives: traders
An Easy Way To Improve Your Trading Success Without Risking Any Money
Demo trading is not suitable for everyone.
Most traders start their trading journey by demo trading, which is a sensible way to start. Why risk real money in the market if you don’t know what you are doing.
Demo trading is fine for new starters but some people find it difficult to stick to their trading plan as they are not trading with real money.
I had a real problem taking demo trading seriously when i first started, so i pretty much went on to live trading very quickly, and lost money, as most people do.
If you are like me and you have the same problem with demo as i did. You will probably be doing the same things i did.
Things like, not stopping yourself out of a bad trade on demo as you are not losing real money.
Sitting in bad trades and waiting till they come back. When they don’t come back you blow the account, but it does not matter because its only demo, and you can easily open another account.
Trading with too big a lot size to increase the demo quickly, to give yourself an ego boost, so you can convince yourself you are ready to go on to live trading.
Jumping in and out of trades, again to try and boost the account quickly to give yourself a false sense of trading success.
I have done it all, and this type of behavior is sub consciously reinforcing bad habits in your trading, which are very difficult to break when they are ingrained.
So whats the answer? Well the answer for me was to start live trading, and pay the market for my education, by giving it my money. But there is an alternative that could be the middle ground between live trading and demo trading.
Forex trading competitions.
I am sure many of you know about Forex trading competitions. Well if you don’t they are generally run by brokers or Forex related websites as a way of generating new business.
Anyone can enter these trading competitions for free. They give you a demo account, and the competition can last for a few weeks to a few months. They offer prize money, generally for the top 3 traders which can be anything from a few 100 dollars, to 1000s of dollars.
The good thing about using Forex trading competitions as a way of improving your trading success is you are accountable for your trades. You are trading against other traders so in order to progress up the list you have to stick to the plan. You cant trade recklessly as you do with demo trading.
The problem i found with demo trading is there is no reward at the end, so its difficult to take it seriously in my opinion. By using trading competitions there is something to play for, an objective, and that is to win. You can win a great prize or a lump of cash without risking any money at all.
Trading competitions are not for everyone though, but if you are having trouble with taking a demo account seriously, then entering a trading competition is a viable alternative in my opinion to trading with real money.
Thanks for visiting my blog, have a great day 🙂
3 Critical Tips For Choosing A Forex Broker
The importance of choosing the right forex broker is often underestimated. New traders with dreams of getting rich quick often look for features that are not important, and can even do more harm than good. In this article, we describe the three most important things to look for when choosing a forex broker.
1. Choose a broker who is subject to strong forex regulation.
The importance of this cannot be understated. Unregulated forex brokers are able to take advantage of you in ways you do not even realize. A prime example is slippage. Slippage is the difference between the price your trade is executed at, verses the price that was quoted when you placed the order. Slippage is a normal part of trading, because prices fluctuate all the time, and can easily move in the short time between when you place an order, and when it executes. However, unregulated brokers can pass the unfavorable slippage on to you, but keep the favorable slippage for themselves. This increases your transactions costs, and the effect can be significant over time, especially if you are a scalper.
The CFTC & NFA have arguably the strictest forex regulation in the world, and they audit their brokers regularly to make sure that slippage practices are neutral. This is just one of many ways that forex regulation can protect you as a trader.
2. Choose a broker who obeys the law.
This may seem obvious. However, it may surprise you to know that as of May 2015 there are only two forex brokers left in the United States who have never been fined by the regulators. The rest have been fined or banned from doing further business. Even in the face of strong regulation and regular audits, forex brokers still try to get away with cheating their clients. Do you want this kind of broker handling your money? Of course not. If you screen for United States forex brokers from this broker review page, you can easily see which brokers have been fined, and which have a clean regulatory record.
3. Choose a broker with low transaction costs.
Transaction costs are a lot lower than they used to be, and you may think this does not matter much to your trading anymore. If so, you are mistaken, and the following example illustrates why:
Say your starting account balance is $20,000. You have a simple trading system with a 30 pip stop loss and a 30 pip take profit level. You leverage 10:1 and you win 55% of your trades. Broker A offers a spread + commission of 2.5 pips, and Broker B offers a spread + commissions on only 0.7 pips. You make 450 roundtrip trades per year, which is just under two trades per day. The following chart shows the results after one year:
The chart shows that with Broker A:
• 83% of your gross profits get lost to transaction costs
• Your net profit for the year would be $4,500 or 22%
With Broker B:
• Only 23% of your gross profits get lost to transaction costs
• Your net profit for the year would be $20,700, or 104%
In this example, you are clearly better off with Broker B. The difference in transaction costs will have the greatest impact to your trading if you trade frequently, or have a narrow trading edge.
This article was kindly provided by Forex Scam Alerts, who provide advice about the risks of forex trading and how to avoid scams.
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Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day. 🙂
The Secret To Successful Forex Trading
What does the market do everyday?
If you think about it logically the market can do 3 things every day. It can go up, it can go down, it can go sideways, but it always does something. The market does not stay at the same price for 24 hours, its always moving, it never stays still, and if its moving, its moving for a reason, and if you understand why its moving, then there are opportunities to make money from those moves.
Most traders fail to understand why the market moves as it does.
They think price goes up because people are buying, they think price goes down because people are selling, and they think the market goes sideways because people are not buying or selling.
That can sometimes be the case, but its not always the case. Most traders react to what they see on the chart, if they see prices going up they buy. If they see prices going down they sell.
So why is it that 95% of traders lose money, if they are doing what the chart is telling them to do?
Why traders lose money in the market.
The reason most traders lose is because they buy when they should be selling, and they sell when they should be buying. The reason they lose is because they buy when prices go up, but because they don’t know why the price is going up, they don’t know how long to hold the trade for, when prices then reverse they get stopped out. The same applies if price is going down.
How much money would you be able to make if you knew why price was going up or down, and you knew how long you could hold your trade for to make maximum profit. Not because of buying or selling, but because of some other factor that’s making price move.
So you have had no success with buying or selling into a move, so you try to catch the bottom or the top of a move. Prices start going up, so you sell. Prices start going down so you buy. Prices keep going so you add to your losing trade, and prices still keep going. When you have been stopped out prices then reverse.
Why did you lose your money? For the same reason that you lost it before. Because you were buying when you should be have been selling, and you were selling when you should have been buying. Whether you are trend trading, or counter trend trading you need to know why prices are moving, and whether you should be buying or selling.
Its not just as simple as buyers or sellers. Prices move for many reasons, and you need to know that reason before you enter a trade, so you are on the right side of the move.
Understanding the Forex market.
I get a lot of calls from traders that think i have some sort of magic formula for trading the markets. A holy grail, or a guaranteed method for Forex trading success. Well guys i have to confess that i don’t have such a thing, as such a thing does not exist. No one knows with a 100% confidence what will happen next in the Forex market. But if you fully understand what is making prices move, and take high probability trades based on that understanding, then you can be a successful trader.
I am not the master of the market, or a Forex trading guru, and i cannot promise you untold riches by enrolling on my training and mentoring program, but what i can promise you is that i will teach you what you need to know in order for you to be successful, and if you devote the time required to learn what i teach, then you will be a consistently profitable trader.
Embrace new ideas and beliefs.
How i trade, and what i teach is very unlike what you may have come across before, and it can take some traders longer than others to fully embrace what i teach, and adapt their trading strategies accordingly. It can be a struggle for some traders to get in the mindset of how a professional Forex trader thinks, and how he trades.
If you have been trading for a number of years and losing money all that time, it can be hard to let go of your learned behavior, and look at the market in a different way. Some traders however, will see my stuff as a light bulb moment in their trading journey, and my teachings will literally transform their trading overnight.
So to any prospective students reading this, if you are considering coming on board with me, please have an open mind, and be prepared to embrace new ideas and thought processes about how the market works. What i have to say will turn your understanding of the market on its head, so be prepared for some shocking revelations.
Use your understanding to trade with confidence.
I trade Forex with confidence and an unrivaled understanding of the forces that drive the market. My entries and exits in the market are based on high probability reversal points.
Some of my entries and exits are so precise, that it does sometimes seem like the market is dancing to my tune, which has prompted some of my students to ask me if i have a contact on the inside, someone feeding me information on where to enter and exit the market. 🙂
It does sometimes look that way, but i can assure you i do not have a contact on the inside, and there is no slight of hand involved.
Everything i trade and teach is based in what the chart is telling me to do. I am not going to go into detail about how i trade, and how i teach, but its all based on market knowledge. All the information you need to do what i do is contained within the chart.
Don’t waste time and effort with free education.
There are many Forex training companies, or individuals that will give away free information, or make videos of how you should trade the market. There are 1000’s of free videos on You Tube that you can spend years trawling through. I respect those people for taking the time to put together training videos to help people learn how to trade Forex. But the sad fact is they are a waste of your time and effort.
You have heard of the saying you don’t get something for nothing, well its true 99% of the time. You can spend a few years going through all this stuff on You Tube, and don’t get me wrong, its entertaining stuff, and you will learn a lot of the basics, but as far as making money goes, there will be very little in there that will help you in that regard.
The secret to successful Forex trading.
I am going to give you something now that will help you in your journey to becoming a profitable trader. This is a very important part of what i do, and in my opinion is the real secret to successful Forex trading.
Most people think the Forex market is random, but its not. I have been in this business long enough to know that no matter how random it looks, its not random. The market is very structured. The same things happen, time and time again in the market, and when you understand the market as i do, you can easily pick up on these recurring events, and use them to make a profit from the market.
This is what i teach you in my training course. I teach you to recognise the recurring events in the market, and how to profit from them. And i am not talking about chart patterns, like head and shoulders. Although head and shoulders are a very good pattern, if you know how to trade them correctly.
I am not talking about buying and selling at trend lines, or support and resistance levels. I am not talking about Elliot Wave, or Harmonics, or Moving Averages, or MACD or Bollinger Bands or any other indicator that you can find to give you trade signals. What i am talking about here are the guaranteed moves in the market that happen every day.
Use what you know about the market to make money.
This may seem like a strange statement, but try and think about what i have just said.
Use what you know about the market to make money. Think about what you know about the market, and what makes price move. What do you really know, with the highest probability? Work out what you are most confident about, and trade based on that.
If you are unsure about how price is going to move then don’t trade. You need to focus on probability to be successful. Be proactive in your trading not reactive. Analise the market for probability, and trade when the probability of a successful trade is most in your favor.
Thanks for visiting my site, and have a great day. 🙂
Volume Spread Analysis (VSA)
This article was kindly provided by Leonardo Barata of analyticalvsa.com who is an active VSA trader. VSA is a trading method that is favored by many traders. I do not trade VSA myself but you may find it interesting. If you like this article please share it. This article is for entertainment value only, and is not a recommendation to trade VSA.
What is volume spread analysis?
Volume Spread Analysis is a methodology originated in early 1900s, by Richard D. Wyckoff (1873-1934), a successful Wall Street trader and later known as the man who made a fortune in the 1929 market crash. Other very successful traders such as Richard Ney would use this methodology as well, only under a different name. This methodology, which is also called the Wyckoff method, was put in more modern terms by Tom Williams, a former syndicate trader based in London, in the 1960s. For the deep insights on the markets that it provides, and the fact that it can be applied to virtually any liquid market, VSA made a name for itself in trading communities.
Understanding VSA.
To understand what VSA is about, we must first understand who are the people who are making money in the markets, and how are they doing it. Like in any other business, there are specialists: some traders specialize in energy futures, others may specialize in the Japanese Yen pairs, others day-trading forex or stocks, and so on. And who are them? These are institutional traders, pit traders, syndicate traders and market-makers, which make a living speculating on the markets. If only we could know what those specialists are doing, then we could trade almost anything without having to do all the fundamental analysis and without looking at all the factors that influence the prices. Well, it turns out we can, and this was exactly Wyckoff’s breakthrough!
The role of volume.
The quantity that represents the activity in the market and is widely available (though not widely used impressively) is the volume. And one thing about the traders who consistently make money in the markets over the years, is that they’ve been able to accumulate a lot of it, and will make large trades to earn a significant amount of money for them. So the volume is the starting point of our analysis, and will show if there is a significant activity (or lack of) in the market, which will be very important to determine what the professionals (smart money) are doing.
Spread’s importance.
But Volume Spread Analysis as the name implies, not only uses volume but also the spread (bar’s high – low). The bar’s spread gives clues as to what type of activity is happening: for example, a low-spread up bar with high volume, indicates there was a lot of selling by the professionals and buying by the public: they prevented the price from going upper by dumping their positions in the market, which the public was happy to absorb. Another example: if there was an widespread down bar with high volume, and the next bars are up, it means there was actually buying on that down bar. Why would the prices go up if that was true selling? The smart money uses the public euphoria to dump or to open their positions, as not to turn the prices against themselves.
Charts examples:
The end of the 2008 stocks bear market: Right before the bear market ended, there was accumulation (professional buying) evident in Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indexes. Signals of distribution were also evident before the bear market started in 2008.
The gold top: right before the bear market in gold, and after all the buying euphoria by the public, gold finally collapsed after signs of heavy distribution.
Learn more and get VSA indicators on our volume spread analysis website.
About the author: Leonardo Barata is a forex and stocks VSA trader and developer.