Hello, my name is Hobart and I am about to embark on a journey. My goal is to learn the Forex market from scratch. The hope is that I'll find something that excites me other than playing golf. It's become quite clear that golf will not pay the bills; I can't stand my sales job, and things need to change.

Obviously this is going to be a difficult task and it may never lead to something I can do as a career but at least I will have tried. In no way am I writing this for validation or any other vein reason. Simply put I'm writing this so that I can always come back to see what my thoughts were during this process. Like anything sometimes you'll need to get back to the basics and I hope this will provide me with a sort of 'live journal'.

To begin I want to state that my knowledge of this market is next to nil, I've been aware of it for years but never bothered to learn anything about it. Previously I've been licensed with a Series 7 as well as the 66 so I've always had an interest in the markets but never enjoyed working with clients so I changed directions. That being said though I've always had an interest in working within the markets in some way.

When posting here I will be brutally honest with myself, you as a reader may look at my decisions from time to time in an unfavorable light, that is okay but if nothing else please try to keep the comments constructive in nature and positive. That being said though I will be posting any information I find useful in my education, anything that happens during demo and live trading (when I get there) as well as all reasoning and results of every trade. Win or lose, I'll do it in public.

To start my education I've decided on three resources that I will consider my 'elementary school' education. To begin my education I've begun studying the training on www.forexonlinelearning.com. So far it has been very helpful in explaining the basics. In the past 5 days I've made it through approximately half the material and taken roughly 2 notepads worth of notes. I'll be working to try and digest all of this course by the end of this weekend.

At this point I've also ordered the following books:

Economics Explained
by Peter Maunder

How To Read The Financial Page
by Michael Brett

Technical Trading Online (Wiley Online Trad...
by Jerold Roth; Trader X

The New Elliott Wave Rule - Achieve Definitive Wave Counts
TS Hennessy

My goal with these books will be to add to my knowledge base and keep my mind focused on the markets, my goal will be to dedicate 2 hours o each of these books Tuesday-Friday and one hour on Monday.

Monday morning will be spent reviewing my notes from www.forexonlinelearning.com. In addition I will begin working through all of the training provided on www.babypips.com on Tuesday morning at 8am,. Tuesdays thru Thursdays will be spent from 8am - noon dedicated to my Forex education before I start my income job. Fridays will be spent from 8am - 3pm on FX education.

Although the training on BabyPips should only take me about a week the combination with the books will push that out to 2-3 weeks. Throughout this process I will update this page with what I've learned and the insights I've had, again so that I can always go back to basics.

Upon completion of the BabyPips training I'll be moving on to the plan outlined on www.prop-traders.net

Started the above mentioned sections today at 2pm, finally closing it up now just before 10pm. Learned quite a bit regarding fundamental analysis but see that this is an endless learning process and that gets me motivated to consume more information.

Will need to look for a tutorial on how to read and interpret the COT report better though. The information on www.forexonlinelearning.com is good but nowhere near detailed enough for my tastes. Was able to locate the report online though and sign up to receive the report to my e-mail immediately upon release.

Early on if I had to say one way or another how I am feeling regarding my personal style I've come up with the following:

Fundamental Analysis will be used to identify entry points in to specific pairs.

Technical Analysis will then be needed to determine the appropriate time to enter each trade and take profits or curtail losses. With regards to the technical analysis I will focus on the 5m chart and look to confirm trends using the 15m and 1h charts.

Early technical indicators that I will be focusing on include:

Relative Strength Index (RSI)
Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD)
Bollinger Bands

I'll also be trying to learn more about Elliott Wave Theory and in that interest I will be replacing the book

The New Elliott Wave Rule - Achieve Definitive Wave Counts
TS Hennessy

with

Elliott Wave Principle: Key to Market Behavior
by Robert R. Prechter, Jr.& A.J. Frost

before moving on to the previously mentioned book.

From here I will complete the following sections on www.forexonlinelearning.com

Hey Paddlepuss,

I'll definitely be doing some testing with demo accounts on longer time frame charts as well. As far as what I wrote above that is just my initial ideas about how I will operate. At the end of the day though whatever TF helps me produce the desired results will be the one I work with. Thanks for the suggestions.

Hobart

Perhaps the following books could be of interest to you:
Market Wizards (all 3 of them - 3rd one is not as good, but there are one or two very good interviews
Reminiscences of a stock operator
Way of the Turtle

Just my opinion, but it looks like you are over-complicating things. Trading should be really simple. The more variables you add, the more convoluted and less robust things become.

Have you started with a real account yet? If not, I would suggest starting an account with an amount of real money that is big enough that you would feel pain by losing it, but not so big that it affects your lifestyle.

I see you also list a lot of economics book. I can't remember much of economics from university, but I do remember the name John Maynard Keynes. After I started trading, I found a quote of his which goes something like this 'The markets can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.'

Regarding demo - I'd avoid it at all costs. The emotional impact is completely different. Generally with demo if something doesn't go as planned, it's pretty easy to start fresh. Real trading doesn't work that way. Perseverance is absolutely critical in this game.

You can start at OANDA with as little as $100 and they offer the most flexible position sizing. To date, you have probably spent more on books.

Edit: Just saw your comment on getting burned on those two trades. With OANDA you can trade in position sizes of 1 unit. Thus if you do get burned the effect is very small. Initially, I always tested my trades by betting 1 unit.