I'm new to Forex trading and looking for some advice

Hey all,
I'm new to forex trading and I'm just looking for some advice and guidance, I'm Lewis and I'm from the UK and currently a final year student (I study film and philosophy), I have no real experience in trading, I have traded on a demo account for the last couple of weeks, but I know trading for real is different, so I'm just looking for guidance or help, to help me learn the market quicker or some information I can study to improve my trading skills. I will attach a image of the trading I have done so far on my demo account, so far I have just been listening to the news and following what they have been saying and depending what they have been saying I buy or sell. I have no idea how to predict what the graph will be next etc I have tried but failed. Anyway if anyone can help me or give me guidance to improve my trading skills quicker that would be great.

Hi there...

There are a few things you'd have to decide first..

Expert advisors or manual trading or both.
Fundamental or technical or both.
Long term trading or short term or both.

There are more - these are just a few I can think of now. Decisions I had to make to suit my lifestyle.

Not a huge fan of demo accounts - they don't make you deal with the emotional aspect (everyone feels they will trade exactly the same with real money - They don't) Rather open a cent account, if you do well there then proceed to a micro or standard account.

I am certainly not promoting or anything of the sort (moderators please remove this next sentence if I overstep the line)
Babypips offer an excellent 'school' where you can learn from basics to a bit more advanced stuff, just google them.


I hope this is of some use..
Good luck to you.

first of all don't use eToro. They are horrible.

Start from the top, drill your way down..


FINANCIAL GOAL

.. decide how much you want to earn from Forex... will determine type of trader you wanna be, the Method you use..


DAY TRADING vs SWING TRADING

...Day Trading most popular..very short-term intra-day trading...affected by a lot of volatility...most difficult means of earning..

...Swing Trading, not as popular..focuses on the bigger picture, larger trends...trading not everyday/week but when trades arise, more than compensate, providing steady long-term earning growth..

https://www.myfxbook.com/members/DRFXTRADING/duane/1079693


DEMO vs REAL ACCOUNT

Save your money....stay on the Demo, find a Method that works...when it begins to meet that target..Real Account


BROKERS

After that is done, then you can decide on brokers and the other stuff...


NEWS

Day Trading...news is used to capture small moves..Swing Trading...not necessary...Candlestick Signals will reflect/anticipate the news, most of which is volatile anyway (I am a formal Central Bank Economist)


Good luck..

https://www.fxstreet.com/ is a good place to get news and ideas. https://www.investopedia.com/ is a good site for definitions of everything financial

RSTrading posted:
Hi there...

There are a few things you'd have to decide first..

Expert advisors or manual trading or both.
Fundamental or technical or both.
Long term trading or short term or both.

There are more - these are just a few I can think of now. Decisions I had to make to suit my lifestyle.

Not a huge fan of demo accounts - they don't make you deal with the emotional aspect (everyone feels they will trade exactly the same with real money - They don't) Rather open a cent account, if you do well there then proceed to a micro or standard account.

I am certainly not promoting or anything of the sort (moderators please remove this next sentence if I overstep the line)
Babypips offer an excellent 'school' where you can learn from basics to a bit more advanced stuff, just google them.


I hope this is of some use..
Good luck to you.

Hey,
At the moment I am trading on my own so manual trading and I'm doing short term trading, I wait until the market spikes for example and then sell my shares, I will check out Babypips, anyway thank you for your advice.

Post_Tropical posted:
first of all don't use eToro. They are horrible.

Hey,
Do you advice using another broker? and what is the difference between eToro and another broker?

DRFXTRADING posted:
Start from the top, drill your way down..


FINANCIAL GOAL

.. decide how much you want to earn from Forex... will determine type of trader you wanna be, the Method you use..


DAY TRADING vs SWING TRADING

...Day Trading most popular..very short-term intra-day trading...affected by a lot of volatility...most difficult means of earning..

...Swing Trading, not as popular..focuses on the bigger picture, larger trends...trading not everyday/week but when trades arise, more than compensate, providing steady long-term earning growth..

https://www.myfxbook.com/members/DRFXTRADING/duane/1079693


DEMO vs REAL ACCOUNT

Save your money....stay on the Demo, find a Method that works...when it begins to meet that target..Real Account


BROKERS

After that is done, then you can decide on brokers and the other stuff...


NEWS

Day Trading...news is used to capture small moves..Swing Trading...not necessary...Candlestick Signals will reflect/anticipate the news, most of which is volatile anyway (I am a formal Central Bank Economist)


Good luck..

Hey,
Thank you for your advice it has been very helpful, I just want to start to earn £100 profit every two weeks (start off small), day trading is more my style, so is there any secret to earning big profits over time or is it just practise? And what brokers do you recommend I set up my demo account on?

RSTrading posted:

Expert advisors or manual trading or both.
Fundamental or technical or both.
Long term trading or short term or both.

My advice:

1) Manual trading, forget EA's unless you want to lose money.
2) Both are important. I use technical to open my positions on better prices but fundamentals play the major role.
3) The market is irrational on short term. Long term is the way to go to make money.

240Z posted:
https://www.fxstreet.com/ is a good place to get news and ideas. https://www.investopedia.com/ is a good site for definitions of everything financial

Thanks mate, I will check the websites out.

topastop posted:

RSTrading posted:

Expert advisors or manual trading or both.
Fundamental or technical or both.
Long term trading or short term or both.

My advice:

1) Manual trading, forget EA's unless you want to lose money.
2) Both are important. I use technical to open my positions on better prices but fundamentals play the major role.
3) The market is irrational on short term. Long term is the way to go to make money.

Hey mate,
At the moment I haven't got enough capital to invest for the long term, thats why I might invest short term so I can increase my capital to invest long term. What do you mean by technical and fundamental? And at the moment I am using Matertrader 4, do you recommend using Matertrader 4? It is confusing at the moment to get my head around Matertrader 4, I was finding it easier to buy and sell on the actual broker's website, thanks for the advice mate.

Thank you for your advice it has been very helpful, I just want to start to earn £100 profit every two weeks (start off small), day trading is more my style, so is there any secret to earning big profits over time or is it just practise? And what brokers do you recommend I set up my demo account on?

Well, you said that Day Trading is more your style, but that £100 target can be achieved Swing Trading only twice per month without the hassle of trading everyday. Take this table as an example, assuming you start of with £1000.








You can risk a moderate 5% per trade twice per month, targeting 100-200 Pips per trade, which is the average range of most Swing Trading methods. Assuming the best case scenario of 200 Pips earned on each trade with no losses, this can add up very quickly in a few months. Even with losses along the way, significant rate of return on your money will still not be far away. You achieve fast turnover but you expose your capital to less market risk by only trading these larger moves that have a Higher Probability of success - moves which arise around 2 per month, in sync with your profit goal.


Well, not sure if there is a 'secret' to large profits, but I think the more you focus on the larger trends away from the spikes and short-term volatility of the lower time frames, you can achieve more long-term, stable rate of gains. If you trade this way, however, its gonna require a lot more patience relative to Day Trading since these trades dont arise very frequently.


Yes practice is important...Once you find a method that works - one that exists already or one you develop - then you will need to practice over and over to ensure it becomes 2nd nature/iron out all the kinks before going Live.

As for brokers, probably depends on the method you choose. But FXCM is pretty good for Demo, as they dont expire, putting less pressure on you to open a Live Account (major marketing ploy of brokers)


All the best.

@Lswilliams

The best broker for you (small manual trades) be Oanda. They also display information like position values which helps you make better informed choices than the MT brokers do and display more information relevent to your positions.

Forget about news. By the time you see it on TV or the web it's way to late. And thus you have to guess the result before the release and then predict the markets result to the news. That's a double guess, not a strategy you could build a future on. In these heavily manipulated markets the news is what is what the people in power wants it to be anyway. A better way to look at it, is that it's scheduled volatility as apposed to unscheduled volatility.

Lastly, the prediction game is a very expensive one. I know quite a few professional traders, people who do nothing else for a living. And in the group I know one, just one that can actually call the market with any form of accuracy. The rest trade reactively, with no attempt at prediction.

For what you want to do, google Jason Stapleton, follow him for a while. I'm not a great fan of structural trading in the age of the computer, but at least you'll learn to read charts without having to bother with news or indicators.

There are as many opinions as there are traders but since there are many ways to trade, all of the information that you get on this or any forum will be perfectly meaningless. Babypips, is good for technical trading, Investopidia is more general but you can learn the language from stocks to futures.

Unless you have lots of money, trading the news (traditional fundamental trading) is only good for long term. By the time the “news” hits the publishers, it is already old news. Big corporation pay lots of money to get the news while it still is news.

However, there is a third way to trade that is kind of a subset of fundamental trading called systemic trading. This system pretty much requires a robot of some type as it was designed for them. When someone tells you that robots only lose money, they are talking from their experience which is very limited. Robots have different skills or abilities than we humans do. The programs that try to make robots trade like humans mostly have failed but when you make a trading system for robots to use that take advantage of the computers strengths then it is all different.

To learn more about systemic systems go to TheSafeInvestor.com and for a more academic study, forex-assistant.com A trainer will save you a lot of time and money. There are two way to pay for that education, pay a trainer and learn from his mistakes or pay for your own mistakes. In my experience a trainer is cheaper.

When you hear people putting down robots, please take a moment to think this through, a computer beat the reigning grandmaster of chess (Deep Blue), Watson from IBM soundly defeated the two best Jeopardy players of all time. Computers do surgery in places doctors can't reach, can take man to the moon and explore mars. And even more impressive, computers can do US taxes returns and actually get it right, no human has ever accomplished this.

Don't listen to the fears of others, robots are the future of trading, already some 70% of trades are made by computers. You're not living in the 1900s anymore, learn the MT4 and make friends with robots, they are really nice once you get to know them.

Bob

Lswilliams posted:

Hey mate,
At the moment I haven't got enough capital to invest for the long term, thats why I might invest short term so I can increase my capital to invest long term. What do you mean by technical and fundamental? And at the moment I am using Matertrader 4, do you recommend using Matertrader 4? It is confusing at the moment to get my head around Matertrader 4, I was finding it easier to buy and sell on the actual broker's website, thanks for the advice mate.

I think you should consider to open a cent account then.
Metatrader 4 is good to start.

Please read the following link regarding some differences between technical and fundamental analysis: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/131.asp

Also, as someone mentioned before, please take a look at this website: https://www.babypips.com/school

Regards

DRFXTRADING posted:
Thank you for your advice it has been very helpful, I just want to start to earn £100 profit every two weeks (start off small), day trading is more my style, so is there any secret to earning big profits over time or is it just practise? And what brokers do you recommend I set up my demo account on?

Well, you said that Day Trading is more your style, but that £100 target can be achieved Swing Trading only twice per month without the hassle of trading everyday. Take this table as an example, assuming you start of with £1000.








You can risk a moderate 5% per trade twice per month, targeting 100-200 Pips per trade, which is the average range of most Swing Trading methods. Assuming the best case scenario of 200 Pips earned on each trade with no losses, this can add up very quickly in a few months. Even with losses along the way, significant rate of return on your money will still not be far away. You achieve fast turnover but you expose your capital to less market risk by only trading these larger moves that have a Higher Probability of success - moves which arise around 2 per month, in sync with your profit goal.


Well, not sure if there is a 'secret' to large profits, but I think the more you focus on the larger trends away from the spikes and short-term volatility of the lower time frames, you can achieve more long-term, stable rate of gains. If you trade this way, however, its gonna require a lot more patience relative to Day Trading since these trades dont arise very frequently.


Yes practice is important...Once you find a method that works - one that exists already or one you develop - then you will need to practice over and over to ensure it becomes 2nd nature/iron out all the kinks before going Live.

As for brokers, probably depends on the method you choose. But FXCM is pretty good for Demo, as they dont expire, putting less pressure on you to open a Live Account (major marketing ploy of brokers)


All the best.

Hey mate thanks for the advice, I will be looking into swing trading and also FXCM, I haven't got huge capital at the moment since I am student so I will probably invest in short term trading to earn more capital then go into swing trading.

NO DONT DO IT!

Even if its 1 cent of your money...dont start trading anything with Real Money.

You dont have a plan of trading as yet, you have no track record on Demo, so essentially you will be experimenting without any clear strategy. You are more likely to lose your money which have a more negative psychological impact than if it were Demo money-no matter how small that Real money is.

Day Trading to get your Capital up sounds like a good plan on paper. But Day Trading by itself pushes you into several bad habits that are hard to break away from - habits that will make it difficult to Swing Trade - and which are the main cause behind 95% failure rate.

-- The 'Need' to Trade /Impatience- seeing the market everyday will make you want to jump in even if there isnt anything profitable, especially if you have the pressure of a monetary target in mind.

-- Fear of Trading - Because intraday movements are fast, you can lose on a trade within a matter of minutes/hours. This is a very short time period for you to recover psychologically, making you fear going back into the market.

-- Conspiracy Theories- when these habits and losses begin, chances are you will begin to believe a lot of what you hear people using to justify their losses


                        1. Brokers are evil
                        2. Stop-Hunting
                        3. Market Controlled by this person, that person
                        

The reality of the market is that Day Trading is a very difficult means of earning money because of how volatile the market is at such a micro level. Economists who predict exchange rate movements and patterns do so with Monthly, Quarterly and Annual Data because of their reliability relative to short-term data. Trying to find any consistent behaviour during such a small period of time in a market affected by so many factors, therefore, is going to be an extremely difficult, if not elusive goal.

I have nothing personal against Day Traders, since I used to be one of them. However, we have been misled to believe that large amounts of money can/should be made in a very short period of time, whenever we want to. This belief leads us to constantly experiment with hundreds of methods in search of what works, but with little results.

Spend your money and your time learning everything about the market, Day Trading vs Swing, Demo vs Live, various strategies.

I don't work with EA's. I don't believe them. When yo trade by yourself and make a mistake - you can learn on it. But how can you teach the program not to make this mistake again?

ysam1991 posted:
I don't work with EA's. I don't believe them. When yo trade by yourself and make a mistake - you can learn on it. But how can you teach the program not to make this mistake again?

A programming patch.

Bob