How to find extremely strong and accurate levels (Must Read!!).I know how to properly identify support and resistance levels that are backed by recent supply or demand. By this I mean, supply is what traders consider to be selling power that makes a currency value go down. Demand is the total opposite as it shows its self as support and encourages a currency's value to go up. With that said, support and resistance or supply and demand are perhaps the single most important concepts in any form of trading. You can easily find these levels if you accurately use past price data (candlesticks) as a reference point to current levels that may or may not break to find the best place to place entries and stop loss. Trading support and resistance levels are so abundant that you can go all the way back to 2010 and pick ANYWHERE to plot lines only to find out that they formed a perfect support or resistance level in the current times of 2018! This is the number reason why it's important to use the most current S&R levels as a reference point to where price is most likely to break through or bounce off. This is from my tradingview. (www.tradingview.com)
Elietheforextraitor
High reward to risk ratio on GBPCADI took three previous trades on gbpcad and was stopped out all three for a .24 lost. My setup told my to stop trading for the week and to re-evaluate the charts today. Here are my current setups this week as I am currently 30 pips in profits on a gbpcad trade that I broke even on. Let's see what next week holds!!
GBPCAD
What makes a good breakout trade? I have found out that the best breakout trades occur when a trader does the following things:
1. Finds an area of consolidation under and area of significant support if you are selling and or above resistance if you are buying.
2. Split your position sizing into 3rds so you would be able to enter at least three times because there is a very big chance for false breakouts. For example, lets say you see a breakout trade oppotunity and would like to trade a micro lot at .01 lot with 25 pips. Instead of placing the whole trade as a .01 lot, take it and divide it by three so you would be able to trade .003 lot at 25 pip stop loss and still risk the same amount as the .01 lot.
3. Time your trades!! I only place breakout trades when the market closes (its possible to do so when you have Oanda) because that is where I notice breakouts are more powerful and less choppy.
OANDA:EURUSD
When to add to a trading set-up/plan and when to leave it alone.It can be a very daunting task to create a trading plan/strategy that fits you without conflict. There are a lot of obstacles that inhibit the average trader from leaving a profitable trading plan or strategy as it is. Even I struggle with this which is why I have decided to publish this article. After much reflection, I have come with a few metrics you can use to determine if you should change your trading plan or not.
Mental Capacity
Mental Capacity, to me, is perhaps the most important aspects of trading. It easily differentiates traders that are absolutely determined to become successful and traders that are bound to become scam traders and losers (no pun intended). Mental capacity resonates itself in a traders ability to deal with traumatic trading experienced such as drawdowns and losing trades. A lot of traders don’t understand that trading is a game of probability so you have to make a lot of money when you’re right and lose a little when you’re wrong. If you make 4X the money you lose, you’ll have to lose more than 80% of the time to not be profitable. Understanding and having mental capacity allows a trader the ability to ignore irrational phobia of thinking that their strategy is not working. If your trading plan/strategy fits you mentally then you should have the mental capacity to accept all the things that can happen to you trading wise. If not, then it’s time for you to change it. Trading is a mental game, always.
Objective
As much as I love the mental side of trading, I do have to admit that objectives are very important in trading as well. If you’re trading a strategy that is not fulfilling your objective (based on reasonable probabilities) then it’s time to switch components of your strategy. I hate to admit this as I am a big believer in having a “Mind like water.” When it comes to trading but if you have an ever burning passionate desire to make 4X what you risk and also to follow the trend then it’s not recommended to deny yourself of this desire as it will one day influence you to give in and break your trading plan. The solution to this, in my opinion, is to take your objective and create your plan/ strategy around it. For example, if I have a goal of making at least 100 pips per 25 pips that I risk then maybe I should trade on a higher time frame while using psychological support and resistance levels. The moral of this part of the article is to exemplify the fact that any undesired occurrence a traders mental capacity can’t handle can easily be resolved by having an objective ( not having a 30% DD) and a solution (maybe I should hedge my trades or buy options) that can help you acquire that objective. The solution in return will let you know that it’s time for you to change your strategy, but if it doesn’t resolve the objective then keep it as is.
Compatibility
I’m going to try to keep this part simple mostly because it’s somewhat related to the objective side of this article but at the same time is a very important part to keeping and tossing your trading plan. No matter how much money you are making in trading, if you aren’t compatible with your trading plan then it will all be in vain. It isn’t logical for a trader who loves waiting to be a scalper and vice versa because when this happens it makes the trader feel that they have to change instead of the trading strategy. It has to be the other way around! Trust me, I learned this the hard way because I always got jealous of high leveraged scalpers making 1k days while I was making 2% per month if I got lucky. When I tried copying them it forced me to change into timeframes/trading strategies that I was not compatible with. My advice to any trader struggling with this is to love yourself and you’re trading because it’s your decisions and perspective that determine profitability.
OANDA:EURUSD
How to find high probability trends on any currency pair.This is a very descriptive example on how a trader can find high probability trades that are very unlikely to reverse. The markets are full of fractals so this strategy should be good for any timeframe but I highly suggest you use these timeframes as follows. If you place trades using the 4hr, use the daily for trend (example on the chart). If you place trades using the daily time frame (recommended) use the weekly time frame for the trend by using the same exact method but on the open, high, low, and close, of the weekly charts. Please leave a lime and comment as this encourages me to create new content for you guys every Friday. Feel free to message me. FX:EURUSD
Three things Mark Douglas taught me (Pt3)Trading Strategy
The trading strategy of any trader is one that should fit him or her. There really isn’t much to this section as a plethora of trading systems can be on the internet. What matters the most is that your system has a risk reward ratio of at least 1/4. If you desire a profitable trading strategy I highly suggest Michael Covel's and Rayner Teo's style of trading. They are great traders.
Please check out my other article as well!
Three things Mark Douglas taught me. (Pt1)Psychology
Psychology, like anything in life, plays a big role on how humans function. It affects the way we think, act, talk, and so on but when it comes to trading it affects us, oddly enough, in only one way and that’s through our emotions. Any experienced (or shall I say inexperienced) trader knows and understands the waves of overwhelming emotions that resonates based off of a trade that’s a loser. These emotions range from sadness, depression, anger, and the list goes on. The reason for this, if I’m not mistaken, is because of the pure fact that the money we use to trade with is hard earned and even when it’s not it’s something that rightfully belongs to us. Human nature is something that’s extremely difficult to change because it's part of our genetic make-up that has allowed us to stay for so long by encouraging us to stay away from things that we don’t understand or that will hurt us. Trading psychology is definitely the hardest thing to master when it comes to trading because your psyche works against you when you're being hurt mentally (losing trades) and works for you when you're euphoric (winning trades). As if this couldn’t get any worse, a hurting mentality will tap you into a pool of past failures or misfortunes that have happened to you in life and convince you to think you're not any good as a trader and that your strategy is useless. This baffled me when I learned this from Mark Douglas because it wasn’t something that I realized. This fact is very important because it means you and only you alone are able to break this cycle of assuming a bad trade means a bad setup. A losing trade has absolutely no correlation to you as a person so you shouldn’t assume that you're the reason why you have a losing trade. According to Mark Douglas, it only takes one person around the world to negate your edge. This basically means that when you're buying, someone around the world is selling. When there are more bears (sellers) than buyers (bulls) you're long trade is no longer able to be profitable and stops you out depending on your risk. The markets are full of newcomers and unprofitable traders that agree on the wrong thing together and thus makes the impossible or improbable possible. This gets even more tricky because it makes you, the person on the other side of the trade, feel unsuccessful. This is not true! A losing trade does not represent a bad setup but because our phycology wants to protect us from losing money (what hurts us) it tricks us into thinking that we are unsuccessful as traders. The solution to this is to simply accept the risk of the trade by trading a strategy or setup that is profitable through backtesting. Mr Douglas implored that back testing should be done through 20 trade sample size to give accurate results. When I first started trading back in late 2016 I would always hear profitable traders talk about trading psychology and not trading strategies. I never knew why until I tool Mark Douglas’ principals into consideration and for that I am grateful.
(see pt2)