Real Forex thread. Major pair landscape changed quite a bit since Brexit...

Real Forex thread. Major pair landscape changed quite a bit since Brexit. I'm suggesting those familiar with the Forex post insights, outlooks, charts and pair picks.

I'll start with my most basic stance on the big 4 currencies since the Brexit. Generally I build positions with a 5-30 day outlook.
USD: Slightly bullish for pairs with tight interest rate swaps. Usually avoid pairs with loose swaps.
EUR: Bearish for pairs with loose interest rate swaps. Usually avoid other pairs.
GBP: Avoid except bullish against JPY and EUR.
JPY: Bearish.

My biggest problem is I stay too far ahead of the curve. Since Brexit I've netted 5% all shorting the Yen.

Other urls found in this thread:

forums.babypips.com/newbie-island/45414-understanding-price-action-chris-capre.html
youtube.com/watch?v=kprorGhESKk
youtube.com/watch?v=8xyUaSY4ZMg
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

SGDJPY has a nice swap, approaching a bit of resistance though.

Here's the GBPJPY looking particularly dangerous.

USDJPY looking sharp on the 1-hour.

ATM AUDJPY is my favorite pair,

>Forex
literally a bucket shop

stay away or trade currency futures

I'm currently trying to learn currencies. Picked up some "Chart Reading MasterClass," "Beat the Forex Dealer," and "How to Make a Living Trading Forex," as well as learning through babypips.

Are there any literature you would recommend or is it all about experience?

forums.babypips.com/newbie-island/45414-understanding-price-action-chris-capre.html

Currently long GBPUSD with some profit locked, targeting 1.43271, added a short position on EURUSD.
The general feeling i'm getting is that the weak GBP thing is overdone

Thank you.

>Are there any literature you would recommend or is it all about experience?
Books are good food for thought but in my opinion nothing increases accuracy or profit margins like practice does. I found charting books to be not very effective.

>Currently long GBPUSD
I see you like to live dangerously. That's a crazy shot taking it all the way to 1.43. I'd go to 1.35 tops for the foreseeable future because I think it'll have a tendency to drop to 1.30 for a while.
>The general feeling i'm getting is that the weak GBP thing is overdone
I've had the same idea.

>added a short position on EURUSD.
Living dangerously indeed, are you trading billion dollar positions or something? Because at the moment I have no clue what to do with the EURUSD.

>have no clue what to do with the EURUSD.

Short it all the way down to 1.09147, sell on dips. I have added another short from 1.10833 and another one now on AUDJPY (not convinced on this one tho) targeting 74.635

>Disclaimer: my win rate is around 15%, i usually get away with that because i tend to anticipate huge counter moves and adding positions all the way up/down

Btw i normally enjoy these kind of threads, very useful as well in general.
Too bad they get flooded with kids and shitposters very quickly.
Sad!

>Short it all the way down to 1.09147, sell on dips.
I don't feel comfortable with the nature of that risk, I like to keep my account low-maintenance. AUDJPY on the other hand is a risk I understand.

you're welcome

And now comes the fun part
Gold long, in for the long haul and another long on gbpusd.

Go big or go home

Stopped on cable, still got 6 positions running, up 10.5% of my total equity. Might grab another eurusd short

>And now comes the fun part
>Gold long, in for the long haul and another long on gbpusd.
It really is a no brainer isn't it? My best guess is gold does >$3,000 before 2015. I'm confident but not as much so on the GBP, I think it'll at least perform over the next year and a half compared to where it's at now.
EURUSD short seems like a decent pick, the USD is in a sort of a limbo, I think leaning bullish. I prefer JPY short.

>>$3,000 before 2015
2025

I'm all about the easy pickings but timing is tough for the USD these days. For the most part the USD looks built to perform bullish for a few months or so.

Eh man you were right on EURUSD it seems. Got stopped out on both my positions plus the one pyramided on GBPUSD and AUDJPY. Only -1% of my account since i had it all moved on BE

First position on GBPUSD still going fine, Gold is still alive and i also got myself a nice short on GBPAUD earlier, already up 3R on that baby. I'll keeping it until 1.67891 and reload all the way down if it keeps moving.
Why the volumes btw? As far as i know FxPro provides only tick volume on mt4, never found it useful.
But i see you trade price momentum divergencies. Only daily or lower?

If you get stopped out here on eur/usd you should this instant stop trading as you have no clue of what's going on and how to trade. That's only for your own good.

Oh shit, Warren Buffett is in the house tonight watch out kids, this playa makes the $$$$$$

>My best guess is gold does >$3,000 before 2015

No idea senpai. 14.23% we get from current levels to 1412.04 from today's low, that's all i need to know. Which means 85.77% of getting stopped out, either at BE or with a loss for me

It wouldn't be a proper trading thread without that one guy who always has to stroke his ego.

Look at any chart. Any, I mean it, 5min, 60min, 240min even daily. All you're going to see is a trading range, right now price is at the nearly top of the trading range, guess what happens at the tops/bottoms of trading ranges 80% of the time? They go back.

It has been happening essentially entire time ever since the brexit vote.
The price has a lot of trouble going over 50% of sell off, even if it were magically to go higher, chances are it's not going to go much of anywhere, bear market for as long as the price is below break down point.

Currently price hasn't even tested the previous multiple tops(after brexit pullback), by far and is right now being rejected from 88% of yesterdays selloff. Guess what that means, more TRADING RANGE.

Look at today rally, if you can't see it getting exhausted with every push up and it's already 3! pushes up, which often follows a pullback of at least 2 legs down(at worst for bears a trading range on 5min chart).
But sure, what do I know, keep on losing money for all I care.

Of course i'm never going to see a spreadsheet or a proper backtest substanciating your wild claims.

>Look at today rally, if you can't see it getting exhausted with every push up and it's already 3! pushes up, which often follows a pullback of at least 2 legs down(at worst for bears a trading range on 5min chart).
>[citation needed]
Lolmao you literally pulled some big words out of babypips and posted them here, shoo kid, shoo shoo!

Actually, never bothered visiting forums or anything else.
All I did was read books and spend three years on trying to understand how the market moves and how it works, during which I was consistently losing money.
A resident if you may, of /pol/ and /jp/, regardless.

Just for some reason decided to, you know, indulge with maybe some other traders and share experiences, as I have never done this before.
I feel that trading is very lonesome and sometimes very psychologically straining and other times too exciting kind of work.

Loneliness just eventually gets to you when seemingly nobody in the world has any idea of what you're doing and there's nobody to share your ideas, knowledge and exciting experiences with.

I may have come at you a bit too aggressive, and I understand that many different people have many different ideas and strategies on trading and execution and I respect that.
But there's an universal kind of analysis in the markets that everyone would agree upon, such as trend lines, support/resistance levels and so on. I don't think I touched upon anything more than that here.

Sorry for off-topic/blogging, just wanted to help out.

Sure I won't provide any spreadsheets or anything, as I don't see a reason why I would, nor am I trying to prove that I'm profitable or not, it was never my objective. Just as I said wanted to share experiences and talk about trading.

My style and such would most likely not appeal to most of the people anyway. Earlier today I posted my regular session in another thread, sure it's nothing impressive and sometime I still manage to lose money.

Pic related todays session.

Didn't quite have enough time and believe it or not, I actually wanted to buy nearly every major pullback, but market evaded me every single time by 1-2pips.
So instead just micro scalped every rally. My objective nowadays to come out with at least 20pips a day, which I often still fail to do so.

The yesterdays one I mentioned.

Would post more, but honestly, never before have I felt a desire to save my sessions and fxcm doesn't show them after the 00:00 rollover.

I've been short USDJPY since 110. Kicking myself for not taking profits at 100, but I think it will swing down again soon. I don't see the BoJ doing anything until 95

>nor am I trying to prove that I'm profitable or not, it was never my objective.

Right, you obviously did it for shit and giggles.
Anyway scalping fx is a losing game, know a couple of blokes doing that tho. I know a lot of people doing it on futures, that's where the money is.

Don't know what to think about your style, still leaning towards calling it bullshit since you don't have a quantitative reference. But anyway
That's my boy. Position trading is where the big money is, amazing how people don't even realize how much they could make with small, leveraged positions in the direction of the major trend with the fundamentals favoring.
As per my opinion, i have resumed my medium term bearish JPY bias.

Nikkei is going to the moon, usually that's a good leading indicator that USDJPY is going up

btw grabbing another GBPAUD short, let's see how it goes, target still at 1.67891

Typed too much, so part 1

Just called out a mistake with a reasonable explanation. Some of the time I don't know what the market is doing, but some other time I do understand what's going on.
Not necessarily always during live-trading, but after the fact at least. And I believe this was exactly the case, as you could actually see currently on the chart - the market reversed up on hourly from an attempted breakdown, which failed, created a double bottom higher high major(or minor depending on how you look at it) trend reversal and that push on 5min chart manifested itself as 3 push up wedge followed by trading range and reversal down(most likely at least 50% pullback) which in turn created another double top major(or minor) trend reversal. Just what I actually said hours before.

All this being after the fact now, of course. The first targets of course are either MA test on hourly then 50% pullback or previous structure that can be seen or even a test of bottom and potential break down. Market has many possibilities.

Speaking of scalping, while I would generally agree it's probably unprofitable, that's not really the point, as if you had spent enough time in the markets, you'd see that movements on 1/5/60min charts, or really, any charts are exactly the same and they don't generally have another set of rules, I see a lot of setups that are profitable, and they'd have been profitable if I would have taken, it's just that I don't quite get filled in often times in the places where I want to.

Where I'm going with this, is that I could be doing exactly same thing on 60/240min chart etc, and trying to gauge 40+pip movements, the problem with that is I want to get experience and from day-to-day participation these setups become very rare on higher time frame charts, and you start to get little participation and I want to be involved and be actively learning and analysing the market throughout the day.

My plan is to be able to master these small legs throughout the day on 5min chart, I will move on from them on higher time frames, but for that I want to have extensive experience and trust in my skill. Not sure if that does sound stupid, but at least I see your point.
Never in fact looked into futures market though.

Another problem, is jumping time frames, you get conflicting signals and they're all true, I just don't think it's worth it. You either stay on 5min or 60min or any other chart and you stick with it, maybe I'm just not mentally capable of keeping a track of 15 possibilities that are all viable all over the place. Which is my limitation upon which I might be able to improve with more experience. If not, due to rareness, you have to start to get involved in other markets etc.

So that's why I'm sticking with scalping, there's no inherent difference between scalping 5min and trading 60min chart, because it's in the end same act, but on 5min chart you have to pay up for the privilege to the broker.

I don't know if you'd call me a fool for this, but generally every market has an character, or rather some kind of underlying trend that represents that character and if it does change, it takes a long time, sometime months, that's why I think sticking with 1 market, in this case eur/usd might help with familiarisation of market. So that's another rock in the flower bed against higher time frames for me.
But that's just personal opinion.

I add this chart, pic related.
Doesn't it look foolish to cover the shorts at exactly the top of trading range, previous 3 highs(more depending on how you look at it) while the market is neutral/bear. What it says to me about you is that you fail to understand the underlying structure of the market and what it's inherently doing, it's not an personal attack, just a call for you to try to improve yourself and explaining your mistake.

I don't know if you have heard of Al Brooks, but what he calls these kind of stops are skunk stops.
You literally sold low and bought high, it's a mistake, because to prevent this kind of mistake you have to either cover the short when the market already reverses on you, or keep your stops wide, and you did neither of those. But of course, it boils down to strategy and the traders psychology.

You could watch this:
youtube.com/watch?v=kprorGhESKk

And no, I'm not shilling my strategy nor am I going to somehow explain what I'm doing, it doesn't matter. There're though, in cases, a common shared knowledge base between traders on how they look and analyse the market, as I mentioned before, and not everyone knows everything, it's just a simple fact and naturalness of being a human. This comes from my observations and the things that I've read in the books and the way those traders analyse things.
I myself no genius, not asking for recognition, but why wouldn't someone point out somebody's mistake?
Maybe I'm going too wide on every subject that I touch upon and just wasting my keyboard and fingers. I don't know.

If you think that all this I've just said is nonsense, you're free to think so. I can't prove you otherwise and I guess I understand the fact in that case. As I never been in the circles of the traders nor do I know how they interact, but at least I tried to back my understanding and the way I see the markets in some kind of way, instead of calling you out as an idiot or noob or whatever without giving any arguments.

The thing is, markets are subjective which makes it nearly impossible to explain, due to all the subtleties that it involves in expressing complex and subjective things. While keeping it all logical. Markets in the end are 50/50, with a slight edge in some minor cases where it goes into 60/40, that's essentially my strategy, relying on the principle of markets being the entity which purpose is to bring equilibrium.

I find it all absolutely fascinating and captivating often times in the logicalness of it all and all the interpretations you can come up with and the stories you can see through that unfold within.

Just as I said, wanted to share experience and maybe even learn something myself.

Ok, good luck trading, but as with any job or business you have to do in this world, you have to work toward it, invest your time and it's not gonna come to your overnight, and there're no get rich quick schemes. It's all about consistency, perseverance and sometime even dumb stubbornness. And people should be informed of it.

Ok you know your stuff. I have seen traders making money using your same line of thought, but i'm a quant. I employ few discretional elements, but i try to keep them to the minimum. Same about "market structure". Not doubtng about anything you said, but if i can't quantify it, i can't test/use/improve it in a meaningful matter. I called bullshit before since this board is full of autistic kids, took you for one of them

I use tfs above H4, which means i get to keep somehow wide stops, pushing every position for extra large returns, even if it means sacrificing 5R or even 6R positions along the way. Even if it means losing more than 80% of my positions. Even if it means gut wrenching drawdowns. But i (almost) always end the month in the black, and wonderfully so. Had a few spectacular months this year (like January and February, managed to catch the whole uptrend on Gold and the first third of the USDJPY fall, while heavily pyramiding)
Took me 2 years to develop my approach. Learned up from many places. Link related, i've learned more from this 2 minutes of drunk rant than from hundreds and hundreds of pages/courses

>youtube.com/watch?v=8xyUaSY4ZMg

That's the thing between retail traders and institutional. They have upper hand over you, every time. They don't even care which way market moves, if it moves against them, they will scale in later and go against their own positions short term, just having deep pockets is such an advantage in the markets, it's insane.
I bet in forex they can maintain their risk reward ratios at huge levels while having possibly even over 90+% win rate.
And stock markets nearly entirely different thing, may as well call it a real pyramid scheme that keeps on giving without an end.

And I absolutely agree, sometime you have to throw away your rules and just let it keep riding, the windfall is insane, but then here we are again, I understand where eur/usd currently is(no trend) and that any move whichever direction is gonna take it(looking at daily/weekly chart) chances are, it's not gonna break out of year long trading range any time soon. And to take a position right now(long term, think months-years) is the same as flipping the coin, would all come down to a lot of time and dumb luck.

Unless you'd start talking politics, and then see what EU politicians are doing and how they're destroying the europe with immigrants and such, then one would keep a very bearish bias on euro, but then again on the flip coin, if you were to look at America.
The DXY struggling to recover into the pre-economic crash levels and you have an upcoming presidential elections, where the left side are buying up votes with the never ending money printing out of thin ether that's being thrown at people who leech off government and sinking entire economy + warmongering and the somewhat sane right side where they want to give some breather for the economy and maybe stop the wars and get people to work again.

Markets reflect exactly that - a lot of uncertainty, indecision fear and anxiety, which is a hallmark of trading range. Everything is absolutely logical no matter which prism you're looking at

>Eh man you were right on EURUSD it seems.
We'll see, I picked up a short on the EURGBP this morning.
>First position on GBPUSD still going fine
Funny you mention that, I just closed a short on the GBPUSD and replaced it with a long. I've been keeping my t/p limits tight on GBP and USD positions since the Brexit.
>Why the volumes btw?
They don't take up much space and sometimes they provide a little insight.
>But i see you trade price momentum divergencies. Only daily or lower?
I'm not sure what this means.
>No idea senpai. 14.23% we get from current levels to 1412.04 from today's low, that's all i need to know. Which means 85.77% of getting stopped out, either at BE or with a loss for me
Interesting.

All you traders and your crazy stop losses. Double down, triple down, quadruple down and quintuple down rarely fails me but I try to pick ripe pairs only.

That's why I've tightened my time frame when trading the USD and GBP since the Brexit. It looks like there might be a stalemate holdout for a while, I'm looking out for the GBP to start running and the JPY to start tanking.
>Loneliness just eventually gets to you when seemingly nobody in the world has any idea of what you're doing and there's nobody to share your ideas, knowledge and exciting experiences with.
It's a pity.
>Sorry for off-topic/blogging, just wanted to help out.
Decent post and appreciated.
>So instead just micro scalped every rally. My objective nowadays to come out with at least 20pips a day, which I often still fail to do so.
Sure is a lot of work for a little profit. Typically it takes me about an hour or two a day to stay optimally abreast of the forex and with my strategy I can expect to net >4% a week on average. I operate on a time frame >8-hours because I've learned through experience that trying to predict anything in a smaller time-frame than that is unreliable. My day-trading disability could be determined by my personality though.

I think the dollar is going to have a big bounce soon judging by the USDRUB chart. USDRUB YTD one of the most interesting charts I've seen.
I find it funny that you would sit on it. USD has been doing quite a bit of accumulating while the JPY is quite pumped.

>amazing how people don't even realize how much they could make with small, leveraged positions in the direction of the major trend with the fundamentals favoring.
I thought that's how most forex traders operate because that strategy obviously has one of the most profound impacts on typical forex operation, rabidly running prices up way too high too fast and then rabidly running then down way too low and too fast. It's not the scalpers that are making that happen.
>Nikkei is going to the moon, usually that's a good leading indicator that USDJPY is going up
Good point.
>Markets in the end are 50/50, with a slight edge in some minor cases where it goes into 60/40, that's essentially my strategy, relying on the principle of markets being the entity which purpose is to bring equilibrium.
I think the market in its' nature consists of entanglements and these can be exploited bringing the odds up above 80/20 if trading instruments relevant to the macro-market. The ruble collapse, euro collapse and dollar rally were all predictable because of the nature of their entanglements.

The latest and greatest, I'm 11 for 11 since Brexit. It's closing time for tonight.

Impressively done! Still wondering how you use that momentum indi
Meanwhile i got stopped out from last nights' GBPAUD and long on Gold. Trying again with GBPAUD short.
Curiously enough GBPUSD is still merrily going up while GBPAUD is digging lower. Wasn't expecting that from 2 pair positively correlated for more than 90%, wonder which one of the two will be my next loser

very nice!

>The DXY struggling to recover into the pre-economic crash levels and you have an upcoming presidential elections, where the left side are buying up votes with the never ending money printing out of thin ether that's being thrown at people who leech off government and sinking entire economy + warmongering and the somewhat sane right side where they want to give some breather for the economy and maybe stop the wars and get people to work again.

True dat.

>Sure is a lot of work for a little profit.
It would be the case if you'd be earning some kind of fixed amount of capital.
But in this case you're getting pips, so the returns depends on your position size, not necessarily pipage itself.
I most definitely understand why people trade 60/240/480min chart and I actually agree that it's what most people should stick with, if they want to enjoy life and be doing other things. It's less stressful too.
What I was arguing is that there's no inherent difference between 5min chart and daily chart or any other chart in regards to analysing/applying your strategies and such, market acts based on literally the same rules, regardless of the chart type.
>I think the market in its' nature consists of entanglements and these can be exploited bringing the odds up above 80/20 if trading instruments relevant to the macro-market.

It's true, I even myself mentioned it, not in that particular sentence though. Sadly, I've never ran an actual analysis on market on long term, which should be done by computer and not manually by human(here's probably another point why institutional traders have edge over retail).
But after manually going through hundreds of setups and getting to the conclusion that when market is in trading range - the breakouts become very rare, and even if they happen, they fail very fast. You'd arrive at somewhere between 70/30 and 90/10 chance of breakouts failing. Similarly in a strong trend, most of attempts to reverse market in opposite direction fail too, with 70-90% rate.
But market spends most of its time(assume over 70% of the time) not in a strong trend and not at the tops/bottoms of trading ranges, but somewhere in the middle. So those opportunities become very rare, it's natural.

And yes, impressive results!

I don't know if someone would be interested in a sort of market analysis and maybe just my mindset in general at how I look at the market, but I'll try.

Today after open, market was rather slow, sideways. Mostly small moves. What's most annoying, is that it was very twitchy, profit taking all over the place, legs lasting just over 10-20pip in total and all the highs/lows that you see, they get there and being sold/bought in a matters of seconds. Sometimes a bit frustrating.

For most people it must be really hard to make any money when it's like that.
But what I imagine most people don't realise, that during such conditions it's relatively safe to do anything, as the market is not going to go ``somewhere'' at all. Because market is being controlled by both sides, two-sided trading. You do get a lot of signals when this starts to become not true, you'd only have to look at the last two candles to understand that something is not right anymore. The single candles starts to overlap entire range - a clear sign of higher participation/preparation for a move somewhere. The move somewhere might fail very fast, regardless which direction it takes, sometime's there're over 10's of attempts. Such was this case.

Especially when the market has been in such a tight range as this. Both sides have valid arguments for either up or down. But it's a good time to go either flat or into a position of which you have more arguments for (I personally like to wait for breakout to happen and then enter on pullback). Another thing I should mention is, I really dislike stop orders.

It's often a good time to look at higher time frame charts, to see which areas the price might want to visit.

At the same time I had already achieved my daily goal and collected my 20 pips pain free. Which allows me to go and do something else, without actually trying to participate in market anymore.

And seriously, by looking at this chart, could you even tell a difference if it was a 5min, 60min or daily?

>At the same time I had already achieved my daily goal and collected my 20 pips pain free.

I disagree. If you have an edge you might want to exploit it for as much as you can, for as long as you can.
I experimented back then with HOD/LOD breakouts, never again. Same with H1 inside bars (the edge was too small to bother).
Not going to question the similarity of charts between timeframes (even on tick charts), just the impact that spreads/slippage have on the overall profitability.
My system, a real monster on higher timeframes has the tendency to fuck up my account on the intraday

Which is why i'll start scalping myself someday, but with futures (where you pay commissions and have access to real volume).
I have also checked out some of the Al Brooks stuff, kinda meh, very little stuff that could be quantified

As per me, i got stopped out on 5/6 positions, only GBPUSD surviving so far, added another long and grabbed a very unconvincing short on CHFJPY.
Gave away a nice 12R in floating profits, took a 9R loss on my account, probably soon heading to 10.
But if my GBPUSD position keeps running, and my reloaded positions don't get stopped out i could be in for a nice 40-50R.

Or maybe not. I don't care.
>and remember kids, if you are still sleeping at night it's because you are not risking enough

Yes, just when I was writing about things, I ran out of the characters for the post, so decided to not talk about entire day and cut it there. The day ended with 30 pips in total.

Well with your style with such huge rewards one shouldn't be expecting to have win rate much over 20% or be even in the range within 30-10%, over time it may work. Psychologically though, it's absolutely crushing and losing trade after trade would wear me down a lot, still wouldn't give up and as long as maths add up, that is all that matters.

I could see gbpusd testing previous high at 1.39 sometime in the next week, potentially, but that's a long shot. That is, if bulls manage to strongly close this week, so all about tomorrow.

Should notice that there's an open gap currently on weekly chart, which is either 1.382 or 1.4, markets tend to close gaps, but does it fail, it accelerates rapidly down.
Going anything over 1.42 and as you targeting 1.43 seems, at least to me, very very unlikely.

On the daily, today gbpusd tested the daily MA and now has a tail, so there's resistance, at the same time created a lower low potential double top(1.352 and 1.347). I wouldn't be too optimistic about tomorrow as a bull.
And on 240min chart market rallied from the double bottom, now it looks like two legged rally with second leg being weaker than the first. Doesn't look particularly strong, wouldn't be surprised to see a test down at around 1.3 levels.

That's how I see it, just my opinion, I don't follow gbpusd chart, so just took a short look around. Wouldn't recommend anyone doing actual trades on this!
In the end that's your strategy - rely on low probability setups.

Lol whoever is long GBPUSD atm, have fun getting wiped and cashing giros.

>Loneliness
I understand this. I want to talk about trading so bad (even though I'm a newbie), but all large communities are filled with those who don't know too much about it.

And the more professional groups are thin and filled with jaded failures.

I've visited too many forums and tried to help in building them up, but no one seems to care for such a thing.

It's refreshing to see someone with similar experiences.

You're incredibly passionate. How do you maintain this level of energy?

Also, you wouldn't happen to post on other financial forums (non-Veeky Forums) with satirical content?

I have a friend who is currently teaching in Japan, but his contract's up this year. We were discussing the exchange rates recently, and were trying to figure out when the best time for him to transfer his money from JPY to USD would be. How high does Veeky Forums expect it to go?

Well, ended up being another blog of sort.
Yes, I find myself in this kind of strange position, where I can't honestly consider it as a work, but at the same time I can't comprehend what the ``professional'' trader is either, it's a dilema for me personally.
I have a lot of ideas and opinions or rather entire philosophy on life/trading/universe. On which I would have to write at least a book to even try to scratch the surface of it all.

So yes, I can look at market and try to explain/rationalise it and it often makes sense to me, but how do I know that my view point is correct and that it's the ``true'' way to go about it? I don't.
And then we have money involved in it all, hard to trust anything or anyone where there's money, because there might only be money to be made from others, by selling them some snakeoil, one should have a lot of caution and vigilance.
This is why I guess you can't find such groups. To sum it up, the reasonable sentence to describe the markets is probably: markets are subjective and both sides have to be making money and everything in between gets run over.

When I started years ago and I've started in 2013, I stumbled around a lot by trying to trade, but soon understood that I can't do 2 things. 1 control my emotions 2 had no clue what's going on - that is, I didn't know how the market moves.
Naturally, I've went to some forums. Tried to read up a bit, but it just took me like 2-4 hours to realise, that I will never get any useful information, as most people are not talking about trading, but something else and the posts/threads are even few years old or worse, and probably the funniest part of it all, is that I simply couldn't muster motivation to even register on any kind of forum so that I could post.
Nobody is specific with either descriptions or reasoning, lots of involvement in indicators - which by the way never made much sense to me, because you're trying to introduce hard rules like: if x+y+z then do v.

If that's how trading actually worked, then why isn't everyone just doing exactly same thing and making tons of money? Waiting for their magical indicators to line up and enter position, you don't even need to do anything!
So I moved on very fast, tried to look for books, but there's again, very little useful information and going through hundreds of pages of books and finding little to no information is demotivating.
Don't get me wrong, there's some for sure. At least more than in the forums(my opinion).
Ended up just spending my time reading charts, one could say religiously, for years, every single day, sometime during weekends, sometime 20 hours a day. Back testing, trying to make up some kind of strategies,
failing a lot, trying to rationalise moves, trying to understand why something occurs, just making some kind of sense. Intuitively, nearly from the beginning, the price when reading backwards(in hindsight) always made a lot of sense and reason. Everything looked, not necessarily all the time, but often enough logical and constructive with little randomness.
Might sound stupid and childish(or maybe rather crazy/lunar), but I could see whatever I wanted in it, like reading a story in a book, a story of war if you may, or really anything you could put your imagination onto.
Well, I'm not against talking about trading, so if there's anything you want to ask about trading I can answer and give my opinion, which may not be true in the real world at all.

>You're incredibly passionate. How do you maintain this level of energy?
It's actually funny that you say that, because I'm probably the most dead-inside person in the world. I tried to ``make it'' in real life, I've worked several jobs(mostly ee or programing related), so went to school/college etc. And with every single year I felt like they were intentionally killing me, some kind of eternal hatred for no particular reason targeted towards me from entire society.
I couldn't comprehend it, I was 70% of the time utterly baffled while interacting with people, though, often time internet is not much of a difference place either.

People always want something(preferably free)
while in the meantime they're not even able to make a coherent sentence with at least half of an argument and the speech mannerisms never made sense either, as if intentionally pretending to be a bit brain damaged.
Most of the time it's as if there's no point to even argue/give arguments or try to reason/have a conversation with people, because they simply just ignore it and move on. 5minutes later asking literally same thing and many other kind of situations, like trying to intentionally suck energy from me.
Not going to sing about how I'm perfect, surely I've a lot of problems myself.

I'm a total recluse, disappointed by society, government, ambition of human race or lack there of. Clearly a not well functioning person, but trading is a big part of my life, sort of even part of me, maybe that's why.

>Also, you wouldn't happen to post on other financial forums (non-Veeky Forums) with satirical content?
While I wouldn't mind posting satire, I never really posted elsewhere.

Speaking of yesterday, pic related and continuing of where I left off.
I had an understanding that anytime the market might be getting a breakout in a certain direction.
So was just waiting for it and for some kind of pullback to enter at(waited for at least a close of first 5min bar which closes above TR).
In this particular case, I could have just traded the usual way and made quite a bit of pips, but breakouts are some time tricky and they carry higher risks(hindsight is 20/20 after all). Sometime I just ignore market all together,
if I'm not entirely sure of what's going on. Tried to look for a swing, but didn't look strong. Thought might get a pullback below that first doji bar, so may as well take scalp here. Pullback didn't come and after that there was never really a good reason to me to enter at all.
Suddenly after a relatively strong breakout, consequent legs looked weak and small, decided to just wait and buy deeper pullback, as I was genuinely expecting a bigger move up to at least test previous high(not visible of course) on hourly or even rally to after-brexit highs 1.118~ area.

The way I saw it and thought, was that the market is trying to flag on hourly for a few candles or so and then at least try another leg upwards, so bought pullback which I would have swung all the way on this. But instead I got a full pullback.
What is interesting, is that if you'd look at the left and the right and ignored everything that has happened in between, entire day was a very small/tight trading range.

I could come up with countless reasons and explanations for that, possibly, but one of the way to look at it, not necessarily seriously, is that the market got invaded by some foreigners, who tried to take control of the market, but market shooed away the invaders.
Kicked their asses out and continued to do ``business as usual''. It sort of reminded me of the current european crisis/situation. Hopefully this is something that will happen in real life.

Some notes about last exits, I was waiting for market to rally to previous small rally or even a bit higher and exit there, but just got impatient and wanted to do something else, as it was a long day and that rally came later in like 15minutes, to my dismay.

While now I'm writing this, and hindsight is always 20/20, the chart on hourly looked particularly bad for bulls, we had a very very climactic rally because it was near the top of the trading range.
What's more important, is that the rally had the biggest candle during an entire bull run on 60min chart, and markets often reverse when the rally is old(at least 20bars) AND has the biggest candle of the entire rally, which makes it very very climactic.
Another problem with the rally was that it failed to even reach the previous high, so bears here had a lot of arguments to try to test the bottom of the range.

Todays rally was a consolidation prize for trapped bulls, we can see on hourly, that there was a big wicked candle, possibly the candle where most of the trapped bulls exited their positions if they got trapped on yesterdays high, so there were a lot of reasons for breakdown today.

A very thoughtful reply. You'll have to excuse me for not giving the same, my mind isn't in the right place at the moment. I wish I could give more.

I think I understand you. A huge incapability with the world and how it works. I see many traits of myself within your writing, except for the writing itself which has much to say and doesn't bounce around, unlike my own more concise babbles.

I appreciate what you've written and I'll be able to incorporate it into my own path trying to learn forex.

Niederhoffer has had success in gathering a mastermind group of people he believes is competent. I believe it's all a matter of getting your thoughts and ideas out there. Those with similar ones will congregate and contact you (although most will be useless). Otherwise, I don't know how much use a blog would do you. But this is one example, here there are some who've recognized the quality of your work.

I have three questions:

>Would you say your motivations are like Frankenstein, you are obsessed with your work or do you only work because it is needed to pay bills (or say suck up time doing something less harmful/useless).

>How do you cope with the lonliness? Whenever I spend days doing nothing but work I realize how little human interaction I've gotten and make me feel terrible. Even though when I got out with friends the experiences seem meaningless. Just more time being wasted, escaping from responsibilities.

>This is a given: What indicators do you recommend? I've been using candles and volume. Or do you just recommend back-testing (and forward paper testing) with all of them to find one that fits best?

I'm heading down your path and whatever advice you can give will be useful.

>Would you say your motivations are like Frankenstein, you are obsessed with your work or do you only work because it is needed to pay bills (or say suck up time doing something less harmful/useless).

I'd say none of those. Sure, I do it because money, it'd be foolish to say otherwise, but personally I don't need money. I don't spend it, I have all that I need already and I'm okay with the things I have. Of course there're maintenance costs, like food, electricity, water etc.

Actually, I'm rather afraid/anxious about the future, the uncertainty of it all and to me it just looks very grim, so having a kind of work where it's independent of your residence, any financial crisis, unemployment or other nonsense seems like a smart solution to flock to, that is if you are able to. Really, independence of it all, being able to be out of the inner circle of society and having stability while being in that position.
Though, if I were to make a lot of money, I'd just send my parents away on vacation, as they're getting old now.

Sometime I just stare at chart and do nothing, sometime just paper trade and I do exceptionally well, always better than live trading. That's the thing I'm working on, trying to psychologically change my mindset, as that's a huge limiting factor(fear, anxiety or something else).

Best thing about it, is it allows you to do anything you want, sometime you just can't trade, something feels wrong and that's fine. There's always a market tomorrow.
You can trade and listen to something you want to, either that's music, podcast or reading a book, you can do many kinds of things and it allows you to actively learn something else or be aware of ongoing events, as it takes a lot of time to keep up with the world.
I actually do exercises, push ups, pulls ups, sit ups and such. That's something people who work full time aren't able to do.

>How do you cope with the lonliness? Whenever I spend days doing nothing but work I realize how little human interaction I've gotten and make me feel terrible. Even though when I got out with friends the experiences seem meaningless. Just more time being wasted, escaping from responsibilities.

Well, that's the thing about being introverted, you don't necessarily need social interaction and if you get it, you sort of get sick of it, too.
I don't have friends, never had any to begin with, loneliness is all I really know. Not sure if you've heard of something like paraphrasing: "Not everyone's brains are the same, that's why people do get addicted to drugs or things or anything. Imagine if you could put labels on people, average normal person has a happiness level of 100, when those people do drugs(that being actual drugs or social interactions or sex or anything at all), their happiness level goes to lets say 140. But there're people who have brains with an average happiness level of 40 or less, and when they do drugs they don't even reach 90, they're barely experiencing something that other people are constantly experiencing."
It's just some people are wired differently. This would be the way to cope with that, depends on what kind of person you are. I don't think I cope with it at all.

>This is a given: What indicators do you recommend? I've been using candles and volume. Or do you just recommend back-testing (and forward paper testing) with all of them to find one that fits best?

I don't think you need any indicator at all to trade, but you can use it as assistance sure. I personally use moving average, or more precisely exponential moving average with a period of 20. There're other popular like RSI and MACD.
In forex I don't think that volume is all that important, I'd say it's more important and maybe useful in stocks. And candles is the king, it's the purest information you can get. And as this other guy said, maybe look into futures trading.

I think there's very little randomness in market, if at all. Everything is important, everything gives some kind of information it just depends on how much you want to take it. I think that there's no inherent difference between trading 1min or 60min chart, as you'll adhere to the same rules/principles.
Sure, it's going to be so much harder to make money on 1min chart compared to 60min, but I think it's possible to make money on any kind of chart. Naturally, I recommend higher time frames over smaller ones.
What's important here is, you won't make it overnight, it requires time, dedication, stubborness. Some people never make it, some might do it in a year some in 10 is what I think and there're no guarantees.
Another important thing, is that even if you don't understand markets and you take every trade with 1risk:2reward ratio, you're probably going to at least break even, if not make money. Math is important here, win rate is just half of the story if not less.

A lot of what I say, I believe because I came to this conclusion myself. But at the same time, I've read of it before, too.

And this is an important decision to make which requires time and money investment and should not be taken lightly, I think many people get mislead and don't understand what they're getting into.

Holy shit, someone actually using "cope" in the correct vernacular on Veeky Forums? Am I being punked?

Thank you, I understand. I've learned some things.

I'm the GBPUSD guy from before. My 2 cents

1) Obsession, yes. I know few people who "made it" and they were all obsessed. I've personally spent 1 years, 10 hours a day in front of a computer screen in order to develop a consistent system, and another year to "adjust" to it. Obsession=hunger, which in turn makes you sharp and always on the look for new improvements, flaws and new pieces of knowledge to add. Being lazy or being in just for the money means gettng rekt.
Besides, the intellectual satisfaction of having your "hypothesis" succesfully tested keeps me in the game

2)I don't really care. But i keep what i do hidden from other people (the usual reactions i'm getting are either "lmao gambling addiction" or "pls sir gibs"). Travel a lot, do it on your own, you will stop giving a shit

3)Bollinger Bands to identify oversold/overbought. Linear regression channels (i don't use it, but it works).Candlestick patterns. Strict rule based approach, backtest your ass off, do it manually. Have a predefined sl/tp. Be very strict on risk. Don't use anything below H4. Cut your losses and let your profits run, even if it means getting 10, 20 losses in a row. Always in the direction of the main trend or against it when you see a significant level (High/Low of the month) getting breached and rejected. Use fundamentals. Keep spreadsheets of your positions, test anything you can. Give yourself plenty of time to learn

My approach is on the opposite spectrum of . There is no "correct" style, as long as you make money consistently. As a rule of thumb the "harder" "psychologically speaking your system is, the more money you will make

Disclaimer: i just got 12 losses in a row, since my win rate is around 14-15%. Gave up 12R in floating profits on top of that.
This is the reality of trading.
Oh and it's going to be even funnier on the open. But i won't betray the same process that netted me 143R in the last 3 months.

lots of bullshit going on here I can smell it