johns ftse system

hello.

reasons for this thread is to hopefully convince some of you that with a bit of skill and a mastery of some basic psychology you can be a successful trader. Also, the main reason is to encourage you to develop your own trading style and not to just blindly follow a system or a bunch of indicators or worse still some guy telling you when to buy and when to sell - when you don't know why he is making those calls.

I have been trading since the late 80's so have been around for a while. some busier times than others but always trading something.

i now primarily trade the ftse100. I use a particular method of trading which i didnt know existed before and in many ways it went against all my beliefs of how to trade, but it has most definitely worked and is working. I can fairly comfortably make 50 pips a day. and more often make over a 100 for just a few hours work.

There are a handful of things i look and trade for. one of them are gaps. See post elsewhere for the complete explanation to trade that.

I run a skype trading room to call what i do which you possibly may be interested in at some future date, but hopefully i can give you enough here to get you trading this market successfully.

Why the ftse100? The market has a relatively tight range which suits scalping. I look for a 5-20 point move which i can quite regularly do and i have multiple trades on but not just for the full move, often the price will not be reached for a while and will retrace a bit, then move again, then back again, i love it when that happens as i can take many many scalps for one or two points and make much more for that little move. one time i made 172pips when the market was moving in a 5 point range. just using this style of trading.

parallel lines of support/resistance are king in my book. if you can find them draw them in. trade a bounce off them for one or two pips,too. very easily achieved. the only other indicators you need are pivot points, but i only use them on a monday and thursday.

I use a bit of a complicated system of predicting swing points or turnaround points, and also i can predict where the retrace will turn around again. It does depend on price action and timing is involved too, so best called live. To give an example. today i knew price had to go up to 5669 in order to complete a swing. In the morning it did go up and i traded it comfortably to each possible mini resistance level, we got a good reversal candle setup which told me price will come down. i traded it back down to a recent low, knowing that it had to go back up an make a new high for the day before coming back down again. so i traded it back up this time confident that it would hit 5669. it hit it easily. Im always conservative with my numbers and get out too early, but i prefer it that way. much safer. Anyway, we ran out of time yesterday and the market closed with a very good reversal candle which means for me i will trade this back down come monday for almost 100pip move. It could take until tuesday or wednesday to hit the bottom but i will make loads on all the little retracements inbetween. But you see when you know that price will go to a particular target you can relax and be confident to put your trade on. No if's and but's just 'when'

So what do you need? you need an account with fxcm. open a demo first to get used to the platform. the reason i like fxcm is that you can have a single click trade button, one click for one pip and you can click it multiple times for each trade ( you will know what i mean once youve played about with it)

You also need to open a MT4 account with fxcm and get their datafeed for the uk100 ftse market, you also need to open an account with igmarkets, or igindex. and have their advanced charts for the ftse100. this is to confirm gaps.

For your analysis i use pelicanspreads charts they do expire though so you need to open an account with them. here is one so you can see. http://timetotrade.eu/ttt/chart.php?...marketid=51158
They are java run and work quite well most of the time. You need to be fairly conversant with the fib tool and be able to use it effectively. Again i will show you some fib techniques that can help you in this thread.


I have a six monitor setup and have the pelican charts on hourly, 15min, 5min and 1min tfs.

I find a single item market much easier to read and anticipate moves on, than a paired traded item. The reason why i think this is true is because the market moves in waves. when you have two sets of waves interacting with eachother the outcome is much more complex than only one set of waves. Im not sure if that makes sense to any of you, but its how i can best describe my ease with the ftse market. also i find it easier to read than the dow, Dax Nikkei and any other indice. I am from the uk but not living there at the moment so i probably feel some affinity to it too.


So in the first place, trade the gaps that I outlined in a previous post. have a play with the scalping settings and go for one point trades on a bounce of a parallel line you have drawn. get an eye for mini levels of support and resistance. remember horizontal lines are more powerful in this market than in forex. so respect previous lows and highs.

It is beyond the scope of this medium to explain how i call the turnaround of swings and their next target - suffice to say that michaelparsons at thegreatesttradingtools.com and steve nison for his excellent books on candlestick analysis are the cornerstone for what i am able to do now, but hopefully we can build this thread into something interesting and, i sincerely hope, profitable for you.

Nice post.
But when i checked out fxcm, they dont really have good spread? I mean 2 points on the nas100? thats alot compaired with other cfd brokers.


Regards

This is a wind up.

Yes, i agree they are not competitive for spreads on most tradeable items. however on the ftse100 they only have a 1pt spread which is great for scalping .

toxicen said:

Nice post.
But when i checked out fxcm, they dont really have good spread? I mean 2 points on the nas100? thats alot compaired with other cfd brokers.


Regards

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You are telling me you scalp for 1point and also pay a 1 point spread for this?
Must be a wind up.

yes scalp for one point profit. which requires a two point move. one point plus spread = 2 points.

Hi John.Having read your post i find it hard to beleave that after 20 years of trading your scalping for 1 point.
Your post has been written with great pashion for what you do and you come across as knowing how the market moves.
So why on earth are you scalping for 1 point.
Do what your doing in longer time frames mate and scalp 150 points at a time.
Then come back and tell us all how to do it.
As i feel sure with the effort your putting in for 1 point could easily be duplicated to longer time frames and many more points. best of luck.

ibetyou said:

Hi John.Having read your post i find it hard to beleave that after 20 years of trading your scalping for 1 point.
Your post has been written with great pashion for what you do and you come across as knowing how the market moves.
So why on earth are you scalping for 1 point.
Do what your doing in longer time frames mate and scalp 150 points at a time.
Then come back and tell us all how to do it.
As i feel sure with the effort your putting in for 1 point could easily be duplicated to longer time frames and many more points. best of luck.

Click to expand...

yes well., i do actualy hold for a longer move when i have a target but you need to understand that most of the profit comes from the +1 scalps. The trade may only require a 2 pip move but i trade it with varying amounts depending on the strength of the trade. So i may place 6 trades on for a +1scalp profit the market moves only 2 points but i make 6 points. The great thing about scalping is that you make your money and you are done. I used to trade for the bigger moves on fx pairs, and occasionally still will trade them, but so often you see a profit move into a loss or just BE. whereas you are in and out of the scalping trade in minutes or even seconds. I will make literally 100's of trades a day with this method.

Also to make the scalps work best you dont want to be paying more than one point on the spread. thats another reason to choose the ftse100.

If you are interested in this, i highly recommend you open a demo with fxcm, and setup one click trading, and limit of 1.0. you will soon experience a new way of trading which could make you re think your trading style and hopefully add another tool in your toolbox.

ibetyou said:

Hi John.Having read your post i find it hard to beleave that after 20 years of trading your scalping for 1 point.
Your post has been written with great pashion for what you do and you come across as knowing how the market moves.
So why on earth are you scalping for 1 point.
Do what your doing in longer time frames mate and scalp 150 points at a time.
Then come back and tell us all how to do it.
As i feel sure with the effort your putting in for 1 point could easily be duplicated to longer time frames and many more points. best of luck.

Click to expand...

He does say that he makes 50 points per day, or ticks, so it is possible that he is painting a worse case scenario, However, my opinion is that he has something going with fxcm to drum up new customers.

I trade with Finspreads and I, neither publicise , nor make a secret of it. They have a 1 point spread, too, but, although I welcome it, I don't try to scalp with it.

However, he seems to want people to open accounts with other firms plus a chart data company, all of which needs money to be laid out. I use one firm. I've found one I like and I stay with it.

Jeeez. you guys are a suspicious lot.

I dont have anything going with fxcm. or ig.

the chart data is free via pelicanspreads.

you can open a demo and access their charts.
For someone who has more than seven and a half thousand posts and more than 10 years as a member of this forum you Splitlink sure sound unknowledgable.

You need a single click one point system to get these trades on. you wont have time to fiddle about with limits like ig or finspreads, pelican, ig, or so many other brokers offer. That's why i trade via fxcm.

I get the suspicion thing, but this is getting tedious.

johnfox1234 said:

Jeeez. you guys are a suspicious lot.

I dont have anything going with fxcm. or ig.

the chart data is free via pelicanspreads.

you can open a demo and access their charts.
For someone who has more than seven and a half thousand posts and more than 10 years as a member of this forum you Splitlink sure sound unknowledgable.

You need a single click one point system to get these trades on. you wont have time to fiddle about with limits like ig or finspreads, pelican, ig, or so many other brokers offer. That's why i trade via fxcm.

I get the suspicion thing, but this is getting tedious.

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It does no harm to alert new traders where suggestions to open accounts with firms is concerned, especially by another poster with few posts. "Why?", is a question that always crosses my mind. On the surface it may be an innocent suggestion but, on the other hand, scalping suggests quite a few trades. Not a good way for a newcomer to start.

On your live chat site how many trades do you do in a morning session?

You have, in my case, done the counting and checking. Personally, I've forgotten how long I have been here but suspicion is a natural survival instinct and comes with the length of membership.

I'm not out to trash your thread, BTW. I've made my point and, now, as far as I am concerned, I am unlikely to write much more, unless asked.

i beg to differ that scalping is not a good way for a newcomer. By trading so many and so quickly the learning curve is much faster and the novice will quickly become proficient in this way of trading. imagine what you learnt in your first 5000 trades. imagine if you could have made those 5000 in one month. your learning curve would have been much steeper. I trained as an agricultural mechanic as a youngster. We would strip down gearboxes and rebuild them. move onto another model and do the same thing again and again. This was a training philosophy where my employer realised that to do a similar thing multiple times gives you a rapid learning experience, the traditional apprenticeship schemes were getting obsolete 30 years ago when i was a youngster because they realised that to do one thing many manytimes over in succession gave you skills that are far more powerful than doing those things over a 5 or 7 year period. So i think it's the same with trading.

More than a hundred trades in a session is normal. But bear in mind you may be clicking more than once per trade.

I think there is a profound difference in questioning a thing to understand it, rather than questioning a thing to pull it apart and destroy it. nice to know you are not in the latter camp.

johnfox1234 said:

i beg to differ that scalping is not a good way for a newcomer. By trading so many and so quickly the learning curve is much faster and the novice will quickly become proficient in this way of trading. imagine what you learnt in your first 5000 trades. imagine if you could have made those 5000 in one month. your learning curve would have been much steeper. I trained as an agricultural mechanic as a youngster. We would strip down gearboxes and rebuild them. move onto another model and do the same thing again and again. This was a training philosophy where my employer realised that to do a similar thing multiple times gives you a rapid learning experience, the traditional apprenticeship schemes were getting obsolete 30 years ago when i was a youngster because they realised that to do one thing many manytimes over in succession gave you skills that are far more powerful than doing those things over a 5 or 7 year period. So i think it's the same with trading.

More than a hundred trades in a session is normal. But bear in mind you may be clicking more than once per trade.

I think there is a profound difference in questioning a thing to understand it, rather than questioning a thing to pull it apart and destroy it. nice to know you are not in the latter camp.

Click to expand...

My opinion, right?

100 trades in a session is potential disaster for anyone who is a newcomer. Every trade costs money and demo trading is not the same as when your money is on the line, especially with a 1 point spread. Pulling a gearbox to bits and reassembling is not the same. I am an ex-apprentice I know that that kind of repetition cannot be compared to the markets.

I cannot visualise you making 100 trades and gassing away on a chat site at the same time, but if you can do it I can assure those following you that they will be broke before they gain proficiency by repetition.

Anyway, good luck in your endeavors. It is up to others to make up their own minds.

As i have said before, you really need to try it before you can cast any sort of judgement. You are disputing the mechanics of placing these sorts of trades, you have personally not done this so you really cant make a judgement on whether it is possible or not.

I challenge you to give it a go, then i will listen and value your comments or evaluation of its potential. I am sure you have the capacity and knowledge base to be able to make some calls on bounces, small range targets and now of course gaps. heck i bet you could make some 20 or 30 pip predictions, if you trade them my way you will see how easy it is to make more than just a single trade to your target. taking plus ones on the way banks money off the table and gets rid of that trading emotion GREED. you just have FEAR to get under wraps and you are ready to go.

100 trades for a newcomer is not a disaster i assure you. As i said the beauty of only wanting a one pip profit is that greed is taken out of the equation and you are rewarded relatively quickly.

There are so many analogies we can make with trading and life. Gearboxes, weather, attitudes, emotions, All part of life can be applied to some aspect of trading. The applications of skills learnt trading have many other benefits in life - not just applicable to the markets. Self discipline, control, rapid decision making, money management the list goes on and on. If you cant see the correlation with repetition being the mother of all learning in relation to proficiency with stripping down mechanical objects and the markets i really dont know how to respond.

I watched the above video a while ago Nova - Hunting The Hidden Dimension (fractals) now we have a thing called harmonic trading based on this . There are so many parallels in our universe. i digress.

Anyway, thank you for your opinion, you have allowed me to respond. i hope i have done so constructively.

johnfox1234 said:

yes well., i do actualy hold for a longer move when i have a target but you need to understand that most of the profit comes from the +1 scalps. The trade may only require a 2 pip move but i trade it with varying amounts depending on the strength of the trade. So i may place 6 trades on for a +1scalp profit the market moves only 2 points but i make 6 points. The great thing about scalping is that you make your money and you are done. I used to trade for the bigger moves on fx pairs, and occasionally still will trade them, but so often you see a profit move into a loss or just BE. whereas you are in and out of the scalping trade in minutes or even seconds. I will make literally 100's of trades a day with this method.

Also to make the scalps work best you dont want to be paying more than one point on the spread. thats another reason to choose the ftse100.

If you are interested in this, i highly recommend you open a demo with fxcm, and setup one click trading, and limit of 1.0. you will soon experience a new way of trading which could make you re think your trading style and hopefully add another tool in your toolbox.

Click to expand...

Newbies become scalpers for the very reasons you give, I've read it here time and time again. Newbies don't know what they are doing and get sick and tired of seeing a small profit turn into a loss...their solution, become a scalper...

I find it hard to believe you have 20+ years trading experience...your post doesn't convey it at all...if you do have 20+ years then from I read you still haven't figured out wot is wot...

johnfox1234 said:

As i have said before, you really need to try it before you can cast any sort of judgement. You are disputing the mechanics of placing these sorts of trades, you have personally not done this so you really cant make a judgement on whether it is possible or not.

I challenge you to give it a go, then i will listen and value your comments or evaluation of its potential. I am sure you have the capacity and knowledge base to be able to make some calls on bounces, small range targets and now of course gaps. heck i bet you could make some 20 or 30 pip predictions, if you trade them my way you will see how easy it is to make more than just a single trade to your target. taking plus ones on the way banks money off the table and gets rid of that trading emotion GREED. you just have FEAR to get under wraps and you are ready to go.

100 trades for a newcomer is not a disaster i assure you. As i said the beauty of only wanting a one pip profit is that greed is taken out of the equation and you are rewarded relatively quickly.

There are so many analogies we can make with trading and life. Gearboxes, weather, attitudes, emotions, All part of life can be applied to some aspect of trading. The applications of skills learnt trading have many other benefits in life - not just applicable to the markets. Self discipline, control, rapid decision making, money management the list goes on and on. If you cant see the correlation with repetition being the mother of all learning in relation to proficiency with stripping down mechanical objects and the markets i really dont know how to respond.

I watched the above video a while ago Nova - Hunting The Hidden Dimension (fractals) now we have a thing called harmonic trading based on this . There are so many parallels in our universe. i digress.

Anyway, thank you for your opinion, you have allowed me to respond. i hope i have done so constructively.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the invitation but ego is the only reason I would do such a thing ie. to prove a point. I am successful enough as I am and do not do more than six trades per day and, that, I consider to be a poor day. My target is to do one per day--rarely reached I know but, for me, perfection.

johnfox1234 said:

I can fairly comfortably make 50 pips a day. and more often make over a 100 for just a few hours work.

.

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"Just a few hours work", a phrase right out of the vendor dictionary.

ZEN archer said:

He is a vendor - although I don't understand why he needs to do vending if he makes 50-100 pips a day:whistling

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Vendors tend to make the most pips.
Have you ever worked out the average pips made per day in Mr Charts thread? Frightening!

piggybridges said:

Vendors tend to make the most pips.!

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Mr Charts has the occasional loser :cheesy:

Yeah, but his losers are so infrequent and small in comparison to his winners, that I feel he gives them back to the market out of mercy and embarrassment at how easy it is.
Maybe that's the case with all vendors, as they all make a hell of a lots of pips...