For people who want to believe, a quick suggestion prior to risking your money on anything. Have a look at any mechanical trading system ranking website out there...see how many systems are around for more than 2 years. Unfortunately the nature of markets is that everything works, some of the time, and it is those times that system designers put up as their track record. If you choose the right period, it will work perfectly. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know in advance what is going to work, in which market. Case to put - I could design two systems, a countertrend system, and a trend-following system. i track the results for 12 months. if markets are choppy, I publish my countertrend system and everyone thinks it is the answer to markets forever, a trending market and the trend following system is the latest way to retire in 12 months. Particularly if you overlay the historical trades with some exponential money management...look at how that would have gone, wow!
In reality, markets are hard. The only way to work this out is to spend time risking your money, taking wins and losses and working out what works for you, mentally. to do this, cut your leverage back so you survive! Investing in some system will not give you this experience unfortunately. And it is only this experience which will mean you will still be around in 5 years time to capitalise on your knowledge.
For the record, I have been trading a range of markets for over 10 years. I have never lost any significant amounts of money, and in the last few years I have started becoming consistently profitable (for the moment anyway!). For what it's worth...the following is what seems to work for me.
1. Work out what the general economic view on the market is at the time.
2. Identify the weekly and monthly trends.
3. Trade a particular pattern around this.
From the above, I only trade markets where the above 2 points are clear - ie today the USD is rallying against most other currencies, while the EUR is particularly weak amid concerns of slowing growth and that it will catch up with the weakness in the US economy.
Plus the weekly and monthly trends are clear in most of these markets - USD is clearly strong. Hence long USD positions are "easier".
Once having done this I then try to put some sort of framework around entries and exits, I use swings as it is easier for me. Ie, at the moment I try not to have too many entries, and I track a lot of markets, so I usually only bother with weekly data - then finding spots to enter, and also to take profits if so desired. The actual technique will depend on your constraints...if you can trade 5 minute data, then perfect, but if you are looking at 4 hourly data then you need to factor this in accordingly and look at bigger periods for your resistance and support etc.
A good example for next week is the AUD - it is looking like there is a possibility of a rate cut amidst slowing commodity growth, hence a lot of downside risk to the currency. Compare that with the USD which is strong, or the JPY which is still benefitting from the unwinding of carry-trades, and looking for short opportunities in the AUD/USD or the AUD/JPY next week looks a pretty good bet. Not everything will win, but you have a lot of things stacked in your favour if this is what you are trying to trade, with stops.
The other thing I would offer is to recognise when a market is not worthwhile trading...sometimes I will go for months without interest in a market because I cannot identify a trend. If it is not blindingly obvious, I have found through experience that I generally lose money in it. Hence these days I don't bother much unless it seems obvious. It can mean in a particular market I won't trade for months...have a look at the USD/CAD for a choppy market over a 6-9 month period earlier this year...while look at the weakness in the USD against pretty much anything in 2007 for nice trends.
Do this, with a trading framework around it (breakouts, buying pullbacks to the main trend, moving average crossovers), and not too much leverage around it, and you will have a chance of surviving. Because I always make mistakes, hence too much risk and I wouldn't get the chance to try again next week to capitalise on additions to my knowledge.
A system never gives you this, and never gives you the knowledge to work out when it is not working...which usually comes too late. For a final example...I designed a system in tradestation many years ago trading gap days on the hang seng market. Historically it had hundreds of trades, and a profit factor of over 2.5 with pretty much no constraints...so what I would consider highly reliable. I looked at it around 2 years ago and saw that over the 5 years from when I didn't follow the market any more, the system lost a lot of money and the profit factor dropped to 0.65...a great way to the poorhouse. As with everything in the markets...if an edge exists that other people can also find, then eventually the edge disappears...hence finding something that is a bit more than a mechanical system will give you longevity.
Good luck!