I Bet You Think You Are..., But Are You Really Actually Even Trading???!!

[luckyd1976]

http://www.trade2win.com/boards/forex-discussion/32468-crazy-returns-they.html

 

[shadowninja]

I suppose it does depends on how many trades you take a day. If you trade 50 times a day, each trade, on average, increases your equity by 1%, compound that and see what you get. (It's Sunday and my calculator has gone to evening mass.)

 

[Atilla]

I have put 2k in to my account to learn to trade as i dont think a demo account is the same.
If i can make the acc grow with in say one month to 3.5k / 5k I will fund my acc with 50k.
I want to make 10% on my acc per day or x amount of trades.
So please coerect me if this is not possible or is to much of a rick to be hopping to make a living
as I want it to be a dependable living as others depended on me.
So My first trade = 10% of acc £2 per pip to gain 100 pips with a 20 pip s/l,
lets say i got stoped out ,
now need a gain of 120 pips,
again stoped out,
now need a gain of 140 pips
and so on by the end of the first day i made it 10% up.
Day two £2200 account, first trade of the day £2.2 and get 100 pips ,
£2420 in acc next trade £2.42 per pip and so on if the acc has a bad run and goes in to - say £1800
then each trade is £1.8 pep pip 20 to 30 pip stoploss
but the goal is to gain 10% per day or by x amount of trades.
I must add that i all ready have incared big losses and am awear orthe risk but do belive that i
have what it will take to make it in this game with the help of you guys.

£2 per point at 20p SL is £40 loss/risk which means with £2K you are only risking 2% which is reasonable but I'd recommend 1% with £1 bet for new starters.

As previous bloggers said prove your system works first before you up your stake.

Limit the number of trades per day too. My mistake was to over trade at the start. eg. No more than 5 trades at £20 SL totals £100 max daily loss at 1%. Should mean you get about full months milage assuming all your days are max losses. Unlikely but possible I'd guess.

I'd strongly like to inform you that the game for starters is not to make money but stay in the game...

If you concentrate on not losing money winnings will take care of them selves.

Best of luck...

 

[prop]

"If you concentrate on not losing money winnings will take care of them selves"

personally i feel it far better to concentrate on making money as opposed to losing it, but i see where you are coming from, its vitally important to trade and protect capital ( as opposed to having a 5000000 tick stop) but i find its even more important to treat every trade as a huge opp to make money, i really do believe if you concentrate on what you can lose you will lose it !
i like to think of every trade as a positive ( difficult sometimes)

 

[Atilla]

"If you concentrate on not losing money winnings will take care of them selves"

personally i feel it far better to concentrate on making money as opposed to losing it, but i see where you are coming from, its vitally important to trade and protect capital ( as opposed to having a 5000000 tick stop) but i find its even more important to treat every trade as a huge opp to make money, i really do believe if you concentrate on what you can lose you will lose it !
i like to think of every trade as a positive ( difficult sometimes)

The problem is 90-95% of traders start with that sentiment.

They calculate they will make 10% a month and perhaps that's a little too modest for them as their trading improves with time and so perphaps 11% second month and even more the next.

We are born to win as we are to breath. People are quite adapt at handling success even if they screw it up nobody gives two hoots.

You are about to step up to a precipice. You look to the other side and see loads of money. You are telling him don't look down, the dark side will draw you in.

Yeah I've seen that episode too but lifes not a fable you know. :cheesy:

I don't think I've come across any trader who doesn't go into EVERY trade thinking he is not going to make money? There lies the 95%...

IMHO the 5% are probaly those who erred on the side caution, choosing not to lose their monies swealtering over their system on entries and exits whilst taking their time and applying discipline to their business...

But I hear what you are saying too. Horses for courses. Do what ever it takes to bank those pips in the bag...

 

[doberman]

OK no one Has disagreed with the risk % all through it has been said to half it .
I take this on broad and also i get the felling that risk % is contacted to ones trading system,
I am trying to trading eur/usa It is sitting at a high of 1.5961 wait to 9.3 /10 am if it has started to fall down below 1.5980 I will go short at 1.5950 hopping for 1.58 or below.
If how ever it stays with what looks to me a trend (long) I will go with the trend till it bends but
with a tailing s/l of 30 pips.
When I pick one or the other after looking at the usa/jpy and the morning news I will put a stop under of 20 pips if this stop out i will let it raid for 70 to 120 pips before i will make any move
say i go long and got stoped out and it starts to come back my way i will put in an order where i got stopped out as i now know it is going my way.(shadowninjis trade secrets ).
Is this how a trader would make a trade or is this a lets have a go.

 

[doberman]

spanish dont mean to hijack your Thread but cant find how do do one of my own perhaps you would inform me on that

 

[spanish89]

I thought it was more than that and over the £2k mark, I must have missed some bad directional trades in the last week where the ultra wide stops were perhaps a tad too wide for comfort on £2k ...ouch!

Although I have to say I'm very intrigued where he is going to go with his reversion to the mean strategy on stocks mentioned in his fannie thread ...truly shocking or enlightening ...bets are on

Aloha, i was at £2750 back on that day the ecb rate was being announced.
I had been earning consistently day by day, posting all history, and had gone from an account of £1000 to that £2750 in just under 2weeks. :cheesy::cheesy:

But that day the ecb was coming out i was short on oil and holding a slight loss..., however due to everyone (not just on here but every single news reporter, all the market analysts, all the city traders) were all saying when the ecb raised rates the euro would go up in value and so the dollar would crash even lower, and therefore the oil price was meant to rocket past $150 that day, and the eur/usd was mean to bypass 1.6000...

So when im sitting there at £2 tick on oil seeing all this im getting terrified, and so i just slashed the trade in half taking loss of £585, to free up capital to extend the stoploss on it, while at the same time then go long on the oil daily, and to short the dow at £3 point since when the dollar crashed the dow was meant to drop 250+ that day...


But well trichet gave his speech in that funny politicans way which made the euro drop instead ven thought its rate had just been hiked, the dow rocketed up 170 points for the day, and the oil dropped about $2 t $3s!!!


And so i got completely ******* and just slashed all my trades in a fit of panic just to getrid of them as quick as possible!! :-0 (The only 1 i kept was my oil short that id been holding from before but had slashed half for loss, only for in the end to it endup going $5 in my favour!)



But so my account was then slashed from £2750 to £1330!!



I have been consistently making profits everyday since then, (only actually trading every other day though), i did take abig loss on friday of over £500 because i had got into oil overnight for the pullback, but was $5s too soon, and had used a stoploss though which was what cost me the money (if i hadnt used stoploss id never have lost any).

So my account was down to just over £1,200 on friday, but then the oil pullback id been waiting for finally came and so i started thrashing the market (even though i fell asleep 3times in 2hours while trading the oil), but ended the day making back all those £500+ losses + £11 extra for the day.


So ended the week up about £500 at £1850.

 

[shadowninja]

say i go long and got stoped out and it starts to come back my way i will put in an order where i got stopped out as i now know it is going my way.(shadowninjis trade secrets ).

Woah there, tiger. I assume you're referring to Jacko's anti-hedge. As long as you read the rules correctly, things should work ok...

 

[doberman]

I read them but you know what they say about us Irish

 

[spanish89]

I have put 2k in to my account to learn to trade as i dont think a demo account is the same.
If i can make the acc grow with in say one month to 3.5k / 5k I will fund my acc with 50k.
I want to make 10% on my acc per day or x amount of trades.
So please coerect me if this is not possible or is to much of a rick to be hopping to make a living
as I want it to be a dependable living as others depended on me.
So My first trade = 10% of acc £2 per pip to gain 100 pips with a 20 pip s/l,
lets say i got stoped out ,
now need a gain of 120 pips,
again stoped out,
now need a gain of 140 pips
and so on by the end of the first day i made it 10% up.
Day two £2200 account, first trade of the day £2.2 and get 100 pips ,
£2420 in acc next trade £2.42 per pip and so on if the acc has a bad run and goes in to - say £1800
then each trade is £1.8 pep pip 20 to 30 pip stoploss
but the goal is to gain 10% per day or by x amount of trades.
I must add that i all ready have incared big losses and am awear orthe risk but do belive that i
have what it will take to make it in this game with the help of you guys.

:|


This is what i mean by how you are more likely to lose money not because of bad ''money management'', or even because you get the direction wrong in your trades...,
But more because you are not actually even looking and viewing the market for what it actually really is at all anymore.


The market isnt a computer, no matter how much we use computers to trade it, at the end of the day the market is NOT a computer, its 100% human:!:


That is why i just think its so foolish and sad how everyone tries to workout a set ''system'' that they can use when they 'trade' to make money consistently.


Because its physically impossible to create any such system, since the market future isnt actually there yest (so system can say where to enter/exit and give you a % your going to make at any 1 time), since the market is PEOPLE, and theres no system in teh world that can forecast people and how they will react and what they will do (so make the market on your screens do).

Thats why i said human pyschology skills are worth more than any masters degrees in maths when it really comes to consistently making money trading, as maths and systems cant predict or control people.


And so it would be extremely unwise to go in attemting to make any sort of % on a daily basis, as it just wont work like that mate.




Imagine you are a trader at a market, just like you are now, but instead of stock contracts you are trading at a fruit market for 2weeks.

You can only make money depending on how many customers who come each day, how much they are willing to pay for whatever you are selling, how much other sellers are willing to undercut you, and how much you even managed ot get whatever you are selling in the 1st place.

That sort of market is exactly the same as the stock market though mate, an dso if you went into that market with a target of making 'x%' each day for those 2weeks you would just be let down, as you would be if you try to do that in the stock market.



The best and easiest way to actually make decent consistent profit everyday in the stockmarket is to do it the exact same way you would do in a fruit market, and that is to go ''bargain hunting'' only, and so just getting as many bargains as you can each day and being happy with whatever the discounts you made as profit are each day, rather than going in with a ''system'' and tryin to make a certain % each day.



That is just my view though, and im sure many have oppsoing views.

 

[normbeef]

Spanish .. I think your issue is that you seem to be more interested in consistency... what difference does it make if you lose money on 20 trades.. as long as the 21st trade covers all the losses and makes you a profit ?

This thread was originally about how people view the markets but seems to have gone into the usual conversation about your trading style and ego problems...yet again..

 

[spanish89]

Spanish .. I think your issue is that you seem to be more interested in consistency... what difference does it make if you lose money on 20 trades.. as long as the 21st trade covers all the losses and makes you a profit ?

This thread was originally about how people view the markets but seems to have gone into the usual conversation about your trading style and ego problems...yet again..

Consistentcy is more important and more likely in obtaining an actual salary you can live off from trading, rather than 'hoping for the 1 giant trade' that is going to cancel out all the losses from all your losing trades and still make you sufficient profit!

If you can cancel out all your losses and make profit on 1 trade against 20 losing trades or even 5 losing trades on some days you are lucky...,
But what if that big giant trade that was going to recover your losses you go in the wrong direction on it??
Or if this trade doesn't come??


Its upto how you trade mate, but my view is consistency is far more important than 'lucky big trades'.

 

[gooseman]

spanish-do you see that you're setting yourself up for a 'big (un)lukcy trade' with your stoploss principle?

 

[spanish89]

spanish-do you see that you're setting yourself up for a 'big (un)lukcy trade' with your stoploss principle?

I do realise taht 1day i may n probably will get caught with a very sharp fall or rise in oil agaisnt my traded direction, and so will have to take a very big loss that day, depending on the tightness of teh stoploss i have sued on that trade.

But i will have banked enough between now and when that time comes that i will be able to handle the loss quite easily..


But im sure even i wont be able to escape taht loss coming 1day..., but so il just keep on banking as much as i can till then. :cheesy:

 

[forker]

you seem to think that this disaster will be a one off thing and rare too

 

[Vaco]

I do realise taht 1day i may n probably will get caught with a very sharp fall or rise in oil agaisnt my traded direction, and so will have to take a very big loss that day, depending on the tightness of teh stoploss i have sued on that trade.

But i will have banked enough between now and when that time comes that i will be able to handle the loss quite easily..


But im sure even i wont be able to escape taht loss coming 1day..., but so il just keep on banking as much as i can till then. :cheesy:

sp, there is actually sence in what you are saying here but only on the assumption that you do not increase your bet size as your account grows.

so when you have made 20k if your still trading £2 a point you will survive a big loss but if you have increased to £10 a point you will wipe out tht account and you will feel it.

I doubt tht you could resist the temptation to increase the stake as your account grows.

On the other hand i disagree with your views as the market been a fruit and veg stall, when people buy and sell futures contracts they are SPECULATING on the future value of the underlying, they are not buying oil to take home and fill up their cars so you dont have customers who require your product.

You can not disagree tht all we do is speculate on the price of oil/dow/e-minis.

speculation- engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains, esp. trading in commodities, stocks, etc., in the hope of profit from changes in the market price.

now how we decide to manage our risk is a personal choice but the risk is real.

You are right that stops should be placed above/below support/resistance levels but these exist in all timeframes.

You argue that theres no point making many small losses waiting for trade 20 to come and make it all back for you, ok

i argue tht theres no point making small profitable trades only for trade 20 to wipe out everything you have made.

When we talk about systems we do not always mean a mechanical system tht can be programmed into a computer. you can be a discretionary trader such as yourself but still have some rules tht you apply to every trade for example

1.my risk on this trade should not be more then 2% of my account meaning i have to either put a smaller stake on (£1 instead of £2) or wait for a better price closer to my stop/support/resistance.

2.why am i placing this trade, where do i expect price to go and does tht represent a good reward for the risk that i am taking. (i dont know anyone tht goes into business without expecting to make more then wht they are risking)

so for any 'newbie' traders reading this thread you should view your trading as speculation. you are not buying or selling any tangable goods you wont even get a certificate to say you own anything. You are simply speculating on price movements.

 

[Trader333]

But so my account was then slashed from £2750 to £1330!!

You will only need two trades like this in succession and it is all over. It will only be a matter of time until this sort of event will happen.

The market isnt a computer, no matter how much we use computers to trade it, at the end of the day the market is NOT a computer, its 100% human

It is actually made up of both with some completely automatic trading systems.


Paul

 

[normbeef]

Consistentcy is more important and more likely in obtaining an actual salary you can live off from trading, rather than 'hoping for the 1 giant trade' that is going to cancel out all the losses from all your losing trades and still make you sufficient profit!

If you can cancel out all your losses and make profit on 1 trade against 20 losing trades or even 5 losing trades on some days you are lucky...,
But what if that big giant trade that was going to recover your losses you go in the wrong direction on it??
Or if this trade doesn't come??


Its upto how you trade mate, but my view is consistency is far more important than 'lucky big trades'.

See thing is Spanish the only thing you seem to be consistent in is talking rubbish... your quick assumption is that all traders NEED to be the same somehow in order to make money, or in your case not to loose too much.

The issue here is that money management and correctly placed stops can help you limit your losses and identify when you have hit the market on the nose.. its not luck.. its part of the skill set of most profitable traders.

Using money management I can go for months without getting the market right (if I need to) ..

I wouldnt mind betting that you would be on the dole within a week if you get 10 trades wrong in a row its just a matter of time... tick tick tick

 

[prop]

The market isnt a computer, no matter how much we use computers to trade it, at the end of the day the market is NOT a computer, its 100% human

you have obv never seen all the spoofs on the s and p