Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Hi Khan, I am new in this forum. I hope to have friends who could help me. I had a short experience of stocks market through eTrade around 6 years ago. At that time I was not educated well and became a loser. Now I am planning on learning and fighting back against what I made mistakes before. Recentely, I contacted Forex (Foredu - fxcm) and S&P 500 future(Trading Advantage - Larry Levin). Would you please advise me how I need to approach on these tradings. If you could please give me some advises. I know it is too broad but I could not spell out more detail than a single line. Just hope to have some steps that I need to learn.
John from Oregon USA
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I have been active in the stock market since 1980. I am just starting in the futures market. I like the ES and YM at this point. Thinkorswim is my current platform. This is a very good forum and I think that I will benefit from others experience,
I hope that I can contribute as I learn. Thank You for this forum.
I have been trading forex and options for the last 2 years. Looking forward to learning more about futures and also learning more about trading in general.
I am a new trader and i want to know how to be a good trader.
i want to know what would be the best trading that is in demand right now.
I know that it is hard to be trader and i know that i can get a loss at my first try but also I am expecting to have gains.
I joined this forum because i know and i believe that it will help me gain knowledge and learning or maybe tactics.
i hope to find friendly members here.
I've just joined because a few recent searches I did pointed to this forum and it looks like a very informative one. Below is a summary of my trading career if anyone is interested read on, but be warned it's a bit long and boring and I am more of a loser than a success story! But hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.
I started around 9 years ago, trading stocks with a $5000 US trading account. My first trade went well and I made $200. Being a new trader my thought was that if I had bet bigger I would have won more money. Next trade I doubled up and shorted an internet stock. Trade went bad and I lost about 20% of my account. I didn't realise that I entered a position (I think on Netscape) just ahead of its earnings report release. Anyway, I then was determined to recover my losses to prove to my wife how good I was and in a matter of a few months I blew my account.
I went through the trading, always trying to improve. I tried to buy a few systems and stumbled across one service which seemed to be based on a buy 20 day high breakout with 10 day low trailing stop, scanning for stocks. I actually traded a $2000 account to $7000 and then blew it all. I think the internet boom was happening around this time.
I then moved from shares to futures, attracted by the leverage, and better liquidity. Didn't have much luck and always had this fear that the internet would go down whilst I was in a position and I would lose my house (or at least that small portion that wasn't owned by my bank). I also managed to get some slippage trading some futures like cotton.
Perhaps thinking I could eliminate risk I then picked up a book on options, and being an engineer with good mathematical skills I was attracted to a thing called delta-neutral trading - the maths of it was pretty basic although it (I mean the Black Scholes option model) did rely on some flawed assumptions (hence the global financial crisis) about Gaussian distributions. I tried it for a few months but realised that the thing that was getting in the way here was the bid ask spread as well as the slippage.
Each time I had one of these ventures I would take a $2000-$5000 account and trade it to zero.
Being in Australia I was finding it hard to stay up during the regular market hours and then got interested in forex. I started trading the eur/usd, with a $2000 account (with $10/pip). Pretty soon I blew the account. It always seemed to be in a slow and steady decrease where I broke ven on trades but whittled away at the account balance due to commissions/slippage. Then I put in a another $2000 and tried a thing called B100 from a forum. It involved trading a breakout on gbp/usd, and there was a period of time where it worked nicely and I turned a $2000 account into $12000 and then blew it all (pattern seems to be repeating itself).
I then discovered news trading where you would bracket a currency a minute or so before the scheduled news. It turned out that by the time I discovered this loophole the brokers had already plugged it - although I do believe it was working quite well about 3-4 years before I stumbled across it.
I went on to buy lots of trading systems ranging in price from $40 (yes I know I am cheap) to $500. The $500 one was a system where the guy published spectacular results on his website, giving you a precise entry but leaving the exit unspecified, and then at the end of the week he would say, ah this is the point where you should have exited. I was pretty naive at that time.
I then went through a phase where I thought I should use people more experienced than me to guide me. So I joined some chat rooms, where you could pay $200 per month to follow a guys live trading. The guy seemed to make a lot of money but I could not duplicate his results. He was either really good with an uncanny instinct to sometimes use a hard stop and sometimes not use it, or he might even have been a cheater - I'll probably never know although I really believed he was in the former category.
I did develop a certain expertise in trading the GY (GBP/JPY) and there was a period there where I was ready to challenge anyone to beat me at picking the tops and bottoms of this, and made some real calls of my own in one forex trading chat room. But my greed and money management inadequacies soon lead to my failing. For example once I had 200 pips on a daily trade and then I held out going for 500 but it came back and stopped me out and I lost 60 pips.
However from the trading room I did see the importance of having a good brokerage for the purposes of scalping and I ended up having some 10 different accounts. The best I could ever seem to do was to break even but most of the time I blew my accounts, always in a slow and steady decay. I also like forex because of the leverage and especially because of the micro lots which allowed me to do position sizing more precisely. I realised by this time that trading at $10/pip on a $2000 account was a formula for disaster, so I went right down to 10c/pip, but still managed to blow a few accounts.
I then came across another system which I bought for forex for $2000 and it didn't work for me. I couldn't work out why. The guy who sold it then offered some coaching. I took the coaching option which was about $7000 USD. There I learnt from experienced traders that even though you had the system you still had to cherry pick the trades. Despite the coaches best efforts I still could not manage to develop the art of working out which trades to take and which to pass on. And I was left wondering should I have even bought the system in the first place because if I knew when to hold and when to fold I could probably make any system work.
I had also gone through the phase of reading books by psychology type coaches. I guess what I learned here is that it is a lot about your behaviour in terms of greed and fear rather than psychological disorders that one might think one has.
I had also thought that if I had more money, or if I used more computers to autotrade, or if I teamed up with a network of like-minded traders around the globe then I would have been more successful but I now don't think that is the problem.
I seemed to always gravitate toward shorter and shorter time scales for trading and in the process I eventually realised that I could get better fills, lower slippage on futures such as ES, YM than on forex and this is where I am at right now.
In rediscovering futures I then started my search for the best scalp trading system and bought several ranging from $1000 to $5000. None of them seemed to work for me however I sometimes did pick out a few tiny but interesting things from each of these and they have at least stuck in my head. Since rediscovering futures I have set up a $10000 USD account and blown it 3 times. I did at least discover the importance of sim trading, and I now take sim trades as seriously as real ones. One night I lost 10% of my account sim trading and I was so angry with myself that I couldn't sleep. It wasn't real money but I did make some mistakes.
On speaking with my accountant for my tax return he advised me that my trading wasn't going anywhere and I should stop. But for some reason I never do. I started my attraction to trading in my late thirties after reading a book by Jesse Livermore, "reminiscences of a stock trader". Before that I had no idea that I would have liked trading (and thought the whole thing was a kind of unpleasant form of gambling) but the book made me feel like I was actually born to trade. I also read one other motivating book by Larry Williams about how he made a million.
My personality is a bit weird because I learn things in a funny way. For example if I had to guess which direction to head (North, East, South, or West) I would try all four and eliminate them one by one until I had arrived at the right one and I was sure of it. Just guessing that it should be West would not work for me even if it was right. So with trading I think I have managed to cover nearly all of the mistakes so that I now know what I want and a bit about what not to do.
What I have concluded is:
ultimately I do not want to rely on any chat room
I do not want to rely on any indicator that is hidden from me
I should use some sort of system which is part mechanical and part discretionary
for psychology it's a lot about being disciplined although there's probably a lot more there that we can do to harness the power of our subconscious to not get in our way sometimes.
Right now I am trying to cook up my own simple system, by bringing together everything I have learned over the past 9 or so years. My personality is such that I think the only way I will succeed is if I develop my own system. 5 months ago I blew my account again and I have been researching and sim trading and trying to forget everything and learn anew. I may go live again in about 1 month. All I know is that I won't make any of the mistakes that I have made in the past and that I have such a huge repertoire of mistakes that I have hopefully exhausted a good portion of them.
again, i am a new trader and i want to learn how to be a good trader. I know that before to be a trader you should have a background of it, but i believe that even though you have background with it, i still have to communicate with my other co-traders to learn things that are necessary for trading purposes. As a new member, i am very much excited in this forum. i want to have friends, and the one who can give me advices and simple strategies that could help me.
