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I've been watching the forex market for about 10 years now. I haven't really been focused on trading all those years though, it was mostly just as a background hobby. I recently joined a forex group with a teacher who claimed to be a world class trader and would teach us all these amazing trading techniques, blah blah blah. Long story short he was a scammer. I didn't lose any money but my confidence is now at an all time low and my frustration levels are at an all time high. I've been aware of futures for about a year and a half now and I figure maybe now is the time to jump in.
I've got a demo account with Ninjatrader right now just trying to figure out how futures work and how they compare with forex. I've watched some videos on order flow and footprint charts and every vendor makes their software look like the best. And it's seeming very hard to get any actual education through the free info. I don't really want to buy a bunch of different software just to find out they are not worth it. I got the auction dashboard software a long time ago since it was cheap but it's just confusing and there is no support or anything. Now I'm just confused about what my next steps should be.
I was thinking of maybe opening an account with sierra charts since the monthly cost isn't that much and trying to trade the new micros. Maybe I can try to learn some order flow trading while watching live. But I have no experience with that so it feels like it would be an expensive waste of time.
Sorry the long post I guess I'm just feeling down and lost and looking for someone to help me out. Hopefully this long rambling has made some sort of sense and thanks for the help.
From my point of view, it is difficult for anybody to provide advice to generic requests for help.
When I joined FIO back in September 2015 it was still called Big Mike Trading. It took me 3 months to make the first post (honestly I had forgotten about the site), and then I began looking for specific things.
I did not feel like just being a lurker, so I started contributing, and the very insightful feedback and advice I got back convinced me that this was a high-quality forum worth frequenting.
My advice would be
start looking for specific topics. Chances are, most of your questions have are already been asked and answered, it's likely a case of searching for them, which brings me to next point -->
make extensive use of the built-in search engines. They are very powerful and give you considerable flexibility to search for any topic. Just start typing something in the top-right search box. There's also two more advanced search modes. If you need help with how to use the engines, just let me know
if a topic you are searching isn't 100% clear to you, do not be afraid to ask a question. I never care about how stupid I may sound by asking the simplest question. The truth is, if I don't know something, I will ask about it
one of the reasons I believe it's worth sticking to any given forum is, you start getting to know the personalities of the 'regulars', their specific strengths and knowledge, so that you can ask them about a subject they are likely to know
finally, contribute if you can. Start by providing insight in your own experience with Forex. What was good about it? What was bad? The reason I suggest to contribute is, I believe writing stuff yourself gets you to think more about the stuff you already know. Learning by teaching in other words.
I hope it helps. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck.
Thanks for the reply xplorer. My forex experience has been pretty uneventful to be honest. Tried a lot of different things, always switching systems and trying to new things. I think my plan now will to try to do some shorter time frame trades in the morning before I have to go to work. Then also set some limit orders on some higher time frames for some swing trading. If I can be successful with that maybe I can then move to futures.
I was thinking of learning more about how the DOM works. I've seen some videos of NO BS and jigsaw and youtube and it seems pretty good. But since I have auction dashboard which has a DOM I was thinking of watching those videos and trying to use the auction dashboard DOM. They don't look exactly the same so it's confusing me right now but maybe after I watch some more videos and practice it will make sense.
So I see the previous post was deleted because of spam links. I assume it was just a spam post and nothing useful was in it? Excited to see a new post email and it was just a spammer, that's disappointing haha.
as a person who's still in the novice stage of trading Fx, I can share a couple of sites that I've found helpful in learning Fx, and a couple ofthings I've come to learn in general.
I've found babypips to helpful when I got started. maverickfx I found later, and their material is pretty thorough, took me a while to go thru their material, and still implementing adapting to my trading.
there's a lot of guys on youtube that are garbage, but everyonce in a while you'll find someone who can actually teach you something.
the main thing that helped me is trading on the larger time frames, and looking at the big picture. once I know what the big picture is, I focus on trading in that direction, executing on the smaller time frame with good risk reward.
i'm pro, yet, anyways, but that's the goal. just trying to help someone along the way. hope that helps.
I too started with forex thinking the cost to enter was small, trade at all hours of the day, I enjoy learning about global economies. It took me about 3 months to see more and more of the frustrations with unregulated forex brokers. I had to step away for a few months due to my regular job demands, but when I came back, I found out my old forex broker had been shut down in the US. I too had previously started looking at order flow but without any centralized market, the data just wasn't reliable. That's when I discovered futures (and this forum). I quickly started grabbing anything I could to learn order flow and volume, including jigsaw & NO BS like you talked about. Those helped me get up to speed, but I didn't want to stare at the DOM all day long. In watching webinars on this forum, I found FT71 and immediately knew his talks on volume profiling with an order flow component resonated with me.
If you are looking for some direction related to order flow, footprint, volume profiling, I definitely suggest taking a look. FT71 does a morning Trader Bite on youtube at 9am (EST) for everyone, and a year ago he started his own community called Convergent Trading. There is a small monthly fee, but its less than most and the community is full of eager traders looking to make an honest jump into successful trading. I have learned 10X more following FT and the Convergent community than anyone/anywhere else, and he really isn't trying to sell anything so there's no reason to be skeptical about being scammed.
Most people at Convergent use Investor RT & Bookmap, but there are plenty that also use Ninjatrader & Sierra as well. At the end of the day in order to have a chance of success at trading, you need to find the style that makes sense to you.
I think people hop from system to system and platform to platform because most stuff just doesn't work. Many people have trouble executing a plan. Most times this is the natural instinct of self-preservation because the plan doesn't work.
The biggest problem with a trading approach to me is market cycles. You create a plan based on what is working NOW. You back test a bit and it seems to work historically well enough. You live trade it and it sucks, or you can't consistently execute. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes that plan that sucks live might actually be good if you just give it more time. People expect every day, week and month to be positive but the reality is that's never going to be the case.
And please don't take this as if I'm standing on my high horse. I'm saying this because that's me. I FINALLY have been sticking to the same way of trading for quite a while now. Some weeks it's not great, some weeks it sucks, some weeks are okay and some weeks are really good. I think over time I can be profitable, but I'm not going to go from little account to multi-millionaire this year. IF I can make it work it's going to be a long grind. With the success of the micros I'm finally back to trading real money.
My advice would be to become an Elite Member. This will give you access to a lot of good webinars and journals. I'm not really a fan of most of the journals because they tend to look better than they are and most of them are not trading with real money. The webinars are pure gold though. There are enough ideas in there to get you started in the right direction. I'm sure there are thousands of ways to make money trading, but each is likely really hard to find (and quantify for yourself). Anyway, that's where I'd start. Oh, and just sim trade until you have a system/plan that shows consistent profitability. No need IMO to risk real money if you're still figuring things out.
So I'm a new user to the forum also, this is actually my first post. Your feelings resonated with me, probably because I started in forex 5-6 years ago and just recently moved over to try trading on the futures market, like 2 months ago. This move to the futures market for me came as I discovered the market profile about a year ago and have been trying to make use of it the best I can. So I feel like we are sort of in the same boat.
I would say that you need to take some time to sit and contemplate what type of trader you truly want to be. I only say this because for the past 10 years in forex you have been moving from system to system trying to find something that works, maybe not taking the time to dedicate yourself to one system and taking it as seriously as you should. I have seen a quote used many times in different trading forums, as well as forums that have nothing to do about trading, and that is because it is applied perfectly in many areas of skill/talent. I'm paraphrasing, but basically it says to practice one thing 10,000 times and become a master of that, instead of practicing 10,000 things one time and never becoming a master of anything. This is the perfect mentality to trading. All you need is 1 system that you can use to generate a profit. Become the master of that system, and your problems will be solved. But doing that requires you to take a hard look on the inside and being true to yourself and what kind of trading you want to be doing and sticking to that plan.
Also, don't let the frustrations of failure get to you, being a profitable trader is, in my mind, the equivalent of being a professional athlete. Sure there are people who are naturally gifted and may have a head-start at being good/profitable. But the people at the top have all put in the hard work to be there. Skill will only get you so far, the rest comes from determination, practice, and a little bit of luck.
