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I thought exactly the same as you. I thought i would be consistently profitable within 3 years but it took me about 7 years of pain. Im earning good money now but it was much more difficult than i anticipated.
Im sure there are people who have become consistent traders much quicker than I have, and some it might have taken longer.
The best advice i can give is, Trading as we know is a very emotionally charged business , so if it fits your personality it could take less time to get where you want to be.
I am an impatient person but patients is one of the key things that you need, so I am at a disadvantage.
But I have very good discipline, resilience and insane drive to succeed so when I was doing my bollocks I could dust myself down and keep going.
Figure out your own strong and weak areas of your personality and go from there.
Not sure on equites but I started on forex as you can trade micro lots.when you become more consistent and confident you can trade futures.
Good luck.
also, you never stop learning. Im 13 years in now and still learning and adapting.
Thanks mate, great post and plenty of good advice. Unlike some who offer advice you have been there and paid your dues so l do pay attention to what you're saying even if it doesn't come across that away.
Patience is a something i have but my weakness, from a trading perspective, is a tendency to over think things. This leads me to procrastinate and hesitate to pull the trigger.
What I need to do is pick a system and trade it. I need screen time to accumulate the skills and knowledge needed to become profitable.
On your point about trading forex, I have actually decided to focus on spot forex because it offers you the chance to fine tune risk through micro lots. Futures will have to wait.
If you don't mind, can I please ask why you switched from trading forex to trading futures as both offer leverage?
It started out in a well-meaning way, in response to a person in a situation everyone finds themselves in at some point. Pretty much all of the contributions have been well-meaning all the way through, with only a few exceptions (people getting into arguments, for instance.)
But it's also become so huge that it's almost impossible to follow or keep track of. It's mostly just different individuals dropping their pet ideas in (I did that too, not complaining, just saying....)
It's become so fragmented I don't know what the upshot of it is. But there certainly is a lot to choose from, which I guess is the value of it.
I hope the thread starter, @xevanchan, has found something he can use. Just one idea can be enough.
Maybe just knowing how many have been there and have come out of it will help. I hope something has shown a way to move ahead, even if it's just the emotional support, which has certainly been huge, and is itself inspiring.
Well it's no wonder people get so confused at how to trade. Just look at this thread and the multitudes of fingers pointing in different directions all trying to get you to the same place. So what direction shall I point my finger? Directly at you. …
This looks to be shaping up to be one of the big popular threads of 2019. Here are a few other similar-themed threads from years back that had a lot of input, various thoughts and ideas and all around entertainment also:
Myself as well as others I personally know have been dupped by the "Dream Merchants" of the trading world which includes Educators, System Vendors, Ebook Authors, Private Mentorship programs and even home spun system developers selling their wares …
After spending a small fortune and much sweat, it looks like my trading is turning around.
Discarded most all conventional technical indicators and explored a new approach. Market Profile analysis.
Which takes market data and places it inside a gaussian …
That said, OP, you may be at an earlier stage of your journey if going by the "38 steps". So my 2c thoughts on trying to give some opinionated advice in addition to the excellent feedback and comments already posted..
Without knowing the exact numbers and figures, I can only guess having losing trades for three days after being greatly profitable for a week bad enough to be margin called probably means there was overleveraging or averaging down losing trades in those three days trying to make back losses. Some ideas:
- the leverage and risk plan sounds inconsistent here. All the trades should have consistent plan of leveraging. A set % of account risked, a max % loss per trade. Some brokers can do automatic reinforcement of limiting leveraging if asked.
You may need to practice staying consistent even during a losing streak whether in sim, or an instrument that has smaller margin per contract.
- if the loss is getting wider, there should be a plan to stop the trade without averaging down any further. This could mean learning to recognize from the price action that the instrument is now decidedly going the other way.
I tried heiken-ashi for a month or so in sim years back. I have to agree there can be much lost and not seen that a minute based chart shows. I'd suggest ditching it and going back to 1min or 5min charts. As for Al Brooks, having read his stuff a logn time ago, and also having tried out his live room for several months, I'm sorry to say while his book is good starting information, the material and what he says in the room can be very vague and is missing entry and trade management instruction. Almost like he is "holding back" showing his exact methods of entry or rather he may not be trading live at all some sessions and too much of what I heard either is missing from his book or occasionally contradicts. I'd suggest keeping in mind his basic patterns, but using other learned or created methods for entry and management as he sure won't ever show real proof.. One idea that I really liked about BPA, was the "failures" i.e. if a bpa pattern failed, then price would often capitulate and extend the other way often for "two legs".
- I'd agree the trends are hardly ever clean anymore like examples seen in books. The HFT overrun markets has made the pa far more messy imo. But there is also more volatility so there are still moves that can be traded if one can recognize and have strategies to trade them. Maybe look into how to take entries out of a breakout of a range for days that are more choppy but have enough participation to stay in ranges for a while before breaking out to a new high or low.
- Maybe have a higher time-frame chart (usually about 5x longer) where you can see if the higher time frame is in a trend.
- I'd not worry about trying to get a whole range as you practice. I'm usually fine with letting the market go after I finished taken profit.
- Well, if you're already doing that well with 3 points a day in sim, maybe you just need to recognize what exactly is so different from your sim trading vs. the live one and aim to keep your live trading exactly like your sim.
- Some comments on your pics, just my 2c, good luck:
This is simply my perspective - just an example of how I trade and produce consistent results. (Sometimes that means losing days, getting whipsawed to oblivion, etc.) Just my opinion:
After looking at your entry screenshots, I notice a couple things. Your indicators should be thrown away and replaced with maybe just ATR and some momentum indicator. Your screenshots also show no clear reason to enter any of those trades. I think you need to step back and aim for longer holds, with your ultimate goal of holding a position from the morning, into the close, and even overnight if it keeps going in your favor. You need to start trading off clear support/resistance levels. I trade breakouts, personally, but you could also trade bounces if that's more your personality.
For example, let's look at the ES on 1/15, your first screenshot. My strategy (which I use primarily for Crude Oil futures, but still applies to any market) would have gotten me long on the opening bar, at 2586.5, which was the break of the prior resistance level 90 minutes before the open. I then would have literally sat in that trade most of the day, using a few criteria to judge momentum, and then flipped short at 2:15. That second trade would have stopped out at breakeven according to my trade rules, but that's the general idea.
An ATR indicator is useful for knowing when NOT to get into a trade, which depends on your standard stop loss. If you don't have a standard stop loss amount for each market, that's necessary for success. I would recommend a 4 point (16 tick) stop for the /ES, or $200 per contract. Essentially, don't even place trades when the current volatility can stop you out. Instead, look to place trades in low volatility zones, so that you don't get stopped out early, and can catch the whole move.
Overall, you seem to be haphazardly placing trades without any real reasoning. You should aim to have a completely rule based system for entry and exit, which you should then backtest with something like OnDemand in Thinkorswim, manually going click by click through as many historical days as possible, recording when you would have entered and exited trades in a spreadsheet. This will give you invaluable statistics on your strategy, as well as give you trust. Personally, I track wins/losses for different times of day, largest daily drawdown, longest daily losing streak, on and on. When you have enough trades tracked, in the hundreds or even thousands, you have a good idea of what to expect from the strategy, and it will help you trust it enough to trade through losing streaks, large drawdowns, and strings of negative days.
You need to have rules for every aspect of the trade - entry, stop loss movement, exit, etc.
You can't do the same things over and over and expect different results, so something needs to change. This is just my two cents, but it works for me. (My screenshots used to look like yours as well, and I realized I was trading emotionally/not objectively. A rule based system trumps emotional/instinctive trading in the long run every time.)
