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Hi guys, I have been using reddit for years in my personal life (not trading!) and wanted to give something back in an area where i am an expert. I worked at an investment bank for seven years and joined them as a graduate FX trader so have lots of professional experience, by which i mean I was trained and paid by a big institution to trade on their behalf. This is very different to being a full-time home trader, although that is not to discredit those guys, who can accumulate a good amount of experience/wisdom through self learning. When I get time I'm going to write a mid-length posts on each topic for you guys along the lines of how i was trained. I guess there would be 15-20 topics in total so about 50-60 posts. Feel free to comment or ask questions. The first topic is Risk Management and we'll cover it in three parts Part I
Why it matters
Position sizing
Kelly
Using stops sensibly
Picking a clear level
Why it matters
The first rule of making money through trading is to ensure you do not lose money. Look at any serious hedge fund’s website and they’ll talk about their first priority being “preservation of investor capital.” You have to keep it before you grow it. Strangely, if you look at retail trading websites, for every one article on risk management there are probably fifty on trade selection. This is completely the wrong way around. The great news is that this stuff is pretty simple and process-driven. Anyone can learn and follow best practices. Seriously, avoiding mistakes is one of the most important things: there's not some holy grail system for finding winning trades, rather a routine and fairly boring set of processes that ensure that you are profitable, despite having plenty of losing trades alongside the winners.
Capital and position sizing
The first thing you have to know is how much capital you are working with. Let’s say you have $100,000 deposited. This is your maximum trading capital. Your trading capital is not the leveraged amount. It is the amount of money you have deposited and can withdraw or lose. Position sizing is what ensures that a losing streak does not take you out of the market. A rule of thumb is that one should risk no more than 2% of one’s account balance on an individual trade and no more than 8% of one’s account balance on a specific theme. We’ll look at why that’s a rule of thumb later. For now let’s just accept those numbers and look at examples. So we have $100,000 in our account. And we wish to buy EURUSD. We should therefore not be risking more than 2% which $2,000. We look at a technical chart and decide to leave a stop below the monthly low, which is 55 pips below market. We’ll come back to this in a bit. So what should our position size be? We go to the calculator page, select Position Size and enter our details. There are many such calculators online - just google "Pip calculator". https://preview.redd.it/y38zb666e5h51.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26e4fe569dc5c1f43ce4c746230c49b138691d14 So the appropriate size is a buy position of 363,636 EURUSD. If it reaches our stop level we know we’ll lose precisely $2,000 or 2% of our capital. You should be using this calculator (or something similar) on every single trade so that you know your risk. Now imagine that we have similar bets on EURJPY and EURGBP, which have also broken above moving averages. Clearly this EUR-momentum is a theme. If it works all three bets are likely to pay off. But if it goes wrong we are likely to lose on all three at once. We are going to look at this concept of correlation in more detail later. The total amount of risk in our portfolio - if all of the trades on this EUR-momentum theme were to hit their stops - should not exceed $8,000 or 8% of total capital. This allows us to go big on themes we like without going bust when the theme does not work. As we’ll see later, many traders only win on 40-60% of trades. So you have to accept losing trades will be common and ensure you size trades so they cannot ruin you. Similarly, like poker players, we should risk more on trades we feel confident about and less on trades that seem less compelling. However, this should always be subject to overall position sizing constraints. For example before you put on each trade you might rate the strength of your conviction in the trade and allocate a position size accordingly: https://preview.redd.it/q2ea6rgae5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4332cb8d0bbbc3d8db972c1f28e8189105393e5b To keep yourself disciplined you should try to ensure that no more than one in twenty trades are graded exceptional and allocated 5% of account balance risk. It really should be a rare moment when all the stars align for you. Notice that the nice thing about dealing in percentages is that it scales. Say you start out with $100,000 but end the year up 50% at $150,000. Now a 1% bet will risk $1,500 rather than $1,000. That makes sense as your capital has grown. It is extremely common for retail accounts to blow-up by making only 4-5 losing trades because they are leveraged at 50:1 and have taken on far too large a position, relative to their account balance. Consider that GBPUSD tends to move 1% each day. If you have an account balance of $10k then it would be crazy to take a position of $500k (50:1 leveraged). A 1% move on $500k is $5k. Two perfectly regular down days in a row — or a single day’s move of 2% — and you will receive a margin call from the broker, have the account closed out, and have lost all your money. Do not let this happen to you. Use position sizing discipline to protect yourself.
Kelly Criterion
If you’re wondering - why “about 2%” per trade? - that’s a fair question. Why not 0.5% or 10% or any other number? The Kelly Criterion is a formula that was adapted for use in casinos. If you know the odds of winning and the expected pay-off, it tells you how much you should bet in each round. This is harder than it sounds. Let’s say you could bet on a weighted coin flip, where it lands on heads 60% of the time and tails 40% of the time. The payout is $2 per $1 bet. Well, absolutely you should bet. The odds are in your favour. But if you have, say, $100 it is less obvious how much you should bet to avoid ruin. Say you bet $50, the odds that it could land on tails twice in a row are 16%. You could easily be out after the first two flips. Equally, betting $1 is not going to maximise your advantage. The odds are 60/40 in your favour so only betting $1 is likely too conservative. The Kelly Criterion is a formula that produces the long-run optimal bet size, given the odds. Applying the formula to forex trading looks like this: Position size % = Winning trade % - ( (1- Winning trade %) / Risk-reward ratio If you have recorded hundreds of trades in your journal - see next chapter - you can calculate what this outputs for you specifically. If you don't have hundreds of trades then let’s assume some realistic defaults of Winning trade % being 30% and Risk-reward ratio being 3. The 3 implies your TP is 3x the distance of your stop from entry e.g. 300 pips take profit and 100 pips stop loss. So that’s 0.3 - (1 - 0.3) / 3 = 6.6%. Hold on a second. 6.6% of your account probably feels like a LOT to risk per trade.This is the main observation people have on Kelly: whilst it may optimise the long-run results it doesn’t take into account the pain of drawdowns. It is better thought of as the rational maximum limit. You needn’t go right up to the limit! With a 30% winning trade ratio, the odds of you losing on four trades in a row is nearly one in four. That would result in a drawdown of nearly a quarter of your starting account balance. Could you really stomach that and put on the fifth trade, cool as ice? Most of us could not. Accordingly people tend to reduce the bet size. For example, let’s say you know you would feel emotionally affected by losing 25% of your account. Well, the simplest way is to divide the Kelly output by four. You have effectively hidden 75% of your account balance from Kelly and it is now optimised to avoid a total wipeout of just the 25% it can see. This gives 6.6% / 4 = 1.65%. Of course different trading approaches and different risk appetites will provide different optimal bet sizes but as a rule of thumb something between 1-2% is appropriate for the style and risk appetite of most retail traders. Incidentally be very wary of systems or traders who claim high winning trade % like 80%. Invariably these don’t pass a basic sense-check:
How many live trades have you done? Often they’ll have done only a handful of real trades and the rest are simulated backtests, which are overfitted. The model will soon die.
What is your risk-reward ratio on each trade? If you have a take profit $3 away and a stop loss $100 away, of course most trades will be winners. You will not be making money, however! In general most traders should trade smaller position sizes and less frequently than they do. If you are going to bias one way or the other, far better to start off too small.
How to use stop losses sensibly
Stop losses have a bad reputation amongst the retail community but are absolutely essential to risk management. No serious discretionary trader can operate without them. A stop loss is a resting order, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. For a recap on the various order types visit this chapter. The valid concern with stop losses is that disreputable brokers look for a concentration of stops and then, when the market is close, whipsaw the price through the stop levels so that the clients ‘stop out’ and sell to the broker at a low rate before the market naturally comes back higher. This is referred to as ‘stop hunting’. This would be extremely immoral behaviour and the way to guard against it is to use a highly reputable top-tier broker in a well regulated region such as the UK. Why are stop losses so important? Well, there is no other way to manage risk with certainty. You should always have a pre-determined stop loss before you put on a trade. Not having one is a recipe for disaster: you will find yourself emotionally attached to the trade as it goes against you and it will be extremely hard to cut the loss. This is a well known behavioural bias that we’ll explore in a later chapter. Learning to take a loss and move on rationally is a key lesson for new traders. A common mistake is to think of the market as a personal nemesis. The market, of course, is totally impersonal; it doesn’t care whether you make money or not. Bruce Kovner, founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates There is an old saying amongst bank traders which is “losers average losers”. It is tempting, having bought EURUSD and seeing it go lower, to buy more. Your average price will improve if you keep buying as it goes lower. If it was cheap before it must be a bargain now, right? Wrong. Where does that end? Always have a pre-determined cut-off point which limits your risk. A level where you know the reason for the trade was proved ‘wrong’ ... and stick to it strictly. If you trade using discretion, use stops.
Picking a clear level
Where you leave your stop loss is key. Typically traders will leave them at big technical levels such as recent highs or lows. For example if EURUSD is trading at 1.1250 and the recent month’s low is 1.1205 then leaving it just below at 1.1200 seems sensible. If you were going long, just below the double bottom support zone seems like a sensible area to leave a stop You want to give it a bit of breathing room as we know support zones often get challenged before the price rallies. This is because lots of traders identify the same zones. You won’t be the only one selling around 1.1200. The “weak hands” who leave their sell stop order at exactly the level are likely to get taken out as the market tests the support. Those who leave it ten or fifteen pips below the level have more breathing room and will survive a quick test of the level before a resumed run-up. Your timeframe and trading style clearly play a part. Here’s a candlestick chart (one candle is one day) for GBPUSD. https://preview.redd.it/moyngdy4f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=91af88da00dd3a09e202880d8029b0ddf04fb802 If you are putting on a trend-following trade you expect to hold for weeks then you need to have a stop loss that can withstand the daily noise. Look at the downtrend on the chart. There were plenty of days in which the price rallied 60 pips or more during the wider downtrend. So having a really tight stop of, say, 25 pips that gets chopped up in noisy short-term moves is not going to work for this kind of trade. You need to use a wider stop and take a smaller position size, determined by the stop level. There are several tools you can use to help you estimate what is a safe distance and we’ll look at those in the next section. There are of course exceptions. For example, if you are doing range-break style trading you might have a really tight stop, set just below the previous range high. https://preview.redd.it/ygy0tko7f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=34af49da61c911befdc0db26af66f6c313556c81 Clearly then where you set stops will depend on your trading style as well as your holding horizons and the volatility of each instrument. Here are some guidelines that can help:
Use technical analysis to pick important levels (support, resistance, previous high/lows, moving averages etc.) as these provide clear exit and entry points on a trade.
Ensure that the stop gives your trade enough room to breathe and reflects your timeframe and typical volatility of each pair. See next section.
Always pick your stop level first. Then use a calculator to determine the appropriate lot size for the position, based on the % of your account balance you wish to risk on the trade.
So far we have talked about price-based stops. There is another sort which is more of a fundamental stop, used alongside - not instead of - price stops. If either breaks you’re out. For example if you stop understanding why a product is going up or down and your fundamental thesis has been confirmed wrong, get out. For example, if you are long because you think the central bank is turning hawkish and AUDUSD is going to play catch up with rates … then you hear dovish noises from the central bank and the bond yields retrace lower and back in line with the currency - close your AUDUSD position. You already know your thesis was wrong. No need to give away more money to the market.
Coming up in part II
EDIT: part II here Letting stops breathe When to change a stop Entering and exiting winning positions Risk:reward ratios Risk-adjusted returns
Coming up in part III
Squeezes and other risks Market positioning Bet correlation Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits *** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part II
Firstly, thanks for the overwhelming comments and feedback. Genuinely really appreciated. I am pleased 500+ of you find it useful. If you didn't read the first post you can do so here: risk management part I. You'll need to do so in order to make sense of the topic. As ever please comment/reply below with questions or feedback and I'll do my best to get back to you. Part II
Letting stops breathe
When to change a stop
Entering and exiting winning positions
Risk:reward ratios
Risk-adjusted returns
Letting stops breathe
We talked earlier about giving a position enough room to breathe so it is not stopped out in day-to-day noise. Let’s consider the chart below and imagine you had a trailing stop. It would be super painful to miss out on the wider move just because you left a stop that was too tight. Imagine being long and stopped out on a meaningless retracement ... ouch! One simple technique is simply to look at your chosen chart - let’s say daily bars. And then look at previous trends and use the measuring tool. Those generally look something like this and then you just click and drag to measure. For example if we wanted to bet on a downtrend on the chart above we might look at the biggest retracement on the previous uptrend. That max drawdown was about 100 pips or just under 1%. So you’d want your stop to be able to withstand at least that. If market conditions have changed - for example if CVIX has risen - and daily ranges are now higher you should incorporate that. If you know a big event is coming up you might think about that, too. The human brain is a remarkable tool and the power of the eye-ball method is not to be dismissed. This is how most discretionary traders do it. There are also more analytical approaches. Some look at the Average True Range (ATR). This attempts to capture the volatility of a pair, typically averaged over a number of sessions. It looks at three separate measures and takes the largest reading. Think of this as a moving average of how much a pair moves. For example, below shows the daily move in EURUSD was around 60 pips before spiking to 140 pips in March. Conditions were clearly far more volatile in March. Accordingly, you would need to leave your stop further away in March and take a correspondingly smaller position size. ATR is available on pretty much all charting systems Professional traders tend to use standard deviation as a measure of volatility instead of ATR. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Averages are useful but can be misleading when regimes switch (see above chart). Once you have chosen a measure of volatility, stop distance can then be back-tested and optimised. For example does 2x ATR work best or 5x ATR for a given style and time horizon? Discretionary traders may still eye-ball the ATR or standard deviation to get a feeling for how it has changed over time and what ‘normal’ feels like for a chosen study period - daily, weekly, monthly etc.
Reasons to change a stop
As a general rule you should be disciplined and not change your stops. Remember - losers average losers. This is really hard at first and we’re going to look at that in more detail later. There are some good reasons to modify stops but they are rare. One reason is if another risk management process demands you stop trading and close positions. We’ll look at this later. In that case just close out your positions at market and take the loss/gains as they are. Another is event risk. If you have some big upcoming data like Non Farm Payrolls that you know can move the market +/- 150 pips and you have no edge going into the release then many traders will take off or scale down their positions. They’ll go back into the positions when the data is out and the market has quietened down after fifteen minutes or so. This is a matter of some debate - many traders consider it a coin toss and argue you win some and lose some and it all averages out. Trailing stops can also be used to ‘lock in’ profits. We looked at those before. As the trade moves in your favour (say up if you are long) the stop loss ratchets with it. This means you may well end up ‘stopping out’ at a profit - as per the below example. The mighty trailing stop loss order It is perfectly reasonable to have your stop loss move in the direction of PNL. This is not exposing you to more risk than you originally were comfortable with. It is taking less and less risk as the trade moves in your favour. Trend-followers in particular love trailing stops. One final question traders ask is what they should do if they get stopped out but still like the trade. Should they try the same trade again a day later for the same reasons? Nope. Look for a different trade rather than getting emotionally wed to the original idea. Let’s say a particular stock looked cheap based on valuation metrics yesterday, you bought, it went down and you got stopped out. Well, it is going to look even better on those same metrics today. Maybe the market just doesn’t respect value at the moment and is driven by momentum. Wait it out. Otherwise, why even have a stop in the first place?
Entering and exiting winning positions
Take profits are the opposite of stop losses. They are also resting orders, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. Imagine I’m long EURUSD at 1.1250. If it hits a previous high of 1.1400 (150 pips higher) I will leave a sell order to take profit and close the position. The rookie mistake on take profits is to take profit too early. One should start from the assumption that you will win on no more than half of your trades. Therefore you will need to ensure that you win more on the ones that work than you lose on those that don’t. Sad to say but incredibly common: retail traders often take profits way too early This is going to be the exact opposite of what your emotions want you to do. We are going to look at that in the Psychology of Trading chapter. Remember: let winners run. Just like stops you need to know in advance the level where you will close out at a profit. Then let the trade happen. Don’t override yourself and let emotions force you to take a small profit. A classic mistake to avoid. The trader puts on a trade and it almost stops out before rebounding. As soon as it is slightly in the money they spook and cut out, instead of letting it run to their original take profit. Do not do this.
Entering positions with limit orders
That covers exiting a position but how about getting into one? Take profits can also be left speculatively to enter a position. Sometimes referred to as “bids” (buy orders) or “offers” (sell orders). Imagine the price is 1.1250 and the recent low is 1.1205. You might wish to leave a bid around 1.2010 to enter a long position, if the market reaches that price. This way you don’t need to sit at the computer and wait. Again, typically traders will use tech analysis to identify attractive levels. Again - other traders will cluster with your orders. Just like the stop loss we need to bake that in. So this time if we know everyone is going to buy around the recent low of 1.1205 we might leave the take profit bit a little bit above there at 1.1210 to ensure it gets done. Sure it costs 5 more pips but how mad would you be if the low was 1.1207 and then it rallied a hundred points and you didn’t have the trade on?! There are two more methods that traders often use for entering a position. Scaling in is one such technique. Let’s imagine that you think we are in a long-term bulltrend for AUDUSD but experiencing a brief retracement. You want to take a total position of 500,000 AUD and don’t have a strong view on the current price action. You might therefore leave a series of five bids of 100,000. As the price moves lower each one gets hit. The nice thing about scaling in is it reduces pressure on you to pick the perfect level. Of course the risk is that not all your orders get hit before the price moves higher and you have to trade at-market. Pyramiding is the second technique. Pyramiding is for take profits what a trailing stop loss is to regular stops. It is especially common for momentum traders. Pyramiding into a position means buying more as it goes in your favour Again let’s imagine we’re bullish AUDUSD and want to take a position of 500,000 AUD. Here we add 100,000 when our first signal is reached. Then we add subsequent clips of 100,000 when the trade moves in our favour. We are waiting for confirmation that the move is correct. Obviously this is quite nice as we humans love trading when it goes in our direction. However, the drawback is obvious: we haven’t had the full amount of risk on from the start of the trend. You can see the attractions and drawbacks of both approaches. It is best to experiment and choose techniques that work for your own personal psychology as these will be the easiest for you to stick with and build a disciplined process around.
Risk:reward and win ratios
Be extremely skeptical of people who claim to win on 80% of trades. Most traders will win on roughly 50% of trades and lose on 50% of trades. This is why risk management is so important! Once you start keeping a trading journal you’ll be able to see how the win/loss ratio looks for you. Until then, assume you’re typical and that every other trade will lose money. If that is the case then you need to be sure you make more on the wins than you lose on the losses. You can see the effect of this below. A combination of win % and risk:reward ratio determine if you are profitable A typical rule of thumb is that a ratio of 1:3 works well for most traders. That is, if you are prepared to risk 100 pips on your stop you should be setting a take profit at a level that would return you 300 pips. One needn’t be religious about these numbers - 11 pips and 28 pips would be perfectly fine - but they are a guideline. Again - you should still use technical analysis to find meaningful chart levels for both the stop and take profit. Don’t just blindly take your stop distance and do 3x the pips on the other side as your take profit. Use the ratio to set approximate targets and then look for a relevant resistance or support level in that kind of region.
Risk-adjusted returns
Not all returns are equal. Suppose you are examining the track record of two traders. Now, both have produced a return of 14% over the year. Not bad! The first trader, however, made hundreds of small bets throughout the year and his cumulative PNL looked like the left image below. The second trader made just one bet — he sold CADJPY at the start of the year — and his PNL looked like the right image below with lots of large drawdowns and volatility. Would you rather have the first trading record or the second? If you were investing money and betting on who would do well next year which would you choose? Of course all sensible people would choose the first trader. Yet if you look only at returns one cannot distinguish between the two. Both are up 14% at that point in time. This is where the Sharpe ratio helps . A high Sharpe ratio indicates that a portfolio has better risk-adjusted performance. One cannot sensibly compare returns without considering the risk taken to earn that return. If I can earn 80% of the return of another investor at only 50% of the risk then a rational investor should simply leverage me at 2x and enjoy 160% of the return at the same level of risk. This is very important in the context of Execution Advisor algorithms (EAs) that are popular in the retail community. You must evaluate historic performance by its risk-adjusted return — not just the nominal return. Incidentally look at the Sharpe ratio of ones that have been live for a year or more ... Otherwise an EA developer could produce two EAs: the first simply buys at 1000:1 leverage on January 1st ; and the second sells in the same manner. At the end of the year, one of them will be discarded and the other will look incredible. Its risk-adjusted return, however, would be abysmal and the odds of repeated success are similarly poor.
Sharpe ratio
The Sharpe ratio works like this:
It takes the average returns of your strategy;
It deducts from these the risk-free rate of return i.e. the rate anyone could have got by investing in US government bonds with very little risk;
It then divides this total return by its own volatility - the more smooth the return the higher and better the Sharpe, the more volatile the lower and worse the Sharpe.
For example, say the return last year was 15% with a volatility of 10% and US bonds are trading at 2%. That gives (15-2)/10 or a Sharpe ratio of 1.3. As a rule of thumb a Sharpe ratio of above 0.5 would be considered decent for a discretionary retail trader. Above 1 is excellent. You don’t really need to know how to calculate Sharpe ratios. Good trading software will do this for you. It will either be available in the system by default or you can add a plug-in.
VAR
VAR is another useful measure to help with drawdowns. It stands for Value at Risk. Normally people will use 99% VAR (conservative) or 95% VAR (aggressive). Let’s say you’re long EURUSD and using 95% VAR. The system will look at the historic movement of EURUSD. It might spit out a number of -1.2%. A 5% VAR of -1.2% tells you you should expect to lose 1.2% on 5% of days, whilst 95% of days should be better than that This means it is expected that on 5 days out of 100 (hence the 95%) the portfolio will lose 1.2% or more. This can help you manage your capital by taking appropriately sized positions. Typically you would look at VAR across your portfolio of trades rather than trade by trade. Sharpe ratios and VAR don’t give you the whole picture, though. Legendary fund manager, Howard Marks of Oaktree, notes that, while tools like VAR and Sharpe ratios are helpful and absolutely necessary, the best investors will also overlay their own judgment. Investors can calculate risk metrics like VaR and Sharpe ratios (we use them at Oaktree; they’re the best tools we have), but they shouldn’t put too much faith in them. The bottom line for me is that risk management should be the responsibility of every participant in the investment process, applying experience, judgment and knowledge of the underlying investments.Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital What he’s saying is don’t misplace your common sense. Do use these tools as they are helpful. However, you cannot fully rely on them. Both assume a normal distribution of returns. Whereas in real life you get “black swans” - events that should supposedly happen only once every thousand years but which actually seem to happen fairly often. These outlier events are often referred to as “tail risk”. Don’t make the mistake of saying “well, the model said…” - overlay what the model is telling you with your own common sense and good judgment.
Coming up in part III
Available here Squeezes and other risks Market positioning Bet correlation Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits *** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part 3/3
Welcome to the third and final part of this chapter. Thank you all for the 100s of comments and upvotes - maybe this post will take us above 1,000 for this topic! Keep any feedback or questions coming in the replies below. Before you read this note, please start with Part I and then Part II so it hangs together and makes sense. Part III
Squeezes and other risks
Market positioning
Bet correlation
Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits
Squeezes and other risks
We are going to cover three common risks that traders face: events; squeezes, asymmetric bets.
Events
Economic releases can cause large short-term volatility. The most famous is Non Farm Payrolls, which is the most widely watched measure of US employment levels and affects the price of many instruments.On an NFP announcement currencies like EURUSD might jump (or drop) 100 pips no problem. This is fine and there are trading strategies that one may employ around this but the key thing is to be aware of these releases.You can find economic calendars all over the internet - including on this site - and you need only check if there are any major releases each day or week. For example, if you are trading off some intraday chart and scalping a few pips here and there it would be highly sensible to go into a known data release flat as it is pure coin-toss and not the reason for your trading. It only takes five minutes each day to plan for the day ahead so do not get caught out by this. Many retail traders get stopped out on such events when price volatility is at its peak.
Squeezes
Short squeezes bring a lot of danger and perhaps some opportunity. The story of VW and Porsche is the best short squeeze ever. Throughout these articles we've used FX examples wherever possible but in this one instance the concept (which is also highly relevant in FX) is best illustrated with an historical lesson from a different asset class. A short squeeze is when a participant ends up in a short position they are forced to cover. Especially when the rest of the market knows that this participant can be bullied into stopping out at terrible levels, provided the market can briefly drive the price into their pain zone. There's a reason for the car, don't worry Hedge funds had been shorting VW stock. However the amount of VW stock available to buy in the open market was actually quite limited. The local government owned a chunk and Porsche itself had bought and locked away around 30%. Neither of these would sell to the hedge-funds so a good amount of the stock was un-buyable at any price. If you sell or short a stock you must be prepared to buy it back to go flat at some point. To cut a long story short, Porsche bought a lot of call options on VW stock. These options gave them the right to purchase VW stock from banks at slightly above market price. Eventually the banks who had sold these options realised there was no VW stock to go out and buy since the German government wouldn’t sell its allocation and Porsche wouldn’t either. If Porsche called in the options the banks were in trouble. Porsche called in the options which forced the shorts to buy stock - at whatever price they could get it. The price squeezed higher as those that were short got massively squeezed and stopped out. For one brief moment in 2008, VW was the world’s most valuable company. Shorts were burned hard. Incredible event Porsche apparently made $11.5 billion on the trade. The BBC described Porsche as “a hedge fund with a carmaker attached.” If this all seems exotic then know that the same thing happens in FX all the time. If everyone in the market is talking about a key level in EURUSD being 1.2050 then you can bet the market will try to push through 1.2050 just to take out any short stops at that level. Whether it then rallies higher or fails and trades back lower is a different matter entirely. This brings us on to the matter of crowded trades. We will look at positioning in more detail in the next section. Crowded trades are dangerous for PNL. If everyone believes EURUSD is going down and has already sold EURUSD then you run the risk of a short squeeze. For additional selling to take place you need a very good reason for people to add to their position whereas a move in the other direction could force mass buying to cover their shorts. A trading mentor when I worked at the investment bank once advised me: Always think about which move would cause the maximum people the maximum pain. That move is precisely what you should be watching out for at all times.
Asymmetric losses
Also known as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. This risk has caught out many a retail trader. Sometimes it is referred to as a "negative skew" strategy. Ideally what you are looking for is asymmetric risk trade set-ups: that is where the downside is clearly defined and smaller than the upside. What you want to avoid is the opposite. A famous example of this going wrong was the Swiss National Bank de-peg in 2012. The Swiss National Bank had said they would defend the price of EURCHF so that it did not go below 1.2. Many people believed it could never go below 1.2 due to this. Many retail traders therefore opted for a strategy that some describe as ‘picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller’. They would would buy EURCHF above the peg level and hope for a tiny rally of several pips before selling them back and keep doing this repeatedly. Often they were highly leveraged at 100:1 so that they could amplify the profit of the tiny 5-10 pip rally. Then this happened. Something that changed FX markets forever The SNB suddenly did the unthinkable. They stopped defending the price. CHF jumped and so EURCHF (the number of CHF per 1 EUR) dropped to new lows very fast. Clearly, this trade had horrific risk : reward asymmetry: you risked 30% to make 0.05%. Other strategies like naively selling options have the same result. You win a small amount of money each day and then spectacularly blow up at some point down the line.
Market positioning
We have talked about short squeezes. But how do you know what the market position is? And should you care? Let’s start with the first. You should definitely care. Let’s imagine the entire market is exceptionally long EURUSD and positioning reaches extreme levels. This makes EURUSD very vulnerable. To keep the price going higher EURUSD needs to attract fresh buy orders. If everyone is already long and has no room to add, what can incentivise people to keep buying? The news flow might be good. They may believe EURUSD goes higher. But they have already bought and have their maximum position on. On the flip side, if there’s an unexpected event and EURUSD gaps lower you will have the entire market trying to exit the position at the same time. Like a herd of cows running through a single doorway. Messy. We are going to look at this in more detail in a later chapter, where we discuss ‘carry’ trades. For now this TRYJPY chart might provide some idea of what a rush to the exits of a crowded position looks like. A carry trade position clear-out in action Knowing if the market is currently at extreme levels of long or short can therefore be helpful. The CFTC makes available a weekly report, which details the overall positions of speculative traders “Non Commercial Traders” in some of the major futures products. This includes futures tied to deliverable FX pairs such as EURUSD as well as products such as gold. The report is called “CFTC Commitments of Traders” ("COT"). This is a great benchmark. It is far more representative of the overall market than the proprietary ones offered by retail brokers as it covers a far larger cross-section of the institutional market. Generally market participants will not pay a lot of attention to commercial hedgers, which are also detailed in the report. This data is worth tracking but these folks are simply hedging real-world transactions rather than speculating so their activity is far less revealing and far more noisy. You can find the data online for free and download it directly here. Raw format is kinda hard to work with However, many websites will chart this for you free of charge and you may find it more convenient to look at it that way. Just google “CFTC positioning charts”. But you can easily get visualisations You can visually spot extreme positioning. It is extremely powerful. Bear in mind the reports come out Friday afternoon US time and the report is a snapshot up to the prior Tuesday. That means it is a lagged report - by the time it is released it is a few days out of date. For longer term trades where you hold positions for weeks this is of course still pretty helpful information. As well as the absolute level (is the speculative market net long or short) you can also use this to pick up on changes in positioning. For example if bad news comes out how much does the net short increase? If good news comes out, the market may remain net short but how much did they buy back? A lot of traders ask themselves “Does the market have this trade on?” The positioning data is a good method for answering this. It provides a good finger on the pulse of the wider market sentiment and activity. For example you might say: “There was lots of noise about the good employment numbers in the US. However, there wasn’t actually a lot of position change on the back of it. Maybe everyone who wants to buy already has. What would happen now if bad news came out?” In general traders will be wary of entering a crowded position because it will be hard to attract additional buyers or sellers and there could be an aggressive exit. If you want to enter a trade that is showing extreme levels of positioning you must think carefully about this dynamic.
Bet correlation
Retail traders often drastically underestimate how correlated their bets are. Through bitter experience, I have learned that a mistake in position correlation is the root of some of the most serious problems in trading. If you have eight highly correlated positions, then you are really trading one position that is eight times as large. Bruce Kovner of hedge fund, Caxton Associates For example, if you are trading a bunch of pairs against the USD you will end up with a simply huge USD exposure. A single USD-trigger can ruin all your bets. Your ideal scenario — and it isn’t always possible — would be to have a highly diversified portfolio of bets that do not move in tandem. Look at this chart. Inverted USD index (DXY) is green. AUDUSD is orange. EURUSD is blue. Chart from TradingView So the whole thing is just one big USD trade! If you are long AUDUSD, long EURUSD, and short DXY you have three anti USD bets that are all likely to work or fail together. The more diversified your portfolio of bets are, the more risk you can take on each. There’s a really good video, explaining the benefits of diversification from Ray Dalio. A systematic fund with access to an investable universe of 10,000 instruments has more opportunity to make a better risk-adjusted return than a trader who only focuses on three symbols. Diversification really is the closest thing to a free lunch in finance. But let’s be pragmatic and realistic. Human retail traders don’t have capacity to run even one hundred bets at a time. More realistic would be an average of 2-3 trades on simultaneously. So what can be done? For example:
You might diversify across time horizons by having a mix of short-term and long-term trades.
You might diversify across asset classes - trading some FX but also crypto and equities.
You might diversify your trade generation approach so you are not relying on the same indicators or drivers on each trade.
You might diversify your exposure to the market regime by having some trades that assume a trend will continue (momentum) and some that assume we will be range-bound (carry).
And so on. Basically you want to scan your portfolio of trades and make sure you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. If some trades underperform others will perform - assuming the bets are not correlated - and that way you can ensure your overall portfolio takes less risk per unit of return. The key thing is to start thinking about a portfolio of bets and what each new trade offers to your existing portfolio of risk. Will it diversify or amplify a current exposure?
Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits
One common mistake is to get bored and restless and put on crap trades. This just means trades in which you have low conviction. It is perfectly fine not to trade. If you feel like you do not understand the market at a particular point, simply choose not to trade. Flat is a position. Do not waste your bullets on rubbish trades. Only enter a trade when you have carefully considered it from all angles and feel good about the risk. This will make it far easier to hold onto the trade if it moves against you at any point. You actually believe in it. Equally, you need to set monthly limits. A standard limit might be a 10% account balance stop per month. At that point you close all your positions immediately and stop trading till next month. Be strict with yourself and walk away Let’s assume you started the year with $100k and made 5% in January so enter Feb with $105k balance. Your stop is therefore 10% of $105k or $10.5k . If your account balance dips to $94.5k ($105k-$10.5k) then you stop yourself out and don’t resume trading till March the first. Having monthly calendar breaks is nice for another reason. Say you made a load of money in January. You don’t want to start February feeling you are up 5% or it is too tempting to avoid trading all month and protect the existing win. Each month and each year should feel like a clean slate and an independent period. Everyone has trading slumps. It is perfectly normal. It will definitely happen to you at some stage. The trick is to take a break and refocus. Conserve your capital by not trading a lot whilst you are on a losing streak. This period will be much harder for you emotionally and you’ll end up making suboptimal decisions. An enforced break will help you see the bigger picture. Put in place a process before you start trading and then it’ll be easy to follow and will feel much less emotional. Remember: the market doesn’t care if you win or lose, it is nothing personal. When your head has cooled and you feel calm you return the next month and begin the task of building back your account balance.
That's a wrap on risk management
Thanks for taking time to read this three-part chapter on risk management. I hope you enjoyed it. Do comment in the replies if you have any questions or feedback. Remember: the most important part of trading is not making money. It is not losing money. Always start with that principle. I hope these three notes have provided some food for thought on how you might approach risk management and are of practical use to you when trading. Avoiding mistakes is not a sexy tagline but it is an effective and reliable way to improve results. Next up I will be writing about an exciting topic I think many traders should look at rather differently: news trading. Please follow on here to receive notifications and the broad outline is below. News Trading Part I
Introduction
Why use the economic calendar
Reading the economic calendar
Knowing what's priced in
Surveys
Interest rates
First order thinking vs second order thinking
News Trading Part II
Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
Data surprise index
Using recent events to predict future reactions
Buy the rumour, sell the fact
The mysterious 'position trim' effect
Reversals
Some key FX releases
*** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
Anyone bought Andrew Tates WRTA or other programs?
ANyone used his war room tradiing academy bitcoin/forex trading systems with good returns? His presentation is legit however the ONLY reviews i can find are negative ones.... What about his other programs with chicks, mental strength, fitness etc. Curious to hear ACTUAL USERS thoughts Thanks bros
First week of live trading and actually having a plan
Been learning forex trading now for about 2 years just reading and practising on demo, in the past 6 months however I've taken a more data driven approach and now I've just completed my first week of live trading (a small amount, nothing too big, just 200). the plan I guess is to reflect on the trades I've taken every week and use this medium as a way of peer reviewing the things I do. Took 3 trades this week, 21/10/2020 - EURAUD and EURNZD sell After identifying these pairs as sells, I viewed the potential sell move that could take place as a broader sell off of the euro rather than individual rising of the AUD or the NZD. For that reason, I decided to split my normal risk per trade amount (2.5%) in half and treat this as one euro sell trade. I closed my trades when they hit the previous days low, however as you can see, price continued moving down for a deeper sell off which is a lilbit depressing to see, knowing I could have made more if I had held, but meh, still bagged 3 times my risk so can't be too sad for the first trades of the first week. Outcome (In RR): EURAUD - 2.9 EURNZD -3.35 23/10/2020 - AUDNZD Buy I was late on my analysis on this trade because I woke up late, however I was still able to fill the limit order after price returned back to my buy zone. The trade looked good going in, however, the moves that I trade on tend to be higher momentum moves, and a few hours into the trade I could tell that there just wasnt any steam, so I moved the stop closer to the entry (but not breakeven, to give it room to breath), anyway, the market moved against me and took me out for 0.5R, saved 50% from the initial risk size so not bad. Outcome (In RR) -0.5 From demo trading this strategy, I know that sometimes the trades can run for a long time. I was curious to know how those of you that have long term swing moves manage the risk and lock in profits but also give the trades room to breath, I've been messing around with using donchians as a trailing stop method however Im eager to know of other methods. p.s lemme know if Im breaking any rules by posting this here, new to reddit and all, also, if there is any interest in it, I can post my reasoning for entering these trades if requested. p.p.s the screenshots of the trades were moderated out, but I've reposted them on my profile
Housemate potentially involved in a Forex MLM/Ponzi scheme
I’m curious if anyone here has heard of or is familiar with the company KOT4X? I have a housemate who claims to have made over $10 million from this website in a few months which I find utterly ridiculous. This all began with him trying to get the rest of us signed up for his “company” which I overheard him tell someone else is KOT4X. I did some digging on them but all I’ve been able to uncover is that the “company” is sketchy as hell. It’s registered offshore (St Vincent and the Grenadines) and makes some pretty serious promises regarding how much money can be made. The catch, of course, is that it costs ≈$250 to create an account (and I would imagine there are further monthly fees associated with this). He has mentioned that there are several hundred videos that teach how to make significant money off of Forex trading, which leads me to suspect this specific website is some iteration of IMAcademy. Needless to say, I didn’t take the bait or really remark on it but now I’m thinking I should have. This housemate has not yet paid his share of the rent for the month; he keeps saying that he has and it’s “processing” and that his low standard of living given his supposed wealth is due to the fact he is “humble.” Coupled with this, I am fairly certain this housemate stole about $120 from my wallet along with my AirPods from my room, which I would imagine he sold for cash. He of course denies this and it’s frankly impossible to prove without either catching him in the act or seeing him use the AirPods, which hasn’t happened yet. If he doesn’t pay his rent within the next few days, I have all intentions of doing everything in my power to get him kicked off the lease and evicted from the house because I frankly don’t feel comfortable living here. I’m in the process of finding someone else to take my spot on the lease, but it’s not promising at the moment. Really, I’m just looking for any help or advice anyone can give regarding this supposed “company” and what I can do to stave off what I imagine will be further acts of desperation to come. I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about it to the best of my ability, but I really don’t know much more than what he has told us. Is it possible to report him specifically to the SEC or another agency for investigation? Ordinarily I’d be inclined to try and talk him out of it, but given the theft I’d just like to see him gone and never see him again.
The Last Time I Write Another One of These Cringey Things (I hope...): Part 2892, The Worst Sequel and Wall of Text, ever
Hiya, folks...! It's another wall of text from some random person who could be doing just about anything else except for this... Who's ready for some paragraphs from some stranger? I know you'd rather be doing anything else, or maybe not haha.. But it does mean a lot if you do take the time to try to attempt to accurately type me... I will DEFINITELY NOT overthink it this time, and take your consideration FULLY to heart, and stop overthinking my MBTI type and live happily ever after! (Hahahahhaha...! ... ...) ... Ok, let's begin!
How old are you? What's your gender? Give us a general description of yourself.
I am a freshly 23 year old male that likes to do average Redditor bullcrap. Video games, memes, music, making my finger go up and down endlessly while staring at a glass LED screen with pixels on it while feeling like I've accomplished nothing. Just average stuff, I suppose. I'm not really that interesting tbh... I work at home and I am just "vibing", as the kids say. I have some long term projects planned, but I'm at least trying to rest up from a really shitty 7 years that I've had back to back to back so... Nothing really insightful to write here haha..
Is there a medical diagnosis that impact your mental/comportamental stability somehow?
Likely several... I had a very traumatic childhood that I constantly gaslight myself about like saying things like "it wasn't that bad, people have it worse" and much worse.. I disassociate from reality every 2.5 seconds, can't focus, have terrible insomnia, EXTREMELY low energy, mood swings, brain fog, random body pains 24/7, seventeen billion repressed emotions which don't help out anything else that I'm dealing with, memory problems, and I need caffeine to do the bare minimum of just about anything on most days, but some of that could be average American problems. I've suspected I have some form as Aspergers, and probably A TON of mental illnesses, such as OCD, anxiety, depression, and maybe a personality disorder.
Describe your upbringing. Did it have any kind of religious or structured influence? How did you respond to it?
My upbringing is a very mixed bag overall. I would not say I had a typically "tragic" childhood (there goes me gaslighting myself LOL) because people have DEFINITELY had it worse than me. But I can't sit here and pretend everything I went through was "normal". To attempt to sum it up, I basically was a "gifted" kid who got good grades throughout school and maintained my image of being this perfect kid, but meanwhile in the shadows, I was just slowly dying inside and suffering from a lot of imposter syndrome (amongst other things), which I'd definitely would say is warranted because I was NOT cut out for anything in school and it showed. I basically faked my way through school, got burnt out EARLY but got mega burnt out by senior year, and basically started college with no plan but somehow still managed to graduate (barely) and just kinda end up where I am now. As far as a religious upbringing is concerned, I definitely was heavily influenced by religion, in kind of a negative way (?) Religion and I have a VERY weird relationship. On the one hand, I guess I love my religious friends, the lessons I learned from it, and a lot of what it says, but on the other hand I can not ever be a part of one mostly because of some of the dogmatic thinking and extremely toxic aspects to it that people use to justify hate and violence, and that's not really my type of thing. Also, I used to be really kinda "uppity" or arrogant about my religion, and now I DESPISE seeing the same type of "holier than thou" attitude projected. It kinda irks me on the inside. Looking back, my response to it all was a major polarity shift from one extreme, to the other, and now where I'm at, I can look back at both sides and take the good from both. What do I mean by that? Welllllll... I mentioned earlier how I can't stand the "holier than thou" type, and for a while, that was DEFINITELY me. I was REALLY into it and took it extremely serious. I wouldn't mind being called "lame" or "whack" for having my faith, but looking back, it really made my quality of life kinda worse because I did have those strong beliefs and those off-putting characteristics that ostracized me from my peers and some potentially great experiences. I grew out of this and then became an EXTREME atheist, and for a while, it felt freeing. I felt better, smarter, edgier, and just superior, but looking back, I was just cynical and a total asshole, and arguably worse than the "holier than thou douche persona" that I had growing up. Luckily, my extreme atheism phase kinda fizzled out after some other trauma that happened around the time I became an atheist, and now, I can respect religion and be open to it, the ideas, and the amazing things that come from it while also maintaining my independent thinking but not to the point of being "hur dur be skeptical and point out everything wrong with religion all the time and be an asshole for no reason to religious people", if that makes any sense. As far as my relationship to the structure in my life.. It's kind of a mixed bag. I had a pretty suffocated childhood, and I wasn't allowed certain things, but I guess it wasn't really all that bad in the end, or at least as it could've been. Most of this was just protection from a single parent who just didn't want anything to me and wanted me to be the best I could be in life, and I can respect this and look back on some parts of my structured childhood with fondness. But I most certainly got sick of it all by the time I was almost finished with highschool and in a lot of my college career. I basically used to be Mr. Structured. I had everything organized, I was neat, clean, got everything done at the right time, all the good stuff. But my brain just got tired of maintaining that forever, because I was already pretty much bad at life, but I was forced to just continue faking everything until something happened. So, by the end of high school, I lost all of those characteristics and became extremely sloppy. But I really do blame that on being physically tired. Being as organized as I was was TAXING because of how I overdid it. And now, thinking back, a lot of my structuredness was just on the surface level, and it was me trying to live up to everyone's standards and be just on top of everything, all the time, at a VERY unhealthy level, and that's probably what burnt me out too. I was addicted to the image of being this extremely put together person who has their shit together, while not having absolutely any shit to get together because I was withering away inside faster than fresh cotton candy from the fair melts in your mouth when your mouth is dry. So, basically to sum it all up, I was a really clean cut religious smart "gifted" kid who wasn't really that, at all (AND I still don't know who I am now tbh haha) and I got tired of putting on that image all the time and turned to a dirty neckbeard atheist cynic for a short time, and then balanced out to whatever the fuck I am now because I wear 238234 different masks for each and every occasion, but THAT'S a different story haha.. I look back at both equally cringey and horrible chapters of my life with some scorn for myself and the times, but overall a much more understand a balanced perspective, because I had to go through it all to be me, and I'm just glad I can be here now. I'd say I definitely liked moments from those chapters, but overall, I'm much happier where I'm at now, which is not nearly as anally obsessive at the concept of being structured and not nearly as hyper-faithful to my religion or just a total asshole piece of shit atheist.
What do you do as a job or as a career (if you have one)? Do you like it? Why or why not?
Right now, I'm sorta half employed. I do trade a bit on the Forex markets from signals groups and make enough to help out my family, and buy myself things here and there. I'm only really doing this because I went through a really shitty 7 years and I just need time to myself to kind of figure out, A LOT (clearly, as you can see by reading this HORRIBLE reddit post LOL) and rest. I just like the amount of freedom I have, and the money. I really like the idea of me having money saved and ready for any emergency, or family member or friend. I just need money to help out, stay safe, and to have time for myself to rest and take care of my health, or just pursue all the hobbies I missed out on, and I'm totally fine doing this the rest of my life. I don't really need or want that much in life, and I've always kind of been like this. I just want things to be peaceful and simple, so that my mind can be at ease and to just have free time for myself and a solution for any random chaotic emergency that happens because my mind always thinks of the worst that can happen by catastrophizing literally everything ever in the world. So my "career" is just a means to an end, like I'm sure a lot of people's careers are, unless you happen to have a passion or something, which is also amazing. I do like writing, and I do wanna finish my book. I daydream a lot about it, and sometimes that's much more fun than actually writing it, but I do wanna finish it, but I also want it to be absolutely perfect and plothole free, and much more. I also wanna do YouTube and Twitch, but I feel like I have a lot to do as a person before I can freely be on those sites as a full person/"influencer" (I have so many mixed feelings about having a full time career as an influencer and having my life under that much pressure and scrutiny, BUTTTTT that's a different discussion...), so I might pursue those slowly or just freestyle it for fun. Those were my big dreams as a kid, but growing up, I see that writing a good book is damned hard (worth it, but hard) and being a Youtubesocial media star is a different world entirely, and I don't know how I feel about it. Like, I know I'd never be a Shane Dawson (YIKES) or Cryaotic (EWWWWW) but to even just disappoint one person, or have any sort of fuckup, or.. I don't know where I'm going with this... Basically, everything I suffer from now would only be amplified by having a YouTube career, my people pleasing tendencies, my over obsession with being perfect for others/myself, my workaholic tendencies, my being hard on myself, my fear of fucking anything up, and my imposter syndrome, those would all go BRRRRRR if I got any decent success on YouTube, so... *Phew* That's my weird relationship with my life, and where I wanna go with it. To be honest, I'd be happy where I'm at right now, because at the end of the day, as long as I'm healthy and my family is happy, I'm ok, but a part of me also wants to live out those big dreams like having my book be a thing and animated, and being a good YouTuber, meme maker, Twitch streamer, all the above at the same time but my insecurities are like "BWAHAHAHAHA", so I'm just like: -_- But I'll figure it out! Hopefully..
If you had to spend an entire weekend by yourself, how would you feel? Would you feel lonely or refreshed?
Hm... Interesting question. Honestly, I'd never feel lonely on weekends by myself. Even when my friends are doing better things or aren't around, I don't really feel lonely I guess. Most of the time I have weekends alone, I feel pretty refreshed I suppose. It's kinda hard to tell haha.. This feels more like a circumstantial question where a myriad of things that are going on during the hypothetical week or just in my life/mind would determine this answer. Sometimes I just need that weekend to recharge and be alone and in my thoughts, or watching Netflix or being an absolute video game degenerate while dancing alone in my room and eating junk food. And sometimes, I like to be out and about with my friends, or just doing stuff. I probably lean more towards refreshed though, overall in a general sense.
What is your relation with movement and your surroundings? For instance do you prefer a sport or outdoors event? If an outdoors event what is it? And why? If not what type of activities do you tend to engage in?
BIG YIKES. I feel like a non human that doesn't belong on this planet or universe 99% of the time. I'm VERY slow, awkward movements, jittery, sometimes it looks like I was born yesterday with my grasp on physical reality, but yet, I do interestingly enough find myself loving to sweat and workout. I don't really have the coordination for any type of real sport, but I do like walks and I would run if I lived in an area where I could have a private or peaceful run where I would not be interrupted or seen by anyone because I look HIDEOUS running. I won't say I could never get into running at a professional or serious level, like with a group, but I'd just say it's more unlikely, for now. It sounds really exciting and interesting to be good at something physical, and I have always admired people who could do really sick stuff in sports, and I've always wanted to do it. But, right now, my uncoordinated ass will stick to just riding my exercise bike occasionally to burn off some restlessness and help me sleep betteperform better because working out makes my brain feel oddly stable lol. (I guess that's why I have such a fascination with physical stuff even though I am absolutely hopeless in most of it in the grand scheme of things)
How curious are you? Do you have more ideas then you can execute? What are your curiosities about? What are your ideas about - is it environmental or conceptual, and can you please elaborate?
I don't know if I'd say I'm curious, I guess I just think a lot. Like, I'll see something or watch something and daydream about it all the time, making new ideas out of it in my head or creating something new with it, trying to take it a new level or understand it at a different level, if that makes sense. Like, I'll sort of mentally digest something and that's what gives me inspiration, or ideas. I take in everything as I go and make up new shit with it later on (LOL this sounds like regular human being talk, because everyone does this). I would say I have a lot of ideas on everything. I daydream about random chapters in my book a lot, like full on scenes. I'll daydream about a new melody for a song I've never heard with lyrics, and I'll try to make lyrics in my head and extend the melody. I'll daydream about my interactions in life, and just how I could have responded differently, or maybe what the other person is thinking, or feeling, or stuff like I wonder if they're okay. I'll daydream about new memes I can make, or me in an interview (OMG MEGA CRINGE ROFL). I pretty much daydream about... Everything. And then I'll daydream about what I'm daydreaming about, and why I'm doing it, and it gets too meta at that point. (this could very well just be maladaptive daydreaming and NOT indicative of any cognitive function ROFL)
Would you enjoy taking on a leadership position? Do you think you would be good at it? What would your leadership style be?
Nope, nuh uh. I am too much of a people pleaser and pushover. I'd be dead or betrayed before my first week is over. The thing about me is that generally, I feel like I'd be a terrible leader because I can overthink a lot, all the time, and I'd be slow to action and prone to analysis paralysis and extreme people pleasing tendencies. I can also be conflict avoidant, and just want people to be happy, so I'd let a lot of stuff slide that I maybe should not. Now, don't get me wrong, I can be firm and tough when needed, but eventually that'd be too much for me to bear, and I couldn't be in a position like that for long. I genuinely hope I never become a leader, because even when I'm looking back to five minutes ago, I can say that "ew, that's cringe bro", so I clearly have a lot of work to do before I have something that serious on my plate.
Are you coordinated? Why do you feel as if you are or are not? Do you enjoy working with your hands in some form? Describe your activity?
HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHA. Funny question. But.. Yeahhhhhhh... No. I am NOT coordinated. I can barely walk in my kitchen without the fear of me accidentally turning wrong or moving incorrectly and just breaking something or knocking over everything in the kitchen. SOMETIMES I'm in James Bond mode, and it feels like I can do anything physical, and I feel aware of everything, my body, my surroundings, and I can actually move like a human being, but that usually doesn't last long. I can do just the bare minimum that an average human can do, but MUCH MUCH worse and at a greater cost of my energy, and my mental energy trying not to fuck anything up because I have literally just been sitting at times and barely move and knock over EVERYTHING somehow, because that's just how much my body was not meant to be on planet earth and I maybe should have been incarnated as a slug, idk.
Are you artistic? If yes, describe your art? If you are not particular artistic but can appreciate art please likewise describe what forums of art you enjoy. Please explain your answer.
I'd describe myself as artistic, even if I haven't drawn in years LOL. But let me explain... I do still have a love for it, I just haven't really been able to practice. In general, my art is just aiming for whatever is in my brain, and I don't have a solid style. I'm just going for whatever I'm going for in the moment. I prefer a mix of realism with some "quirks", if that makes sense. While I haven't drawn in a while, this is how I'd imagine I'd want my art to look nowadays. Pretty realistic with perfect everything, perfect features, perfect environment or whatever I'm illustrating or going for (perfect features on a person, all the hair strands drawn individually, etc), with a mix of my own little "spice", if that makes sense. Back in the day, my art was just trying to copy classic anime, and while I have no problem with that style, I just wanna kinda make my own style, even if that is hard to verbalize lmao. Alright guys.. I would write more, but I'm sleepy and some of this is getting dumb/boring (as if it wasn't already LOL). I'm glad you made it this far, and thank you for reading and putting up with this actual garbage fire of a post. Please take care of yourselves during these crazy weird times, and I hope you are doing well. I look forward to reading you guys responses (if I get any LOL). Stay amazing, and stay healthy :3
Euro follows rouble's example. Forecast for EURUSD for 21.10.2020
The European Commission’s first issuance of bonds as part of common debt and the capital flow to the European markets support EURUSD bulls. Let’s discuss that and make a trading plan.
Fundamental forecast for euro for today
Money controls the world. Everything seems to be against the euro: the second wave of COVID-19 in Europe, the S&P 500’s retracement, the worsening of the eurozone’s economy and the ECB’s hints at monetary policy softening. Nevertheless, the EURUSD jumps up like a scalded cat. If the reason is the Chinese yuan that has reached its 27-month high against the USD, then why aren’t the Australian and the NZ dollars consolidating? Australia’s and New Zealand’s shares in Chinese exports are higher than the eurozone’s one. As it turns out, it’s carry trade that should be blamed for the euro’s rise. The story that occurred to the Russian rouble is still fresh in our minds: carry trade made it the best Forex performer in 2019. USDRUB’s fall looked paradoxical too. The state of the Russian economy left much to be desired, trade wars slowed down the main partners’ GDP and the Bank of Russia dropped the key rate to stimulate inflation. It’s the latter factor that made non-residents buy out governmental bonds in expectation of a rise in price. A similar story appears to be happening in Europe now. The European Commission made the first issuance of 10-year and 20-year bonds as part of common debt on 20 October. The sale will finance the EU’s coronavirus-relief programs. The issuance volume amounted to €17 billion, and that’s just a beginning. The fund’s total volume is €750 billion. The mass media once presented those bonds as an alternative to treasuries. That was one of the factors in the EURUSD’s summer rally. I think it’s a mere flow of capital from the USA and developing countries to Europe. Buying EM bonds doesn’t seem to be a good idea amid global GDP’s potential slowdown in Q4. Europe’s periphery is another thing. Greek, Italian and Portuguese bonds look tasty. That lowers their spreads, in comparison with German ones, and points to smaller political risks. Hi, Russia-2019!
Yield spreads in European and German bonds
https://preview.redd.it/3p1xf8ol5gu51.jpg?width=560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8743f58ef1a5d2ca226c89acc76bf2234c6edb5c Source: Wall Street Journal. The more the ECB speaks about softening monetary policy, the more actively non-residents buy out European bonds, hoping for a price rise in the future. Obviously, German bonds have no room for growth, but the periphery still offers some earning opportunities. By the way, EURUSD’s 3-month swap spreads became negative in August. That means the Americans can make profit from both a rise in price in EU bonds and hedging. The risk of a Blue Wave in the USA aggravates the situation. Joe Biden’s victory and the Democrats’ takeover of the Congress will unblock $4-5 trillion in fiscal aid. That will increase the volumes of Treasuries issuance and drop their price. Investors need an alternative urgently, and they find it in Europe.
Part IV - Entry Options Hey everyone, you can find Part III of this series here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/h97sv7/part_iii_my_10_minutesday_trading_strategy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Welcome to Part IV where I will be discussing various entry options. I’ve said this before, but it is worth repeating here as well: identifying a technical setup is one thing. Making money off of that setup is a whole other thing. This is precisely why most signal services fail. While the quality of the signal provider is one thing to consider, the other thing to take into account is that it is very difficult to blindly trade like somebody else - even if they give you their exact entry and exit points. This is why I really want to focus on figuring out how to make MY strategy work for YOU. I will share with you a few different options for entries based on the strategy’s prototypical setup. But it is 100% on you to figure out what suits your trading style, personality, and lifestyle the best. Part V will cover exit options. Part VI will cover risk allocation & management Let’s get on with it. Basic Notes On Entries: We are assuming that all entries are referring to a setup that forms at 5pm EST. I am using 5pm EST because that is when the most trading opportunities have the potential of occurring based on this strategy. It is also when you will see the spreads widen out as the NY Session comes to a close. Therefore, you will not want to take a market order right at 5pm EST. Usually the spreads start narrowing again by 6pm EST.
Market order
Limit order (we will use fibonacci retracements to figure out where to place our limit entry orders)
Stop order (we can set a stop order beyond the setup candle’s high/low. I personally do not recommend this particular method, but I am including it here because one trader that uses this strategy has had success with it and prefers it)
The big difference between the stop order and the other entry types is pretty simple. If you are using a stop order to get into the trade, you will not have as good a risk to reward ratio as a trader that used a limit order to get into the trade. The advantage to using a stop order is that there will be some trades where you do not enter the trade because price never went beyond the high/low point of the setup candle. This means you avoid taking a loss on those trades whereas a trader who used a limit or market order to get into the trade would take a loss. The other advantage is that there may be trade setups where the limit orders don’t get filled but the stop order will. I have NOT statistically tested stop orders vs the other order types. If you want to know what works best for you, it is on you to do the testing. Okay let’s take a deeper look now into the different ways we can enter:
Limit order: We will draw our fibonacci retracement levels over the setup candle (I have updated the Fibonacci levels I use in Part III. Replaced the old screenshot with the new one with up-to-date levels). We will then look to place our limit orders just below (IF a short trade setup) / above (IF a long trade setup) the 23.6% and 38.2% Retracement levels. When I say just below or above, I am referring to the spread amount at minimum. However more above/below you want to go is up to you and your testing. Sometimes your limit orders get filled rather quickly. Sometimes they take longer (hours longer). I cancel unfilled Retracement orders if price has run to a fiboancci extension level without filling me on the trade. The obvious benefit to limit orders is that you can set your orders and then simply walk away from the screens. IF the setup candle closes past its 23.6% Retracement level then you will only take ONE limit order off the 38.2%.
Market order: Since we will not be taking a market order trade right at 5pm EST, this leaves us with options. Because a market order does not guarantee us a fill price, we do have some flexibility vs taking strict limit orders. The risk you run with using limit orders is that if your price is not met, you do not get filled. So for example, let’s say it is 6pm EST and the spreads begin to narrow once more and price just so happens to trade right around the 23.6% Fibonacci Retracement area. This is a great opportunity to simply take a market order and get into the trade. Let’s say, however, that price never retraced back into the setup candle and it looks like the trade may simply run to its profit target. What do you do? Well, you can still take a market order to get into the trade… OR you can wait to see if price will retrace back into the candle later on… OR you can write the trade off because price has already run to a fibonacci extension level. The bottom line is that if you have flexibility and you have options. **NOTE: On setups that occur outside the 5pm hour, you can obviously take market orders as soon as the setup bar closes without worrying about unusual spreads)**
Stop order: Stop orders are similar to limit orders in that you can set the orders and then walk away from the screens. If you are using stop orders you will not split your order into several parts. You will simply take one order. You will set the stop order just beyond the high/low of the setup candle.
My preferred method of entry: I like to combine the market and limit entry options myself. Again - assuming a 5pm EST setup here is what I do:
Set limit orders at 38.2 and 61.8% Retracement levels and walk away. If I get a notification that my 23.6% order got triggered, I don’t have to come back to my screens. If I don’t get a notification that my 23.6% order got triggered by 6pm EST, I’ll come back to the trade setup and execute a market order and then delete the 23.6% order. I leave the 38.2% limit order as is. Hopefully it triggers, but if it doesn’t then at least I have half my position on. IF it is a situation where the setup candle closes past its 23.6% Retracement then I will only take 1 order, whether it is the market or the limit.
This thread is the direct continuation of my previous entry, which you can find here. I have the feeling my rambles may be long, so I'm not going to repeat anything I already said in my previous post for the sake of keeping this brief. What is this? I am backtesting the strategy shared by ParallaxFx. I have just completed my second run of testing, and I am here to share my results with those who are interested. If you want to read more about the strategy, go to my previous thread where I linked it. What changed? Instead of using a fixed target of the -100.0 Fibonacci extension, I tracked both the -61.8 and the -100.0 targets. ParallaxFx used the -61.8 as a target, but never tried the second one, so I wanted to compare the two and see what happens. Where can I see your backtested result? I am going to do something I hope I won't regret and share the link to my spreadsheet. Hopefully I won't be doxxed, but I think I should be fine. You can find my spreadsheet at this link. There are a lot of entries, so it may take a while for them to load. In the "Trades" tab, you will find every trade I backtested with an attached screenshot and the results it would have had with the extended and the unextended target. You can see the UNCOMPOUNDED equity curve in the Summary tab, together with the overall statistics for the system. What was the sample size? I backtested on the Daily chart, from January 2017 to December 2019, over 28 currency pairs. I took a total of 310 trades - although keep in mind that every position is most often composed by two entries, meaning that you can roughly halve this number. What is the bottom line? If you're not interested in the details, here are the stats of the strategy based on how I traded it.
Extended: 223.46 R of return, 2.34 of profit factor, 0.72 R of expected value, 46.13% winrate. The average win is 2.72 R while the average loss is -1.00 R.
Unextended: 172.20 R of return, 2.19 of profit factor, 0.56 R of expected value, 53.23% winrate. The average win is 1.92 R while the average loss is -1.00 R.
The highest drawdown for both systems was 18 R. This seems like a lot, but remember you're splitting risk in half.
Here you can see the two uncompounded equity curves side by side: red is unextended and blue is extended. Who wins? The test suggests the strategy to be more profitable with the extended target. In addition, most of the trades that reached the unextended target but reversed before reaching the extended, were trades that I would have most likely not have taken with the extented target. This is because there was a resistance/support area in the way of the -100.0 extension level, but there was enough room for price to reach the -61.8 level. I will probably trade this strategy using the -100.0 level as target, unless there is an area in the way. In that case I will go for the unextended target. Drawdown management The expected losing streak for this system, using the extended target, is 7 trades in a row in a sample size of 100 trades. My goal is to have a drawdown cap of 4%, so my risk per trade will be 0.54%. If I ever find myself in a losing streak of more than 8 trades, I will reduce my risk per trade further. What's next? I'll be taking this strategy live. The wisest move would be to repeat the same testing over lower timeframes to verify the edge plays out there as well, but I would not be able to trust my results because I would have vague memories of where price went because of the testing I just did. I also believe markets are fractals, so I see no reason why this wouldn't work on lower timeframes. Before going live, I will expand this spreadsheet to include more specific analysis and I will continue backtesting at a slower pace. The goal is to reach 20 years of backtesting over these 28 pairs and put everything into this spreadsheet. It's not something I will do overnight, but I'll probably do one year every odd day, and maybe a couple more during the weekend. I think I don't have much else to add. I like the strategy. Feel free to ask questions.
I was trying to find the lowest cost brokers that aren’t just mobile apps that offer passive investments in the assets I’m looking for on top of the usual equity and bonds I already have. I’m hoping this will help people in my situation. I looked for a comparison website and found: https://brokerchooser.com/ which helped but I still had to dig around to get the direct comparison I needed all in one easily visible table. What are your thoughts and experiences on the below brokers like customer service etc with these platforms? Trading212 looks to be the cheapest and best all round but I’ve read bad experiences. To diversify my portfolio I’m looking at:
Renewables funds,
Commodities,
Individual shares and Crypto (a very small gamble 1% of total)
Property dev/REITs,
Venture capital,
Higher risk corporate Bonds,
1 - 4 Can be invested in via ETF’s offered by most of the online brokers below. 4 - 5 Can be invested in using the other platforms below: Crowdcube, Seedrs, Syndicate room, Crowdproperty. 1 and 6 I think need higher cost traditional brokers like HL/Black rock etc but I’m not sure. Here’s my comparison:
Free trades per month
Products
Fees (deposit etc)
FCA Regulated?
Bank transfer or debit card?
Trading 212
Unlimited
Stocks ETF/ETCs Forex Crypto ISA
Free ISA, no trade fees, CFD account has charges inc: 0.5% currency conversion charge, no forex fees
Yes
Debit card: Yes - Bank transfer: Yes
TD Ameritrade
Unlimited
$0 for US stock $6.95 for non-US
Cannot find on FCA register
Cannot find on FCA register
eToro
Unlimited
Stocks ETF/ETCs Forex Crypto Commodities via CFD’s No ISA
- $5 withdrawal fee - Deposit and withdrawal fee of 0.5% - exchange fee (50 pips) 0.5cent/$1 e.g $7.5 on $500 - If no activity for 12 months charged $10 per month - 0.75% fee to buy bitcoin
Yes
Debit card: Yes - Bank transfer: No
Freetrade
Unlimited
Mobile app only Stocks ETFs ISA
ISA £3/month 0.90% forex fee
Yes
Debit card: No - Bank transfer: Yes
Revolut
3
Mobile app only Stocks Crypto Commodities No ISA
Complex fee structure
Yes
Debit card: Yes - Bank transfer: Yes
Degiro
Unlimited
Stocks ETF Funds Bonds Options Futures Crypto No ISA
High fees (complex structure)
Yes
Debit card: No - Bank transfer: Yes
Other investment platforms:
Investment type
Fees (deposit etc)
FCA Regulated?
Pre-emption rights?
Crowd cube
Venture capital
1.5%
Yes
No
SyndicateRoom
Venture capital
High fees 2% set up fee 1.5% – 2.3% annual 20% performance fee Life-time management fees of between 12.5% and 24.3%
Yes
Yes
Seedrs
Venture capital
7.5% of any profit Plus variable sale fees
Yes
Yes
Crowd property
Property
0% fees however returns capped at 8%.
Yes
N/A
Have you used any of these before or do you have alternatives?
https://preview.redd.it/x98368rv9at51.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=403844ffea80a92dfd741fe8e3dd86f6e07a2bfd This was London open today. Dax was falling like crazy, we just needed to follow the trend. Impossible to lose money on a day like this! Everyone in my trading chat room ended up laughing with profits. Trade simple. Learn how I do it. Free trading course here: www.livingfromtrading.com #forex #money #forextrading #trade #traders #tradingroom #scalping #forexmarket #daytrading #investors #stocks #trading #livetrading #stockstrading #forextrader #stockmarket #NewsTrading #TradingSchool #BestStocksToBuy #DAX #DAX30 #AAPL #DowJones #futures #ES #NQ #MNQ #FDXM #FDAX #nasdaq
So my dad has joined this “‘mentality” group. It’s related to FOREX investments, anyone can help me out?
He’s been acting weird and secretive lately about these ZOOM meetings that he is attending; he locks himself in a room and nobody can disturb him no matter what. I checked his computer while he was away and I found that what he has joined is something called “Freedom Alquimia: mentality and Forex”. It’s all in Spanish (we’re in Spain and are Spanish). From what he has told me the people there are making 5K a month just by trading very little and he wants that. I know that’s already fishy, but he says that he hasn’t put any money at all. So.... I’m confused. His behavior has been changing since he started this and he claims that my mum is “sabotaging” his success; and I’m just scared they’re brainwashing him or something. Maybe it’s legit but... I need to confirm somehow and google didn’t help at all.. Thank you everyone!!!
Hello fellow Redditors! We're (as of the moment of writing) in the middle of our first whitelist-only curated map, dubbed "A Tale of Two Towns", where we have two distinct towns with a vastly different set of government ideology and economic systems in place! Thanks to districts and titles, we have the ability to simulate locality to laws, in effect paving the way for groups of people to join us who want to give us a try, while having full town autonomy! Of course, if you're by yourself and you want to give a well-organized world a go, both our existing towns welcome you with open arms :) As one of the few servers to do so successfully, we have two sets of a dual currency setup going. As of this map, that includes foreign exchange ('forex') where people can get by solely by trading in the various currencies of the world if they so choose. Be sure to talk to SatsukiShizuka if you have questions about that - she's been the bank for several rounds and the designer of one of our economical systems. On the other hand, if you're a builder, we have several custom mods, including more block types! We run a 60 day meteor cycle (mostly coinciding with SLG update cycles) so plenty of time to get things ready! Additionally, we have our own blog: https://www.praefator.nl/ where you can read up on my latest musings, as well as reading about server history, our roadmap, and our mods as well as the proposed government structure when multiple concurrent governments are a thing (come Beta 10.0). With all that said, here is the nitty-gritty info to get you started: Server Name: MaiestasHaven | A Tale of Two Towns Server Location: The Netherlands Brief Description: Greetings! We're well underway with our first whitelist-only map, with plenty of room to expand! We have two fully functional economies ready for you to sink your teeth in! We feature two separate economic systems, each with dual currencies, a well-organized world, foreign exchange, plans for a fully Renaissance-themed capital, an Asian secondary town as well as Megaproject 3.0, of which you can see a sample in this month's screenshot contest winning entry! Server Admins: Praefator (Owner) & InistarasServer Staff: Ferchibald, SatsukiShizuka, Sans Tark, squishy-panda, NNMike, Acularius Password protected?: Yes, whitelist-only IP & Port: eco.praefator.nl:2053 Discord: https://discord.gg/qgf6yt9World Size: 4 km2 World Difficulty: Beyond High World Objective: Let's connect Durmgrist and Mingyang! The latest megabuild, currently being planned in SP prior to its enactment on the production server
ASIC Regulation Thread - Regarding the proposed changes ( Australians effected the most )
I'm hopeless at formatting text, so if you think you can structure this post better take everything i write and put it into an easy to digest way. I'm just going to type out everything i know in text as fast as possible. I'm not a legal expert, I'm not somehow who understands every bit of information in the PDF's below, but i know I'm a retail trader that uses leverage to make profit which is why I'm posting this, in the hope that someone who can run a charge better than me, will. Some of you are already aware of what might be happening, this is just a post to educate retail traders on changes that might be coming to certain brokers. This effects Australian Customers the most, but also effects those living in other countries that use Australian brokers, such as Pepperstone and others. Last year in August 2019, ASIC ( Australian Securities and Investments Commission ) was concerned about retail traders going into Forex and Binary options without understanding these instruments properly and started sticking their noses in for tough regulation. ASIC asked brokers and anyone with interest in the industry to write to them and explain what should and should not change from the changes they proposed, some of the proposed changes are very misguided and come from a lack of understanding exactly how OTC derivatives actually work. I will provide the link to the paper further down so you can read it yourself and i will provide a link to all the submission made by all parties that sent submissions to ASIC, however the 2 main points of debate are: 1, To reduce the overall leverage available to retail traders to either 20:1 or 30:1. This means people who currently use leverage such as 100:1 to 500:1 and everything in between will be effected the most, even more so are those traders with relatively small accounts, meaning in order to get your foot in the door to trading you will need more capital for it to be viable. ^^ This point above is very important. 2, The removing of Binary options trading, which basically includes products like "Bet if gold will rise to this price in the next 30 seconds" This sort of stuff. So far from all the submissions from brokers and individuals nobody really cares if this changes as far as i know, though if you have concerns about this i would start voicing your disapproval. Though i would not waste your time here, all is pointing to this being eradicated completely with brokers also supporting the changes, I've never used such a product and know very little about them. ^^ This point above isn't very important and will probably be enforced in the future. Still to this day i see retail traders not understanding leverage, they think of it as "dangerous and scary", it's not, position size is the real danger, not leverage. So ASIC is aiming to limit retail traders access to high leverage, they are claiming it is a way to protect traders who don't really understand what they are getting into by attacking leverage and not the real problem which is position size relative to your capital. If it was truly about protecting retail traders from blowing up their accounts, they would look for ways to educate traders on "understanding position sizes and why it's important" rather than attacking leverage, but their goal is misguided or has an ulterior motive . I will give you a small example below. EXAMPLE - We will use 2 demo accounts for demonstration purposes. If you don't understand my example, i suggest you try it for yourself. - Skip if not interested in examples. Lets say we open 2 demo accounts with $1000 in both, one with 20:1 leverage and one with 500:1 leverage and we open an identical position on both accounts ( say a micro lot '0.01' on EURUSD ). You are safer on the 500:1 account as you don't need to put up as much margin as collateral as you would on the 20:1. If the trade we just opened goes against us and continues against us, the account with 20:1 leverage will run out of free margin a lot faster than the 500:1 account. In this simple example is shows you that leverage is not dangerous but safer and gives you a lot more breathing room. This trade was a small micro lot, so it would take hundreds of pips movements to get margin called and blow up that $1000 on each account. Lets now use a different position size to truly understand why retail traders blow up accounts and is the reason why trading can be dangerous. This time instead of opening a micro lot of '0.01' on our $1000 dollar demo accounts, lets open a position size much larger, 5 lots. Remember we only have $1000 and we are about to open a position much larger relative to our capital ( which we should never do because we can't afford to do that ) the 20:1 probably wont even let you place that trade if you don't have enough margin as collateral or if you could open the position you would have a very tiny amount of free margin left over, meaning a small pip movement against you will instantly blow up your $1000 account. On the 500:1 account you wouldn't need to put up as much margin as collateral with more free margin if the trade goes bad, but again a small movement could blow up your account. In this example, both accounts were dangerous because the lack of understanding position sizes, opening a position you can't afford to open. This is what the true danger is, not the leverage. Even in the second example, the higher leverage would "margin call" you out later. So i would go as far to say that lower leverage is more dangerous for you because it margin calls you out faster and just by having a lower leverage doesn't stop you from opening big positions that can blow you up in a 5 pip movement anymore, any leverage size is dangerous if you're opening positions you can't afford to open. This is also taking into consideration that no risk management is being used, with risk management higher leverage is even more powerful. ASIC believes lowering leverage will stop people opening positions that they can't afford. When the reality is no matter how much capital you have $500, $1000, $5000, $50,000, $500,000, $5,000,000. You don't open position sizes that will blow that capital up completely with small movements. The same thing can happen on a 20:1 or 500:1 account. Leverage is a tool, use it, if your on a lower leverage already such as 20:1, 30:1 it means your country has been regulated and you already have harder trading conditions. Just remember higher leverage allows you to open larger position sizes in total for the amount of money you own, but the issue is NOT that your using the higher leverage but because you are opening positions you can't afford, for what ever reason that is, the only fix for this is education and will not be fixed by simply lowing leverage, since you can just as easy blow up your account on low leverage just as fast or if not faster. So what is going on? There might ( get your tinfoil hats on ) be more that is involved here, deeper than you think, other agendas to try and stop small time retail traders from making money via OTC products, theories such as governments not wanting their citizens to be traders, rather would prefer you to get out there and work a 9 to 5 instead. Effective ways to do this would be making conditions harder with a much larger barrier of entry and the best way to increase the barrier of entry for retail traders is to limit leverage, lower leverage means you need to put up more money, less breathing room for trades, lower potential. They are limiting your upside potential and the downside stays the same, a blown account is a blow account. Think of leverage as a weapon, a person wielding a butchers knife can probably destroy a person wielding a steak knife, but both knifes can prove fatal. They want to make sure your holding the butter knife then tell you to butcher a cow with it. 30:1 leverage is still workable and can still be profitable, but not as profitable as 500:1 accounts. This is why they are allowing professionals to use high leverage, this gives them another edge over successful retail traders who will still be trying to butcher a cow with a butter knife, while they are slaying limbs off the cow with machetes. It's a way to hamstring you and keep you away rather than trying to "protect" you. The real danger is not leverage, they are barking up the wrong tree, how convenient to be barking up the very tree most retail traders don't fully understand ( leverage) , pass legislation to make trading conditions harder and at the same time push the narrative that trading is dangerous by making it even harder. A full circle strategy to make your trading conditions worse, so you don't succeed. Listen carefully especially if you trade with any of the brokers that have provided their submissions to ASIC. Brokers want to seem like they are on your side and so far some of the submissions ( i haven't read them all ) have brokers willing to drop their leverage down to 30:1 because they know by dropping the leverage down it will start margin calling out their clients at a much faster rate, causing more blown up accounts / abandoned accounts with residual margin called funds, but they also know that if they make trading environments too hard less people will trade or even worse move their funds elsewhere offshore to unregulated brokers that offer higher leverage. Right now it's all just a proposal, but as governments expand and continue to gain more control over it's citizens, it's just a matter of time till it's law, it's up to you to be vocal about it, let your broker know that if they drop their leverage, you're out, force them to fight for you. If you have any more information related to this, or have anything to add, post below. I'm not an expert at this technical law talk, i know that i do well with 500:1 leverage and turn profits with it, it would be harder for me to do on a lower leverage, this is the reason for my post. All related documents HERE CP-322 ( Consultation paper 322 ) & Submissions from brokers and others. https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/find-a-document/consultation-papers/cp-322-product-intervention-otc-binary-options-and-cfds/
I've been thinking a lot about my own trading and have come to some harsh conclusions. It's time we discuss some hard truths about technical analysis, mechanical trading, and psychology I think many of us don't want to accept.
I've had a rough week and it sounds like I'm not the only one. This week has wiped out my gains since July 1st, and I'm finding myself ever-so-slightly in the hole this month so far. I've made money every other month I've traded, so I'm not writing myself off as a failure, but nevertheless, I've done some digging to try and figure out what I'm struggling with. I hope the following observations about my own trading resonate with some of you and can help us all become better traders. First off: Fundamental/technical analysis. Since I started with forex a few years ago, I've put 100% of my time and effort into studying technicals. I think many traders, myself included, are drawn to technical analysis because we fall into the trap of thinking "If I just figure out what combination of indicators/chart patterns/algorithms work for me, trading will be smooth sailing." Being able to take a formulaic approach is incredibly appealing because it's much easier to simply check off a list of criteria than it is to interpret more nuanced information. For me, I found success drawing supply and demand zones, using Bollinger Bands to visualize market structure, and confirming reversal patterns with stochastics to trade from one zone to the next. I even studied the math behind those indicators to make sure I fully understood how they worked so I could identify their limitations, and for the most part, the strategy made money. Nevertheless, if I had a dollar for every time I take what I think is a perfect setup, then the market takes me on a wacky-ass ride of unexpected "crazy bullshit" that stops me out, I wouldn't be trading for a living. After some introspection, my conclusion is that those moments are not "crazy bullshit", but rather are the results of factors that fall outside of the (actually very narrow) scope of technical analysis. This has been hard to accept, as I previously learned technical analysis was perfectly viable as a sole perspective. I was taught that the market can be predicted based on analyzing past behavior. It seems obvious now, but when I think about it, no combination of chart patterns or indicators can predict next week's unemployment figures, interest rates, or what announcements (or blunders) world leaders are going to make on the global stage. Technicals work, but they only work when the market is reacting to fundamental factors, and as soon as a new fundamental change comes along, every bit of technical analysis used until that point becomes obsolete. What I'm trying to say is, at the very least, I need to be able to understand when, why, and how the game is going to change if my technicals are going to serve me. As such, I need to stop shirking fundamental analysis. It's time I start paying attention to that economic calendar and put in the effort to learn what each event means and how to interpret the results to figure out how the market will react. It's simply not as easy as looking at the technicals. It should be obvious that there's no magic formula to trading, but many of us try hard to avoid coming to terms with the fact that there's a lot more to "analysis" than just price action, risk management, and indicators. The problem is we as traders want trading to be easy. It's a career that society glorifies, and even if we tell ourselves we know it's not a get-rich-quick scheme, we still want to "figure it out" so we can spend a few hours a week scribbling on our charts and making simple black and white decisions while we kick back and "live comfortably". And so we try to trick ourselves into thinking it is easy by endlessly parroting mantras like "Risk management is all that matters" and "Trading is 100% psychology" and "All you need to do is find the strategy that works for you and stick to it." The first two are certainly pieces of the puzzle, but there's so much more to the big picture. The last mantra isn't even remotely true, and brings me to my second point, which thankfully is something I figured out early in my career, but it's too related to the previous topic to not mention: Mechanical strategies. The sentiment that you need to clearly define a precise, detailed strategy and always stick to it is another lie to make trading seem simpler than it really is. Even when I was just starting to demo trade, I was finding trades that would tick all the boxes outlined by my strategy, but my gut would hesitate. Long after I identified that problem, I also began to notice that I'd be forcing myself to hold onto trades, even if they were not moving as fast or far as I initially thought they would. Once I decided to leave room for my own instinct and discretion, I became much more successful. It's important to understand your strategy is a set of rules you yourself made up. If your strategy does not line up with your own professional opinion of the situation based on your personal experiences and observations, you need to find out why. Yes, you absolutely should draw on your past experiences and be consistent in how you examine the market, how much you risk, and what tools you use, but give yourself enough credit to form your own opinions. The market is not consistent. Do not expect to succeed by applying one cookie-cutter set of rules to different currencies, at different times, during different events. Long-term success in any other line of work is dependent on critical thinking and the ability to adapt to an ever-changing world, and forex is no different. It's not simple, it's not easy, and you will have to make difficult decisions. This wound up being longer than I anticipated, so thanks for reading. I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts on these topics, so please share them.
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Hello BEFire people, Looking how I now have a bit of time on my hands and some money I don't mind loosing on the short term, I would like to start dabbling into Forex trading. Lost of great resources exist for you to start with a demo account and learn how this type of market work but the question isn't here. As any investor know most of the money you make can be lost through the complex process of Belgian taxation. Which is why I am addressing you in the first place. After a bit of research, i found really conflicting legislation on the subject. On one side, the FSMA has banned the trading of CFD (contract for differences) and Forex instruments by Belgian brokers. (https://www.fsma.be/en/faq/fsma-regulation-governing-distribution-certain-derivative-financial-instruments-binary-options-0) Leaving little room for private investors to do anything. On the other, I didn't read anything about passing through an offshore broker. Diving deeper in the taxes aspect of it, I suspect this would be taxed as a "professional salary" due to the repetitive nature of the operation and would there account for for a complementary salary more than anything else. If it is the case, this would mean it would follow the following table: from 0 to 8 350 euros ..............................................25 % from 8 350 to 11 890 euros ....................................30 % from 11 890 to 19 810 euros ..................................40 % from 19 810 to 36 300 euros ..................................45 % over 36 300 euros ..........................................50 % Mind that these numbers date from 2015 and might not be up to date anymore. This would means that if you want to double your capital by trading Forex you would nearly have to triple it before taxes. Has anyone here ever dealt with Forex trading and could confirm my understanding on (1)the possibility to trade Forex through offshore broker and (2)the way Belgian taxes are computed for this type of trading is correct ?
Im a growing trader and i have a question, any help would be appreciated
I'm still a fairly new trader, I've with known about the markets for a few years but i only started lately with about approximately 6 months of consistently educating myself and teaching myself on all the different parts of trading, some parts I feel confident with while others might not be the best that I can be YET. a list of things i can say i understand would be fundamental analysis, technical analysis...to a certain extent (always room for improvement) indicators and various tools like the macd, momentum indicators, rsi, stochastic indicators, bollinger bands, etc, risk managment and protecting capital the meaning of certain candelstick patterns, diffrent markets like stocks, forex, commodities and dividend stock. i also learnt how not to fall for stupid internet scams. ive been trading with a demo account for the most of my learning period but i have traded with a live account too. I took a liking to the 4 hour timeframe and built my own trading plan from there onwards , i guess i just feel like my personality matches the 4h charts, but i use 1D 1H 30M also. I just want to be a succesful trader and improve my standard of life, buy myself a cozy house, fall in love, help my mother pay her bills, these regular things. I'm working on making enough money to fund my account since im only 19 With all i have already taught myself I cant help but feel like theres someting important that i am missing and have not stumbled into yet to teach myself or learn. Like what is the next step in my growth? i feel like i dont have all the pieces of the puzzle. what do you think it might be?
I have been dabbling with Forex for a few years now, and have started taking it more seriously over the past few months. I feel that I have come a long way and I would like to share my thoughts on what I have found. It would be interesting to see if anyone agrees or disagrees or has come to any similar conclusions. The first point on my list and perhaps the most important: Patience, patience, patience. This is heard everywhere but remains extremely important and also covers a few points. For example; Wait for a good entry! Think you have a 'sniper' entry at a trend line or on a support level? Wait! Think the market has started moving how you anticipated? Wait! Think the market has given you some confirmation for your trade? Probably still too early! Think you've missed your opportunity? Now you're getting closer to a good entry. This will be different for some people and different for varying strategies. For me, there is no point trying to catch a reversal right at the top or bottom. The chances of this are slim. It is so much more fruitful to capture the main bulk of a trend rather than trying to guess the tipping point. The meatiest part of a fish is the body, forget about the head and the tail. As well as waiting for a good entry, wait for a good trade set up. If there are no good trades, leave the screen and enjoy your day. I think one losing mentality is that money needs to be made now. On the contrary. Zero trades is a whole lot better than five bad ones. The second point on my list ties into the first somewhat: Stop closing trades early! Again, patience is key. It is so easy to see some profit and think that the price is about to go against you. Leave it and see what happens. Perhaps move your SL to break even if this works for you and if the market has retested another resistance etc. but most importantly leave your TP where it is. Hopefully there is a reason you put it there in the first place? Trust that. There is nothing more frustrating than closing a trade early and then watching the price continue in that direction afterwards. Some people like to have 2 or 3 TPs. This is fine but know this before hand and not as an excuse to take some early money. Part of the reason for this point is because I have found I would never seem to want to close losing trades early, so over time this bad habit would become a very expensive one. The third point I will make for now is my personal experience and might not be that universal: Widen your stop loss! I have been very guilty of trying to take a trade with a very optimistic SL and a larger than otherwise lot size, hoping that the price will only move in one direction. Unfortunately most of the time this is not how the market moves. If you have your SL at a reasonable and calculated level, then if the price hits it, there is a good reason for it and the trade was probably bad. It will be so frustrating for both your mental energy and your bankroll if your SL is hit and the price then moves in its original direction. Make sure there is enough wiggle room for this to happen. Let me know your thoughts, if this is popular I may follow up with a part two. Thanks, Happy trading!
So I've been living with my girlfriend , our dog, her mom and boyfriend, and older brother who's 38 years old. My girlfriend and I pay a portion of the rent. I upgraded the internet and pay the difference. Her brother doesn't work or pay rent, and has two children who he sees once a month and doesn't pay child support... I could go on but yeah. In the household I share a bedroom with my girlfriend, and there is also a extra room which is directly 3 feet from her brothers room. I use the extra room often because it has my desktop computer in there. I'm a avid gamer, i wear headphones so no one can hear my audio, and I stream frequently so i can be talkative. And I understand I can be loud at times, and with that I keep the door shut when I'm doing so, but there are times throughout the day where it gets extremely hot so I leave the room door open for circulation. Sometimes I want my dog to be able to come in the room and chill with me, and be able to freely walk out. When ever I am in the room he always shuts my door. Even when I am pretty quiet. The only thing that makes noise is my keyboard and the chair i am sitting on.. and random burps lol. Meanwhile he leaves his room door open playing sh*t lo-fi music while studying forex trading thinking hes going to do that for a living with no income source. He also plays sh*tty free games with horrible audio that plays throughout the day down the hall in our home. Anyways I confronted him one day after he shut my door when i just burped randomly while on the computer not making any other noise. I said "Why do you always have to shut my door to the computer room" he stated "Because you are being disrespectful by burping".I laughed and said "burping? Its normal *laugh*, and if you really cared you should shut your door if you don't want to hear anything". he then said "no" then I said "no one wants to hear your music either we can hear it coming down the hall." he then said "no i don't have to." Then I walked away and the conversation ended. TLDR - Gf's bro thinks i'm to loud and shuts my door. It seems he just wants to be the alpha male in the household. I'm 2x his size.Should I confront him the next time again he does it , go shut his door? Am I being petty by making this a issue or should I let him do what he wants? Should I tell him to get earbuds/headphones like I use? Anytime i confront him about an issue he gets real defensive and I can see him getting mad real quick.
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