He is saying the basics and not the secret to success. There is no secret formula. Trading is like any other occupation. You learn from books, apply the concepts and gain experience. Like any other occupation, you have people who are good at it and you have people who are not. Not everybody can become a doctor. Even the doctor that performs surgery on you started as a 18 year old sitting in a lecture hall and reading about medicine. There were no secret behind his success other than him being able to grasp the concepts from book and apply to practical surgery that the other 0.01% of the population could not do.

So to the other people here asking for secret to trading and saying that nobody is helping, it is the same concept as posting in a medical forum and asking how to become a doctor. There is no secret and no shortcut.

Just because performing a trade on forex is as simple as clicking a few mouse buttons, it does not mean that everybody can do it. If people are not finding success even after years of hard work, then maybe trading is not for them.

This post has been edited by sleepwalker: Jan 13 2016, 06:30 PM

Europe already opened.. your 15mins more is for UK open.

It's overlapped.. Europe Opens one hour earlier.. London follows and they overlap to create a larger market with more liquidity. So officially we refer to the openings as Europe open (not so important) and London open which will be in 2 mins.

That is how the PIP is calculated based on 4 decimal for most pairs and 2 decimal for some. Nothing wrong with yours as it was the Original way of doing it. Even until today, when we refer to 1 pip, we refer to 4 decimal points.

For example on a 4 decimal system the EUR/USD is 1.0880 and each pip is the 4th decimal. So 1.0880 to 1.0881 is considered 1 pip.

A few years years ago most brokers adopted the 5th decimal and you see 1.08800 and the 5th decimal is considered as a pipette which is 0.1 pip. Even with 5th decimal, when we say 1 pip, we mean 10 pipettes (1.08800 to 1.08810).

This is why sometimes you see some new players saying they made 400 pips in one day but actually made 400 pipettes which is only 40 pips.

This post has been edited by sleepwalker: Jan 19 2016, 09:01 AM

That didn't move much.. a few minutes later.. Mr EU himself in the press conference.. blah blah blah.. keep rates low or even lower in the long term... and EU jumped off the cliff...

This post has been edited by sleepwalker: Jan 21 2016, 10:48 PM

Do remember you are trading in pairs and when you take a few pairs of currency and compare you can then figure out which single currency is actually moving.

For example I use EUR/USD, AUD/USD and USD/JPY, EUR/JPY to compare.

If EUR/USD and AUD/USD not moving but drastic moves in USD/JPY and EUR/JPY, you then know that it is JPY that is making the drastic moves.

If 3 USD pairs move in tandem like EUR/USD and AUD/USD go down and USD/JPY go up, then you know it is USD that is making the move and not the other currencies.

The broker does not reserve USD50 from your margin. They use it to open the position size you required. So a 0.1 lot of EUR/USD at current rate with leverage of 200 is USD55. So they take USD55 from your USD200 to open the minilot. That leaves you with around USD145 as margin.

So if you decide to open 0.2 lot, then it would cost you USD110 from your USD200 and that leaves you with USD90 margin. It all depends on the lot size that you open and how much margin you have left to play.

Your calculation on pip movement and margin call (when you run of margin if the market moves against you) is correct.

That is just the basic requirements to run MT4 without any indicators. Once you load up your indicators, the MT4 ram usage increases up to almost 512 to 1GB of RAM. That does not sound much but if you have windows 7 with 4GB of RAM, almost 3GB is used up and if you also open your browser, there is not much left.

My MT users up to 800mb of RAM to run once I load up all my indicators.

It is most like due to 7 years of indicators/notes/drawings/analysis that is left running in the profile. I need to do some spring cleaning to clear out the profile. I backup my profile and transfer them from computer to computer and all the old notes tag along for the ride. I even have daily Fib drawings that goes all the way back to day 1 of my trading in my current profile.

I remember crossing a line in Dec last year.. and I was wondering what line was that... then I zoom out and found that it was the low of the year line that I drew in year 2008. LOL.

Pips before money. Remember that. No 2 would be the answer. Your SL is based on your trading strategy and the current conditions of your trade and therefore you determine the number of PIPs you want to risk for the SL and then calculate the 2% money risk for it.

You usually don't trade with a fixed SL unless that is part of your strategy. I know some traders will always fix SL no matter the conditions because it suits their strategy (usually scalpers since there is no time to recalculate and you open your trades with fixed scripts).

If the trade is good then you can go for it. The risk factor is just a guideline to control emotions. The more you lose, the more emotional you get.

A 2% risk factor, in your case you can't go any lower than 0.01 size, gives you 50 trades instead of 20 trades of 5% before you MC. The number of trades goes down drastically as you increase risk and that impacts your trading emotions.

If you are going to open a trade and you are not confident of doing so, then don't open. Your analysis must give you more than a 50% chance of winning. Otherwise you might as well flip a coin and let it decide to buy or sell.

I know there is no such thing as 100% but your strategy/analysis must give you more than 50% confidence/chance of winning. If not, like I said above, go flip a coin.

You can break the 2% rule once in a while but if most trades need you to break this rule, then you will have to look into your strategy and analysis again.

and these are the people giving a bad name to Forex Trading.

Over 2500 post should be looking into starting a new topic.

How long is 'later'? 5 mins later? 1 hour later? 1 day later? If your analysis and chart pattern changes very quickly would mean you are analysing within a very short time frame. That is similar to what people do for scalping.

For example, if you are analysing a 10 min Moving Average, that can change every 10 to 20 mins but if you are analyising a 10 day moving average, that won't change so fast.

So if you are playing catchup to a constantly changing indicator, you might just be looking at too short a time frame for your trading style.

I shall close this topic. Please proceed to the new topic.