I will also say that if you are trading a $100 account you might as well trade a paper account, which is (near) worthless.

Unless you live in some parts of Africa and India lets say, that is not capital, as someone said above, that is drinking money (I don't say this to be insulting...).

If it is not drinking money to you then you need a job.

If it is drinking money to you then you need to trade with real* money so that it means something and that you learn real lessons.


*And no TS, I dont mean gold and / or silver (ffs is that a wink?)

Or you could search the many thousands of stocks and find the ones that have been steadily trending up for almost a decade or more, with no sign of stopping. Those tend to be really forgiving instruments to trade on the long side.

Chances are I will either tire of this or blow up the account. But since I started it, I'm not going to quit just yet.

The trailing stop on my USD/CHF short was just hit for +200 pips ($19.45 after commissions). AUD/JPY short still being difficult and about halfway to my SL now. Will have to hope for a bounce off the 84.50 resistance or else these two will be practically a wash.

Candles aren't necessarily TA. I could plot the local temperature or my blood sugar levels with a candle/bar and it has nothing to do with TA.

Trading a chart with no indicators, charting tools or volume, or generating strategy not mentioned in TA books as TA is debatable.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G925A using Tapatalk

A chart is a visual representation of the market. That is all TA is yet all you want to do is bash it. A glance at a chart gives all sorts of useful technical information like the range of the time period, the trend (if any), congestion areas (ie support/resistance) etc. Only a fool would trade without looking at charts yet charts are 100% TA.

And candles are pure TA.

@ Mr. Baseball,

Thanks for your contributions to the thread. Even though I have a great deal of respect for the naysayers of TA, I'm sure it's possible that someone with a large amount of experience using TA has an understanding of certain edges that the naysayers may not be aware of.

Do you specialize in one specific market or trade in several? Do you trade equities? Commodities? Options?

I won't ask for you to give away any specific strategy, but do you mainly look for short-term scalps? Ex: Wait for a trending bull market to show momentum and then shove all in in order to capture 10 pips or so and then immediately exit the trade?

I trade short term, mostly energy commodities (HO, RB and CL). I use a lot of support/resistance, trend and momentum in my trading.

Long NZD/CAD @ .9452
SL @ .9300 support level
Target @ .9550 resistance level

repost for your benefit... *

you have several tick-by-tick manual trading simulators... (that you can speed up)

this is the same as your 100 USD live trading, with the benefit of you trading 1 month in 1 day pretty much...

*smiley to make this post more persuasive

Are you referring to the same programs you would use for backtesting? Those are the only tick-by-tick simulators I am aware of. The issue there (I would think) is that you have to have a purely mechanical approach to entering and exiting the market - which I do not.

Got cold feet on the NZD/CAD trade. I saw a bounce off pretty heavy resistance and chose to exit for +30 pips ($2.84 after fees). And of course it's on the way back up now *sigh*

Ninjatrader has market replay option ...
Playback speed could be from a real time up to 500x iirc

And of course I was long GBP on the assumption that Ms. May's Conservatives would have a good showing. -300 pips and essentially back to break-even... whomp whomp.

Make it back with the FOMC next week imo

In all honesty I probably need to just stay out of the market during high-impact events. It rarely works out well for me.

And thanks to this thread, I've seen the light a bit and have started a Think or Swim practice account. Never really traded stocks, but it's high time I started learning.

That was my point. Having a position open yesterday on the pound wasn't smart. You are just asking to be slipped and/or whipsawed.

It was definitely a mistake and was outside of my trading plan. Apparently I don't always stick to it 100%... need to work on that. Just gonna keep grinding for the moment.

Easily the biggest leak you can have aside from having no trading plan. Find a way to punish yourself when you deviate, and get the help of wife/girlfriend/etc to keep you to it.

Do not trade your opinion!

I'm officially tired of swing trading. Not entirely sure why I chose that route to begin with, since it goes against my interests (I suppose I've heard too many times that scalping spot forex is suicide). Well, **** it. I'm doing just that.

Bit of an up and down day, but ended up +28%. After 1 month sitting at +11%

We should merge this thread with the Day Trading BBV (Technically ahead of Dan Zanger's world record pace, but only 2 months in) thread.

Day trading/scalping is far worse. Now you have to buy larger unit sizes and pay loads more commission for the random market noise to stop you out.

So you're up $11.75 after a month's (time and emotional and intellectual) effort. Imagine if you've spent that time:

- Building a profile as a freelancer (coder, designer, copy reader) and/or learning a marketable skill.
- Working a second (or first) real world job for 5-10 hours/week.

You would have made at least 500% return on capital, possible more, and had a chance of setting yourself up for the future in other ways. Instead you made 11%. And that was an outsized/lucky month - no one returns 11% monthly in forex. You don't even know if you have an edge or if it's possible to have one (all the pro traders here who do make money say it isn't).

Anyway I'm not trying to give you a hard time. If you father was hard on you and it's incalculated a kind of a masochism, and your healthy outlet for it is punishing yourself by trading forex, then ok. Please carry on.

But you seem a sane, level headed guy, above average intelligence, stubborn, capable of following rules (you write well and are rational and nuanced). You can do well in any number of endeavours that will pay FAR better than trading forex ever will with a lot more fun. I mean you're not trading forex for sex, kudos, exercise or to inspire your next novel. You're trading it for money. And it's about the most ****tarded choice you can possibly make for making money that you could think of.

What are you doing? I get that the allure of free money is interesting, but this is as about as free (emotionally, intellectually, time wise) as working for 20c/hour at Walmart. And you learn less.

If we're going to take the term micro stakes trading literally, trading forex is an terrible choice. If you want to trade a small amount of money either for ****s or even to build up a tiny account, trade equities. You can make a decent percentage trading odd lot arbitrage, and if you're willing to put in more work there are lots of scalping strategies that really only work on like 200 shares or less. There have been a lot of great merger arb opportunities in super thin otc stocks. Little $ return but great risk adjusted returns.

TS... you make valid points. There are a number of things I could probably be doing, trading or otherwise, that could be a better use of my time. Part of it is because this is what I have been told by everyone -- it can't be done. Everyone who tries to do this fails. And I understand most do. Yet I am the type of individual that wants to see for myself. Just how I am personality-wise.

So, here I am leveraged to the hilt trading spot forex with less-than-prudent risk per trade. Is it the smartest thing? No. Am I going to continue despite that? Yes.

I hopped on the USD bull rush this morning. Had a pretty nice positive outlier kinda day.