Recent content by 5of7

Back in the old days when trading futures, scalping was popular because one contract cost thousands of dollars in margin and each tick was $12.50. So to minimize losses and get more trades per contract most of us learned with scalping trades which were tight stoplosses (to minimize the amount...

When I first started learning to trade they called the search for the perfect indicator or system, looking for the holy grail. It was now as it was then a fruitless search that never ends. Today's search for the perfect EA is part of that same fruitless endless search. So has anyone...

Can you save profiles (different stop/target/trail settings)?

Is this true with even the latest versions of MT4?

Did you say you are using Tradestation, or Tradingstation? Back in my futures trading days, there was an free indicator for tradestation that plotted news on the chart. This was so you could historically determine the effects, and drill down into 1min bars to see what happened. I have to warn...

Seriously Pharaoh said it: "Rule 1. Only risk a small percentage of your account on any one trade." If only people really understood the value of that singular piece of advice.

The order of development should always be: 1. Backtest. 2. Forward test in demo. 3. Forward test with 1 micro. 4. Setup a live account trading 1 micro fixed, with enough capital to support the largest historic drawdown, plus some. 5. Only increase trade size with the strategy's...

If you really want to develop your own EA's, I have to say that MT4 is probably the worst platform possible to do it on. It may be okay for executing the strategy, but for developing and backtesting, it's the pits. There are much better tools out there to develop on. Then when you have...

If I were to offer one single piece of advice to EA traders, it would be to only use EA's ad a stop gap, or temporary measure on micros only while you train yourself as a trader. Not as a forex trader, but as a "trader". So your skills can apply to stocks/options/futures etc. ie. There is an...

Agreed! You are right, the bucket shop should be the first test!

Bravo! I like your list. I would only expand on #1, and also include classical training as a trader. It seems too many people jump into forex, and use EA's as a crutch to learning. -Trader 5of7 of TheCollectiveFX-

Brokers are much more clever now. Or the software they use is much more clever. They will wait until lots of traders are aggregated, and will only widen partially to catch the stops. That's going to be nearly impossible to catch watching individual trades. But the big new movement is...

Got dice??

Ah, therein lies the rub. Autotrading = System Trading, but automated. So you first need a good "system". A strategy for buying and selling. Your tradency experience was due to correlation. Just about every single commercial EA trades the same thing, and the exact same way, and to make...

You have to do each transaction separately. On each line item, use the execution price to convert back to dollars.