Recent content by Music Man

Probably the hardest skill to acquire is the skill to lay out -- not to trade when there isn't a high-probability, big reward, low risk trade setup. The 2nd hardest skill is patience -- letting your trade mature into its full profit potential, without closing it out too soon. I'm still working...

I did OK with EUR/CHF lately by setting traps. I take my directional queues from news and market chatter, then set a buy or sell stop where I think the next SNB intervention, or lapse of intervention, will take the market. It's very boring... trades may take days to execute... but, it seems to...

I do not trade any particular pair. Instead, I use clustering to pick strong/weak pairs and then look at the charts to see where S/R, candlesticks and volatility are at. If the yen is strong and the euro is weak, then shorting EUR/JPY may be the answer, depending. When I first started, I...

Well, I don't think Jesus will help you win at trading. That is the antithesis of the view that Jesus espoused, which was very much an anti-capital, anti-wealth view -- "eye of a needle" and all that. So, regardless of the existence or non-existence of Jesus, you can't influence the markets by...

>>moral relativism Now there's a term that gets lots of bad press, but in practice, most individuals' morals are relative to their culture. In some cultures, infanticide is seen as unfortunate, but understandable. In others, the murder of a daughter for the sake of family "honor" is the...

This reminds me of a discussion I had on another (non-FX) board regarding good and evil. My observation is that lots of what people refer to as "good" or "evil" is just food-chain relativism -- what's good for the trout is bad for the mayfly. Notions of good and evil that are not related...

FWIW, I don't buy the "no value" argument regarding trading. Traders pay taxes and spend money in their local economies, as well as raising families. Also, the trading business contributes to the advancement of computer technology and applied mathematics. These are all positive contributions to...

A good broker is Alpari UK. I know many people who use scalping bots on that broker. Basically, you need a non-Dealing Desk broker with Straight-Through-Processing (STP) to do scalping AND news trading. The Dealing Desk brokers don't like either. If I were going to trade on a dealing desk...

Well, this Friday is NFP 2010, Round 2. Are we still game? MM

Today I tried to trade the RBA rates decision. As in the NFP thread, I straddled, taking care not to allow my stops to execute prematurely. It's a good thing, too, because the market was convinced there would be a hike. I had to push up the buy stop price a few times to avoid buying pre-news...

One way to limit scalping risk is by multiple time frame confirmation. If you put Bollinger Bands on your chart and switch back and forth between several time frames, and all of them are looking like the price action is at the peak or the valley -- at either the upper or lower BB line, then you...

Yeah, technically they were buying USDCHF and EURCHF. What I meant was selling the Swiss Franc, in this case to buy Euros and Bucks. Great week ender!

Never has there been an enterprise where beginner's luck was more corrosive to a person's long-term success than in Forex. The fact that demo accounts may trade more profitably than real money accounts only adds to the "holy cow" effect. Heck, the first few weeks I tried demo Forex trading, I...

SNB decided to wait until Europe went home to sell the Swissy like crazy. More of their efforts to keep their currency from gaining too much on the Euro. I just lucked into the spike and part of the retrace. Would have been 35 pips, but I gave back 10. Not a bad way to close out the week...

Tonight, I'm getting my groove back by switching to the Heiken Ashi bot and letting it trade the Euro downtrend. I have no idea why I didn't do this last night for USDJPY and AUDUSD... I must have been tired or something. Oh well. I also got a quick scalp in on AUDUSD on a technical tip from...