Recommended next step

[mastachief]

Hello,
I am brand new to trading (have read a little bit of technical analysis) and have been playing with a demo forex account, but it feels very hard to get a grasp of what I should be doing; the market feels like it moves randomly for or against me :/

What is the recommended next step? Specific books I should be reading?

I have read about automated trading robots, but they seem like a general scam-- has anyone used these effectively? I want to make a lot of pips here but not buy into any scams-- I am a gamer outside of trading and am not so sure that I would trust a trading robot to do something that I could potentially do better if I knew how to do it, but I need recommendations on my next step.
Thanks in advance.

 

[mastachief]

Specifically I am looking for something that helps with macds; this is the indicator I have picked out to trade with and read about divergence but it is harder to implement on my chart than I thought it would be.

A trader friend told me to check out Trading Robots here or go to an education school-- but who needs a training for something I cna find free on wikipedia? lol

I tried setting stops at support and resistance areas, but my price always seems to go the opposite direction or stop me out before I get going ARRRGG
Any help will be great-- I will post a trading journal with some of my trades also :err:

 

[Pharaoh]

Follow the price action after you get stopped out. Did prices usually just test support and resistance, or did they blow through them?

If it was just a test of support or resistance in many of the cases before moving towards your profit targets, you need to look at modifying your trade plan to make those stops a little wider. If it's usually price just ignoring support and resistance, you may need to rethink your method of calculating those, or trade during less volatile market conditions.

I'm not a MACD expert, but hopefully someone who is can chime in on the subject. One note - the MACD that comes with MT4 is not standard. Run a google search for MACD MT4 and you should be able to find some free replacements.

 

[mastachief]

Thank you for the response Pharaoh,

I've been setting my stops behind sup/ res areas and trading as the bb's cross and macd's turn and the supp/ res holds; target set at a future pivot. Problem is consolidation and I have huge losses when they supp/ res breaks or false breakouts. My stops are usually around 20 pips, give or take some.

 

[Pharaoh]

Try trimming your lot sizes and look for setups with a few pips more profit potential. That will reduce the potential cash lost on each trade while getting about the same profits as previously.

As always, test new things out on demo first.

 

[mastachief]

that makes sense, larger targets, but when i see a break or an area it is hard to not just jump in that trade and add contracts if it runs and pull out if it slows down at an area


I have a few questions:


I've been reading about the benefits of intuition versus technical analysis versus indicators;
I feel that I trade a lot based on intuition, but how can you develop intuition about the market movements without having a strong technical analysis background? Is intuition partially based on technical analysis or am I looking at this wrong?

How do you "pick" what your trading method will be? I find it easy to see support and resistance, and a buddy introduced me to the macd's generally. I understand that the macd's are a "lagging" indicator, but they seem to work well enough...

I've been up for the past few days (and hope to stay that way ) and am looking forward to going live maybe in about 30 days once I can prove profitable

 

[Pharaoh]

Some traders only trade on intuition. Others use iron-clad rules based on indicators and/or price action. Most traders in both camps lose, but there are some profitable ones.

Personally, I'd recommend a solid set of rules, but if your intuition says "don't do it.", then skip the trade. Better to miss a few profitable ones than to jump into a bunch of bad ones.

 

[JohnSkr]

when I was a newbie I used some simple automated trading systems, to see how they work, what logic use, what mistakes they do and thus basing on their successful and bad experiences I found all the practical principals of trading.

 

[mastachief]

JohnSkr,
interesting; I have not thought of automated systems as a tool that I can learn from before-- just as trading systems; I guess that's the same way we can sometimes learn from AI in other aspects too.

I will have to think about that some.

 

[Stanly]

you are definitely right that currently there are too much scam systems available and to find any solution that will be showing really good performance for at least a year. I believe just systems showing successful trading (and at least 1.5 profit factor) on the forwardtesting live trading.