cornixforex

Not ideal, but following your own rules is not necessarily an ideal situation, rather usual common sense. And all trades executed according to rules are "good" in my opinion, doesn't matter winners or losers. Assuming of course, that rules are part of the system proven to have an edge.

IMO, incorrect wins and losses should both be eliminated from the trading, because they are result of impulsive actions (aka gambling) as opposed to rule based systematic trading. If you treat it as a serious business, you should not act impulsively.

Yes, definitely. Agree with that remark.

Always have a hard stop-loss in place (with the exception of long option trades). That's my #1 rule I always obey.

Good entries are one of the key elements of successful trading. Exits are more the matter of managing the trades and fine tuning your strategy. But entries, which provide you an edge in the markets are more important.

First of all, what are "correct" losses vs. "incorrect" losses? Correct losses are your safety net. They are the result of your hard work of back testing and forward testing and constitute the optimal way to control risk for an outright forex trader. You know that you only want to risk a certain maximum amount of pips and you control that by placing stop-loss upon entering the trade. This is essential part of almost any consistently profitable trading system. And when such "good" loss occurs, you know that it is not a problem, just the opposite, it is the part of normal trading routine. And you should like the fact that everything is going right, as planned. Incorrect losses, on the other side are those which are not planned or even worse, are caused by impulsive, emotional actions of a trader. Unplanned losses are pretty hard to control and you must be ready to the fact that some day they may happen. Sudden market spikes, caused by unexpected news, central bank interventions etc. All of them may cause slippage through your stop-loss order and bigger loss as a result. This is just one of many outright trading risks, we must simply accept this truth of reality. But this fact reinforces the need for a stop-loss. Because slippage through it is one thing, and totally uncontrolled move against you is the other, much more ugly. Impulsive, caused by emotions losses though, are the worst kind of all trader's losses possible and must be eliminated, because it's them which lead to dramatic hits or in the best case, to an absense of ability to trade profitable on a consistent basis. The examples of such losses are: market is moving against you, but you move your stop-loss "just a bit" further from initial amount, because you hope (you may think you know, but you never know anything for sure about the market) that price will come back and make you money. Or even worse, you average down in an unplanned way (planned average down can be a legit trading or investment strategy), also in hope it will eventually come back. Result of such "innovations" is always the same: you end up losing much more than you planned or even turn profitable trading method into a losing one. So it's always good to remember: our profitable trading strategies are product of serious efforts, our home work and practical experience of interaction with the market. Our stop-loss amount is such for a reason. So we should never change something in our strategy only cause it feels so on a single trade. If we see effectiveness of a method drops over time, we should stop trading it live and on full size, do some home work and find out the reasons for that. If objective reasons do exist (which is not always the case), then we should develop some modifications which would adjust our method in the correct way. And then we execute the modified method with the same discipline as we did before. But such decisions must always come from intellect, not from emotional impulses...

This is often discussed question. For me the answer is proper trader's mindset is more important than particular trading method. The reason for that is that during my trading career I met many successful people as well as those who tried and failed. I also myself failed many times before became more or less consistent. All consistently winning traders I know have their own style. Some use pure price action, some add volume to that, some extremely successful people use stochastic indicator, others use CCI... There are those who use all together as well. They only have one thing in common: they know their style like their own hand and they are very disciplined in following it correctly, so they can be called true professionals. From the other side, most of consistent losers have the habit of trying new methods again, again and again. I was not an exclusion from the rule. I tried nearly every trading method I could find on the Net, read about in the book or buy from some vendor. Some I tried more than once, some more than 5 times... I was running in circles so to say, looking for Holy Grail. Until realized that it must be not the method issue and Einstein was right when said, "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." I was trying different methods, but basically did the same thing over and over again by trying a trading method, getting a loss or a couple, dropping it and trying to find another... What changed it, was a little of self-analysis, which made it clearly obvious: the problem is my wrong mindset. It is plain wrong to look for a miracle, which would make you huge profits, would preferably not make big losses and be mechanical enough to follow it easily right from the start. Sounds like a trader's dream, huh? Well, yes. So when I realized that all I need is take ANY forex trading method I more or less like and practice it with DISCIPLINE, situation suddenly started to improve. And funny, but the more I practice one single method, the better results become. Percent of losses really decreases, winners really become bigger and it becomes easier and easier to follow rules... The moral of the story: if you want your dream to come true, do not look for a grail somewhere outside you, better put all efforts into becoming the true ace professional yourself... The only way to make your career easy is follow the seemingly hard way of deliberate practice and training... But I must tell you, it is much less painful than consistent losing for years. Believe me, I've been there...

It depends on the strategy nuances (probably not optimal to sit all day in front of screens to make little profit), but anything that beats inflation and yields something on top of that is definitely profitable IMO.

I tried stocks, SIF's etc but ended up trading Euro, because it is the #1 world's market, which is active during my trading hours (6-10AM UTC). For a trader who trades European hours, IMO the best choice.

NLP can be very effective for a trader, but it is not an exact science, rather an art and as such, results dramatically vary. Our mind is too complex to be easily programmed by some universal tool. Every case is unique and so are NLP nuances to be applied.