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The trend is your friend. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

I haven't read the whole thread so I am sorry if what I am posting is not consistent with the thread. I did an experiment in Forex. I made an expert advisor for Metatrader. It's job was to see if current bar was 20 pips or less. If it was then it would enter pending orders 2 pips above and below that current bar. Stop loss 20 pips and take profit 40 pips. The pair was irrelevant and so was the Average Daily Range, the pip value, the spread and anything else to do with Price Action or indicators. I would wake up every morning at 4:00 GMT and run that Expert over 28 pairs. At that time we were still in Asian session so there would be at least 4-5 daily bars under 20 pips. My expert would take them all as long as the bar height was under 20 pips. So you could say that my entry was pretty random. During the first 3 days there was not a single day closing in green so I tried different numbers. SL = 40 pips, TP = 20 pips. SL = TP = 20 pips. Needless to say still failed within the first 3 days so I abandoned the random entry theory all together.

Right now I am with my wife in beautiful island doing our summer vacations. One of my dreams was to analyze my charts in the morning drinking coffee by the beach. I did that yesterday. Believe me it is not worth it. The sun was too bright, the table too low, too small and uncomfortable and I, instead of relaxing, I was paying attention to my charts. Even in the hotel room it is very brutal to pay attention to the markets. While on vacations there are so many activities to attend, swimming, sight seeing etc, that don't allow much time to work properly. Right now I manage to steal few minutes from time to time to manage my positions or to read my mails and that's it. But I still feel that I don't do a decent job with my charts.

I am linking here 2 different methods that you can get started Forex e-Books | Forex4Noobs Learn Forex Live Members Area - 3SMA system Read them, understand them and then look in the charts where you see price behaving the way these resources describe. Don't mind the indicators mentioned in the second link. You only need the moving averages, the rest you should be noticing with a naked eye, it is what will come with experience and chart time. After you have done your homework try to apply these methods in your demo account. You will only trade only the signals from these methods when there is no signal, there will be no trade. This way you will learn discipline to follow a method. After a year, if you demo account is alive and green, you can go live with these methods and maybe you can use your demo to experiment with other methods. As for candlesticks etc you should definitely go through the school of pipsology Forex Training Online: Learn Foreign Exchange (FX) Currency Trading (BTW I am in no way affiliated with any of the providers for the links. I am pasting just to satisfy my ego for helping a fellow noob. )

Hi Stock.Jock. I might be wrong for what I will say and let more experienced traders correct me. Maybe I will learn something along with you. For trending markets I would prefer moving averages or donchain channels. For ranging markets more something like MACD or RSI or even better stay completely out. But how can you know when markets are ranging and when are trending? Indicators by them selfs don't help much, except maybe if you use ADX. In ranging markets price jumps up and down of the moving average and in trending markets oscillators are constantly overbought or oversold. In this case you might end up with many false signals. This is why you need to learn to read price action also. Really, identifying support and resistance along with some candlestick formations + patterns like head and shoulders and flags can help you much more in understanding what is going on. You will see that every pattern tells a story and bars/candles are the words that story is written with. Indicators are the pretty illustration that maybe can help you understand better the subject. These words come from someone who discovered price action a month a go and now doesn't use even a moving average so maybe I am just over excited. I too was obsessed with indicators afraid of the learning curve of price action. Now every day I like it more and more. BTW there is no ranging pattern or trending pattern. Only price ranges or trends. Price then forms patterns that give us hints about what it might do next.

Funny but this thread reminded me this. BBC News - Drunk trader banned for buying 7 million barrels of oil As for me, yes I drink while I do anything related to trading. Gallons of coffee.

@Waterfield Thank you very much. A lot of nice things there.

I usually prefer to study a topic from a book where most basic information is concentrated After that I read the forums to see how experienced people apply the theory in practice. That is why I wanted to read a book first. Now I noticed that DbPhoenix has done a great job organizing the stickies and I probably will start from there.

Thank you all for your answers. But I would like to know if his methods apply to end of day data or are applicable only to intraday charts? I understand that he was ridding trends but I also know that he was talking about tape reading and even one of his books had the word "Daytrading" in the title. So can a end of day trader benefit from Wyckoff?

No it's not. It will travel to Athens and the company that delivers the Amazon items will just drop it outside my house and let it get stolen. So I have to pay for Priority International Courier and the final price will rise to 39.50 euros.

I have been studying a lot lately and I believe I have learned a lot. I trade only with EOD data and my aim is to catch the big trends as opposed to swings. I haven't read anything about Wyckoff's work. I want to learn more things about trading and I believe studying him I can expand to new (old ) ideas. Can Wyckoff's methods be applied to EOD charting? I am thinking on buying ths book Charting the Stock Market: The Wyckoff Method (Paperback) Jack K. Hutson (Author) So is it a good investment for me?

May I add to the list Stan Weinstein's Secrets For Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets

They don't turn immediately against me. They usually go in my direction and give some profit before they turn against me. The problem is how much profit is enough. I have read the John Carter's book and Suri Duddella's book and Alexander Elder's book and many websites around the Internet. My main confusion with what they describe is if they can be applied to day trading, swing trading and if there is any difference. @DbPhoenix Unfortunately I am the kind of guy who must shoot his foot to learn to operate a gun. If I stop I will not learn. I study so I will not blow the foot. The link you provided has many useful things. I already am applying some of them. I have an entry strategy. I want to find an exit strategy. I thought that a good strategy was to trail stops and let the market take me out. I used to trail them two days back and didn't follow that strategy meticulously. The only unbreakable rule is "Once the stop has been set it never goes back. Only forward or stands still". Now I see that this is inefficient. I didn't believe that setting targets is a good idea because every guru says "Let your profits run". It seems I was wrong. What should be done when the target gets hit? Should I get out? Tighten my stop? I don't like the idea of scaling out or adding to positions because that would confuse my record keeping.

Here is a recent example. I got into this trade at 26 June @14.99€ and my stop was hit at 10 July @15.26. To this one I invested the sum of 994.61€ and got back in return 999.52€. That means 4.91€ profit. The day before after the close I had something over 75€ profit. This I consider a fair trade since at least I didn't record any loss. The reason that I put the stop loss at that point is because I was watching the rest of the market going downwards and I thought that if it was going to fail with such a big candle then it deserved to die. This thing has happened a few times so I would like some advice how to maximize profits in such conditions?

Please dear traders I need your help. Since I am under capitalized and still struggling to learn I keep my positions small. So the maximum amount I put per position is 500€. I have found my self gaining as much as 100€ (that is 20%) from those 500€ and the next day my stop gets hit and I get out with 4€ profit :doh: or even loss. That's not that bad since these stocks after they hit my stop are on their way to meet the volume chart. So I think I have two problems. One is I don't know how much should I expect to gain realistically from a trade. If the whole market is going down and a few stocks are rising, are they to be expected to continue rising or I should be grateful that I survived one more day and take the money and run? The other one I am struggling to understand is where to put my stops. I am trying to simulate trading by playing historical data bar by bar. A typical pattern that I see is that after I enter a trade, it goes 2-3 days my way and then it kicks me out with a few cents of profit or a heavy loss. After that sometimes reverses again and continues it's way up.