Staying Single How to Avoid Falling in Love with Trades ~ forex trading income

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When we embark ourselves in the incredible adventure that is trading, we quickly find that the worst obstacle to achieve our goals is nothing but ourselves. In all the years I have been trading I could tell you that most of the problems I have had have been caused by my own actions which have been a consequence of my - sometimes - irrational thinking. One of the worst ways in which I affected my own trading in the beginning was what I would call my "love affairs" with trades. When we start to trade we tend to make every position we enter too important because in the beginning we all generally lack focus and perspective regarding trading as a business. On todays post I will talk about this great problem I had when I started trading and I will share with you some of the things I did to "stay single" and avoid this disastrous experiences with my trades.

It was a sunny afternoon several years ago when I decided that everything was set. The stars had aligned, my setup had come true and I finally had a perfect EUR/JPY trade ready for entry. I entered the trade, entered my stop loss and take profit levels and waited for a few hundred dollars to go into my account. However, the market decided that the odds were against me and I was facing a position very close to my stoploss in a few hours. Then I remember that the EUR/JPY had done this to me before and I exit my trade only to find out I would have hit my TP after a few hours. My decision -based on this irrational thinking - was to give my trade "more room", I moved my stoploss to allow the trade to continue. Then it moved even MORE against me and it wiped my trade. I ended up losing almost 4 times what I had initially planed to lose and the position never bounced back to the level I had set as a TP.
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This is only one of the several examples of times in which I fell in love with a trade and refused to let it go. The consequence was not only a significant financial loss in my account but a feeling made up of frustration and anger that had a snow ball effect that made me revenge trade the market and end up at an even worse point. When you trade like this you are operating your business like a 5 year old, good things - profitable trades - make you very happy and euphoric while bad things - losing trades - make you absolutely frustrated and angry. It certainly took me a few months but I finally realized that this was a recipe for total disaster.

To change this is no easy thing because the present - the trade on your screen - has an inevitable effect on you psychologically. It is extremely difficult to stay calm and trade your system like you were meant to trade it, to avoid intervention and to avoid feeling like a winner or loser based on some limited trading results. This was the most difficult thing I had to do to become a profitable trader to remove these emotions and become immune to the short term emotional effects trades had on me.

How did I do it (and continue to do it!) ? What worked for me was simply to change my perspective from a short term look to a long term look. I realized that trading wasnt working for me because I was too focused on short term results (turning a profitable trade today) rather than on long term results (obtaining a good average yearly return). My strategies and trading didnt have any long term focus and this was the reason why I wasnt getting anywhere. I decided that if this was going to work for me I needed to have long term targets and I needed to know exactly how my systems would perform in the long term. How long and deep their draw down periods were, how many losing trades I could be expecting, etc.

The change here was from night to day. When I started to have a long term outlook on trading as a business and I had a clear perspective on the way my systems worked, understanding why they were going to be most likely successful in the long term and when exactly I needed to stop trading them if they werent was a blessing to my trading career. Losing trades just became a characteristic of my systems and intervention became a clear thing to avoid since it was obviously detrimental to my systems results. I became a very cold-minded trader and I have successfully managed to avoid "falling in love" with my trades.

To me a trade right now is simply a very small part of what constitutes my long term goals and therefore it simply makes no sense to get happy or sad about the outcome of any single one of them. Certainly if you are a new trader my advice for you is simple, write down a plan that is extremely clear and that has all the detailed characteristics of your trading system laid out (draw down periods, expected loses, expected profits, etc). Know exactly what you are getting into and gain a LONG term perspective into your trading. Treat your trading like a business with long term goals and you will gain an amazing level of control and discipline that will put you on your way to become a profitable trader.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you can use automated trading systems to improve your trading abilities please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Five Reasons NOT to Use a Trading System ~ forex trading in usa

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Yes, it is true. We all want to find a profitable trading system that produces money in the long term and we get easily excited with anything that might look promising. This is especially dangerous for new traders as most of them still dont have the ability to recognize the potential of a trading strategy or the actual defects that will make it very hard to trade or simply impossible to succeed with in the long term. Some people new to forex trading are easily convinced with a few trading setups and a week of results while others venture into using systems that dont even offer clear entry and exit setups that have been proved to succeed in trading. On todays post I will give you some advice regarding this subject, I will talk about the characteristics you should look for in a system and the five main reasons why you should NOT use a given trading strategy.

If you go into any of the currently available forums with a section on forex trading systems you will find people using some trading setups that experienced traders would never use. Often these threads will continue until the system faces a draw down period, time after which the rules are changed and the cycle is repeated. This often continues until the general users loose interest and the thread dies, moving onto the next "new technique". How could you know which systems have the possibility to succeed and which ones dont ? Keep reading if you want to learn the FIVE main reasons why you should run AWAY from a trading system.

1. Lack of Statistically meaningful testing. Any system worth using must be evaluated through a statistically meaningful period. The length of this period - if you want a system that has a fighting chance against future market conditions - is of AT LEAST 5 years. This doesnt mean that the system has to be automated and backtested but that the system needs to be evaluated, even if only visually and a record of these simulations MUST be kept. I have seen HUNDREDS of systems on forums that have just been evaluated for a few months or a year and the result is obvious, they simply fail as the market changes.

2. Lack of risk and profit targets. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why I consider people fail with the thousands of systems proposed in forums. There is simply NO clear idea of what the risk and profit targets of the strategy are. What is the longest expected draw down period ? What is the average yearly profitability ? If you go to any forum and ask these questions about a system you will - most of the time - get no answer. This makes people use a system whose risk characteristics they dont understand, usually leading them to failure. If you want to succeed with ANY system, you need to know its risk and profit targets and these targets must be inferred from periods of at LEAST 5 years.

3. Lack of adequate money management. This aspect is very important as money management includes both the exit criteria plus the lot sizing technique. Money management is not simply "only risk x% per trade" it is the lot sizing plus its complex interaction with exit logic mechanisms that allows you to achieve a profitable outcome over long periods of time. If the system you are trading does not have CLEAR exit rules and CLEAR evaluation that shows over a period of at least 5 years of simulations how the closing logic benefits the system and how the overall money management reduces risk then you are not going to succeed with this strategy. Generally systems on the internet developed my inexperienced traders are filled with very complex entries and a vague and unevaluated money management concept. A weak money management strategy that has not been evaluated adequately is definitely something you should RUN away from.

4. Lack of reproducibility. A trading system cannot succeed for everyone who uses it if it cannot be reproduced accurately. Often you will see that systems proposed or shared online fail to have clear exit and entry rules that allow you to follow or evaluate them accurately. It is fairly common to find very vague descriptions of exits like "exit at the next significant support or resistance or Fibonacci level". What does the author interpret as significant ? How does he plot the Fibonacci levels ? This excessive level of discretion is very bad and it usually leads to systems that are extremely hard to evaluate or use successfully. If the systems lack reproducibility it is a definitive signal to run away.

5. Changes every 5 minutes. Perhaps the thing I dont like the most about many forums where systems are shared is the fact that changes are suggested and made very frequently. You will often find that the first post suggests a 50 pip TP only to find 30 posts later that they changed it to a 20 pip TL and then 50 posts later to a 100 pip TP. This is usually the consequence of LACK of confidence, lack of adequate evaluation, lack of adaptability and a general lack of understanding of draw down periods. Every time some loses come by the users build up a correction of the logic based on a few trades without a statistically meaningful evaluation. If you find that the systems characteristics are changed every now and then, you should move on.

I hope that the above information will be useful if you have been looking for a reliable system to use on some of the forums available online or on the internet in general. It is easy to see why the above criteria isnt met by most of the systems found online. It takes a long time to do 5 year evaluations, figure out profit and draw down targets come up with a robust money management system and a robust overall logic, however by doing this you ensure that you KNOW and understand how the system performs and this will be your ONLY weapons against the draw down periods that will certainly come. Having an understanding that bring confidence into your trading is what separates most successful traders from those who fail.

If you would like to learn about automated trading systems and how you can develop your own with a true understanding of their logic and their risk and profit characteristics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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