Mark,
Most ideas that work well on 4 hour bars or on 1 hour bars usually work even better on daily bars. Why not scale your ideas back to a daily timeframe. Set up an Oanda account (hell, start with the trading game to prove your ideas out) and trade small for a good long while.
Then you could spend an hour on Sunday deciding what was important for the week ahead on 6-8 low spread pairs and then 20m a day comparing them with your criteria and entering trades.
That way you could develop a solid strategy while working which would backstop any shorter term trading when you scale back your working hours. Less stress = better trading for most people.
Kiwi
thats solid advice,
most people think that decreasing the trading timeframe to intraday, in order to give them more trades and opportunities, will equate to a better bottom line.
I can say from first hand experience, it does not, the shorter the time frame the harder it is to trade consistently and profitably. less is more in the trading arena.
I personally, trade the daily time frames, holding positions anywhere from a week (if it is no good), upto two months.
the amount of pips I bag from a big move completely smashes anything most short term traders make, with far less sweat and work. (granted i have bigger stop losses, its all consistent) but what I am trying to say is, trading should be made as easy as possible, to revolve around your current commitments, because it is hard enough as it is.
if I was you, I would open an account with oanda, nothing major, say £300, once you double that twice, match what is in the account and you will have something decent to trade with without killing yourself to get your stake together. from there, you should be substantially supplementing your current income.
if it doesnt work out, you haven't lost everything, i.e, job, savings, sanity.
good luck.
