Hello

[jhooker]

Hi Everyone -

I joined about a year ago when the whole credit crunch was starting to kick off... might have not been the first time to start learning!

Anyway... afterjumping in feet first... loosing ... and a year of reading I thought I'd come back and give it another go ( a little wiser)

Any advice would be more than welcome and listened to, hope to see you all about.

 

[Jaydee]

Hi jh

The first thing to do is redefine your edge by going over your past trades and seeing why you lost more money than you made.

You should also incorporate some money management into your trading which is often overlooked by new traders. Let me give you an example of how you may go about this:

1) Let's say you have £10,000
2) Let's say you only want to risk 1% of this on each trade
3) So, you will only lose £100 on a wrong trade. This doesn't mean you are only putting £100 into each trade, it is simply the most that you will lose should your stoploss be hit (assuming you don't suffer any slippage).
4) Now you need to work out the size of your position based on the volatility of the market you are trading. More volatility, less size - less volatility, more size. I use the average true range for this but you may wish to use standard deviation, beta, etc.
5) Once you know this, you can set your stop which equates to £100 loss.

Using this method will keep your account whole and give you a structure to follow.

Hope this gets you started.