hiya everyone

[billnye5]

Hi people!!! great to be back to the forum, hopefully more regular this time.

trading on and off for over 3 years (very little dabbles, going for a paddle before jumping in as it were). hopefully learn a lot from the forum and delve in a bit deeper than I used to.

not sure about everyone here but trading is just something on the side of a real job, looking at daily charts to find an entry and then looking at the daily time to find the general motion of the induce (indices, gold, rarely stocks or forex, been burnt badly)

so with that in mind, the past few days i've been going and going alright, £35 deposit, didn't expect to get anywhere with it but expecting to learn a lot!!!, like all deposits they are usually between £30-£250, lost £600 so far but learnt so much doing it this way, I'm getting there in making a profit.

anyway to the thing thats bugging me, yesterday at 50p/point traded the nasdaq down, found a shoddy entry point which saw the loss mount to £50 quite quickly (thought I had put a £10 stop in, which immediately, poor mm) anyway as the day went on it came back into profit and i made £50, BUT, if i had let it run, I would've made over £200. which irritated me as maybe I'm missing something others could help me out with? i.e. where do I exit. the general directions are correct as I'm calling them, but forever trading out too early costs £££.

another one yesterday evening with gold at 1308.4, i presume the resistance at 1310 will hold so put a stop of 1311.4 on, selling gold this is. so it goes past the stop point before turning back around and, again, if i let it run there would've been another £200 profit, so now thats taking profit too early and placing stops too close, over the last 2 days. anyway after that mm went to pot and earlier today put 2 trades on both heavy losers, shot in the face with that.

now considering that was done with £35, I did get up to £129.XX and learnt a lot in the process. would anyone have any tips or directions where I could go to find the right distance to place a stop, and how to know when an indice is falling like a rock?

as I write nadaq 100 is at 3548.0, yesterday i sold at 3600.4, and gold is at 1290, well past my take profit point of 1299.8, from a trade yesterday of 1308.6


like i said, starting to turn consistent results but annoyance gets the better of me sometimes and it just turns aggression up and causes a blow-up, every time. (i don't mind losing £30, but considering putting £1k in in the future, if i can get this mm thing sorted and put stops and take profit where they should actually be placed!!!)

 

[timsk]

Hi billnye5,
Welcome back to the forum.

You cover a lot of ground in your post and ask some big questions! My advice would be to stop trading real money until you've got some answers that you've then tested to determine whether or not they provide the solution(s) you're looking for.

The first trade you mentioned went against you to the tune of £100 before reversing into profit. Realize that you got lucky and that it could just as easily have carried on moving against you. So, your first priority is to protect your capital and establish where to bail out of trades that aren't working. Get that in place asap and get it working like clockwork.

Regarding where to exit profitable trades - this really depends on the type of trader you are and the type of trade you're taking. If you're a trend trader, then you want to look at taking some or all of your profit when you determine the trend is faltering or reversing. This could be at the formation of a lower high, or breach of a trend line / moving average etc. Some traders add an oscillator such as RSI into the mix and get out when it's extremely overbought, i.e. above 90. You'll have to go over your trades to discover what will work for you. If you trade ranges or reversion to the mean, then obvious exit points are when price approaches the opposite end of the range or the mean!

Doing all of the above will be easier when you have a trading objective and you know what it is that you're trying to achieve. There are numerous types of trader and any number of ways to trade. You need to know where you fit into the grand scheme of things so you can focus on one area. To use an athletics analogy - are you Usain Bolt or Mo Farrah? Or perhaps you're a hurdler or a marathon runner? They all have running in common, but none of them would excel at each other's discipline. Their training and focus is geared to the type of athlete they are and their respective objectives - which are all very different. Make sense?
HTH.
Tim.