My Own Made Trading System

[tomorton]

Proliferations of overlaid indicators is often an indicator in itself - of fear.

This could arise from rejection of the idea of making a mistake, or of being seen to have made a mistake, of financial loss, of having profited without appropriate levels of effort, of having made 'easy' money which is therefore likely to be lost just as readily, of being seen to be using a simplistic strategy, of a strategy being easy to copy or improve on, etc. etc.

A natural supposition that traders make is application of what they have learned through school, at work etc. - that more effort and more knowledge leads to greater success. So ten indicators must be better than one, also ten chart formats covering the same instrument, more information must be better than a little, and so on. This is because trading for almost all of us is fulfilling far more than just the single obvious requirement that it make a financial profit.

It is not enough just to strip a chart to price action, all the other factors need to be confronted by the individual and brought to some form of resolution. After that, we can trade.

Acknowledgements to Mark Douglas.

 

[scose-no-doubt]

Dude, you speak common sense. Now, as it's Christmas, why not bring back the donkey, until the Magi arrive?

I love Japan, but this current cartoon guy just doesn't really have donkey's charisma.

I miss donkey too and this cartoon guy is a real nasty piece of work. I haven't settled on a new one yet.

 

[neil]

I suggest you watch your words and mention contrustrive fair comments, which the wider t2win community can benefit from. I am tired at reading complete BS from some so called legendary member comments on this forum that have nothing to do with trading in the slightest. Better not to comment at all.



Great stuff mate.

Tell me how do you measure or I should say what tool do you use to get those percentages on those moves?

You still don't get it

Throw out the indicators for the reasons Tommo stated above and concentrate on Price Action....several thhreads here use it...Look at Flashheart for example
Now get to it and stop chasing rainbows:cheesy:

 

[DionysusToast]

Now get to it and stop chasing rainbows:cheesy:

Obviously - no offence to the gay trading community...

 

[neil]

Obviously - no offence to the gay trading community...

Thats a bummer of a post:cheesy:

 

[sj8070]

Well they are just numbers on the chart 12,224
The trick to succesful trading is really quite simple. When you enter a trade, be sure that the trade is performing as per your expectation. If it is not, then it's not the price action thats wrong, but that of your expectation. So, in other words, if a trade is not behaving as per your expectation, GET OUT.

Spoke like mr. Livermore himself. I 2nd

 

[Pipsaholic]

First of all, PipsAlaholic- always put the document in a simple format. Sorry I tried to open it and couldn't.
Wanted to help, but use a common text format- keep it simple.
Also , I suggest you change your name- the 'aholic' at the end of you name- is a suggestion of failure
already- be centred, be positive, you're on the right track- in asking for suggestions here, Just keep open to continue improving... Cheers, G.

Yeah, I agree simple format is great and easy to follow I like checklists. I am quite proud of my name and identity and I see it as a positive.

Mate, put the trading books down, pick up a maths book, analyse what all these indicators that you're using actually are and how they're derived, and then consider why you should still use them. At the moment you're just looking at a graphic on a chart without any understanding of what it actually means. I'm not saying don't use them as I'm sure there are people out there using them to make money I can only dream of but the difference is that they'll know what their looking at.

Yeah, I get you I am concertrating fully on price action trading without indicators although without indicators I wouldn't have got to where I was today as they have helped me read price action many will disagree I know, but thats my own experience in them. I feel its not the indicators that are the problem, but which ones and why you are using them for is more important.

Indeedy.

He's looking at effect (price action & indicators derived from them) and not thinking about cause - people buying & selling.

As such, he has zero chance of making it as a trader.

If you read my document you would realise that I look for psycological levels with supply and demand, swing areas on the chart if thats not cause tell me what is?

Price action + indicator based systems do work not all of them are profitable but they do work in my opinion not that I am in favour of them.

 

[ocd]

Pipsaholic

What a mish-mash you have there. You've listed a bunch of questionable indicators and then made a reference to a naked chart.

Here's your problem - you have no real understanding of the markets or why they move up & down in the short term.

Hence, you will keep adding things from trading books/web sites in the hope that this will somehow lead you to a magical combination of all these things that will lead you to a profit.

Based on what you have there, my recommendation is you start again, from scratch. The first thing you need to think about is why do the markets move up and down. Is it always random? Sometimes random? Always predictable? Sometimes predictable?

The path you are on will not lead to profit, although it is the path that many people take.

Frustrating, isn't it?

DT

Well, this just summed me up perfectly. I've got indicators that tell me perfectly what happened after the fact. I sit here at night studying all that crap and say, "yep I would've bought here and sold there."

Then in real life during the trading day everything seems to fake me out, reversing the course of where I think the price is gonna go based on what the indicators are telling me.

So...with a knife, fork and a huge slice of humble pie in front of me...can someone direct me to where I need to go in order to understand how to reasonably ascertain which direction the market should take?

And at this point, I'm okay with yelling, insults, whatever...I just need to get on the right track.

(BTW, if my answer is in this thread I'll know later tonight but I saw this post and it hit me like a bolt of lightening.)

 

[tomorton]

ocd - I hope that's just a name and not a diagnosis by the way.

You could go back to a level of simplicity and revert to what we know about any market -
prices in an established trend tend to continue in the same direction;
but:
prices fluctuate around the trend as players attempt to control risk, take profits, increase exposure etc.

The trend gives you the direction, the fluctuations give you the possibility of identifying entry levels. Use only chart features and indicators that confirm one of these - if two features will suffice to confirm trend you don't need three. And if two others will identify your entry, don't hunt for a third. Your stop of course is the point nearest your entry which price would need to reach which would tell you that what you thought was most likely to happen is now more likely not going to.

I challenge anyone to prove trading must be more complicated than this.

 

[Eric Geddes]

Hi Pips,

Only just come across this thread and quickly skimmed through so perhaps my comments may reiterate what others have said previously. I thought Tomorton's recent comments particularly appropriate. What I did notice in your very first post was that you were concentrating on just one forex pair and using many many parameters to ascertain a profitable trade. By restricting yourself to just one pair I think you are limiting your scope -- unless you're very experienced and very clever I think it's very difficult to screw lots of profit out of just one instrument.

I think it's more helpful to develop a number of setups that you can recognise and know will be profitable when you take them. As a start, why not just go for one setup and when you see it use it? Obviously if you confine yourself to one instrument it may be some time between the appearance of setups to your liking. Why also only confine yourself to fx? -- I know many do but there are so many others out there that maybe you are missing out? I personally use the S&P 500 and started at A and end up Z looking for my setups -- what I find is that I rarely get beyond F or G because "ripe fruit" is so abundant!

I note also that your Word document containing your rules is so comprehensive that you will get lost in trying to remember what the rules are let alone applying them. So please please simplify what you are doing. If it's any help I recommend that:
(A) do a simple trawl using daily charts looking for a simple setup -- that could be anything as easy as identifying a trend which has just broken.
(B) enter a trade on a reasonably high timeframe e.g. one hour, use a sensible stop loss based on daily resistance/support but be prepared to exit the trade before reaching the stoploss if it doesn't go according to what you expected.
(C) I personally favour paper trading though I know many don't, -- I find it's good for developing the mechanics of your trade: that's something I think you need to get sorted before moving on to the psychological aspects which will really come into play when you trade with real money. Once you have got the mechanicals right you will start to get a feel for trades and just know when to enter or get out due to your setup parameters being ingrained in your subconscious. After that, you can move on to real money with real greed and fear playing its part but at least by then you should have some foundations in place to help you cope.

Overall, I think you're just overloading yourself with too much input -- the brain just can't cope. So keep it simple. With paper trading you can experiment to your heart's content; resist the temptation to overcomplicate -- try using just one rule and see what happens.

Best of luck -- we've all been there.