Here's my plan.
After experiencing a rapidly depreciating £pound sterling a couple of years ago and buying a little bit of physical gold at profit I want to defend my finances again like this.
I'm not looking to make a whole bunch of money. This is about defence of what I have.
I've subscribed to a few signals newsletters of the tech analysis variety. I learnt a lot but the results were not good:
- they were far too expensive for what they are; it's not hard to plot indicators and count waves, I expected more than that like weighing up which indicator to use and multimarket cross correlations that take time and work to work out
- often they gave conflicting advice
- you can rarely react quickly enough as a human
- your own social aspect ruins your decisions. By providing multiple outcomes your own bias is introduced and you tend to choose the loser. For example "In the short term we have the MACD and vortex at sell but in the medium term the elliot wave count is saying buy". I found I would then go with the wrong option every time, either considering the elliot wave as more dominant. I come from a Bitcoin background where trading is very different. Typically there are few visual interfaces, so all this MetaTrader4 stuff baffles me. I'm used to programming on the commandline.
or the 2 signals to be stronger than 1 signal.
As such I have decided to use what the commercials do as the base for my decisions on a yearly scale and instead use signals to fine tune on the monthly scale. This is long term positioning. I won't be using newsletters and instead I'll just use freely available signals or maybe even plot my own.
However...
I come from a Bitcoin background where trading is very different. Typically there are few visual interfaces, so all this MetaTrader4 stuff baffles me. I'm used to programming on the commandline.
What I want to be able to do is conditional programming to mitigate that reaction speed problem:
"When MACD reverses
sell XAU"
^ so this is a semi automatic trade. I'm setting the trade up manually but it's executed for me in the middle of the night if need be and then it's up to me to cancel it - the position I'm aiming for is so longterm I'm happy to hold overnight without even bothering with a stop loss or take profit (if the trading program would let me).
But these visual programs baffle me. If I run them on my own computer then I get hell slippage because I'm not near the exchange. So then I have to pay for a VPS. Whereas before I had a commandline linux VPS for £2/month I'm then having to pay £20/month for a Windows VPS. Can't I export the command from MT4 to execute close to the broker servers somehow? Can I export a MT4 script to run as a linux script, connecting to a broker API?
The java based programs provided by the brokers aren't the best. I've tried TradeInterceptor5 and it crashes sometimes... it's so 1980's...
Likewise website based solutions are clearly designed to encourage you to make more trades than you would normally - flashy lights, bandwidth intensive sites wieghing in at 3-4mb just to make a trade - no good if you're on dialup! I just like efficiency.
Can't I program something to close a position for the night and then reopen the next day? All these longterm positions are surely going to take a hit if I hold them for months on end if there's overnight position fees from the brokers, surely? What do position traders do about that?
Finally, broker security. Funds in a brokerage are like a bank account - how do we assess how safe they are? Bear in mind that banks are FCA etc regulated but they aren't safe either - you need to assess the book balance and is the broker near bankruptcy because there aren't enough funds in national schemes to cover you.
After experiencing a rapidly depreciating £pound sterling a couple of years ago and buying a little bit of physical gold at profit I want to defend my finances again like this.
I'm not looking to make a whole bunch of money. This is about defence of what I have.
I've subscribed to a few signals newsletters of the tech analysis variety. I learnt a lot but the results were not good:
- they were far too expensive for what they are; it's not hard to plot indicators and count waves, I expected more than that like weighing up which indicator to use and multimarket cross correlations that take time and work to work out
- often they gave conflicting advice
- you can rarely react quickly enough as a human
- your own social aspect ruins your decisions. By providing multiple outcomes your own bias is introduced and you tend to choose the loser. For example "In the short term we have the MACD and vortex at sell but in the medium term the elliot wave count is saying buy". I found I would then go with the wrong option every time, either considering the elliot wave as more dominant. I come from a Bitcoin background where trading is very different. Typically there are few visual interfaces, so all this MetaTrader4 stuff baffles me. I'm used to programming on the commandline.
or the 2 signals to be stronger than 1 signal.
As such I have decided to use what the commercials do as the base for my decisions on a yearly scale and instead use signals to fine tune on the monthly scale. This is long term positioning. I won't be using newsletters and instead I'll just use freely available signals or maybe even plot my own.
However...
I come from a Bitcoin background where trading is very different. Typically there are few visual interfaces, so all this MetaTrader4 stuff baffles me. I'm used to programming on the commandline.
What I want to be able to do is conditional programming to mitigate that reaction speed problem:
"When MACD reverses
sell XAU"
^ so this is a semi automatic trade. I'm setting the trade up manually but it's executed for me in the middle of the night if need be and then it's up to me to cancel it - the position I'm aiming for is so longterm I'm happy to hold overnight without even bothering with a stop loss or take profit (if the trading program would let me).
But these visual programs baffle me. If I run them on my own computer then I get hell slippage because I'm not near the exchange. So then I have to pay for a VPS. Whereas before I had a commandline linux VPS for £2/month I'm then having to pay £20/month for a Windows VPS. Can't I export the command from MT4 to execute close to the broker servers somehow? Can I export a MT4 script to run as a linux script, connecting to a broker API?
The java based programs provided by the brokers aren't the best. I've tried TradeInterceptor5 and it crashes sometimes... it's so 1980's...
Likewise website based solutions are clearly designed to encourage you to make more trades than you would normally - flashy lights, bandwidth intensive sites wieghing in at 3-4mb just to make a trade - no good if you're on dialup! I just like efficiency.
Can't I program something to close a position for the night and then reopen the next day? All these longterm positions are surely going to take a hit if I hold them for months on end if there's overnight position fees from the brokers, surely? What do position traders do about that?
Finally, broker security. Funds in a brokerage are like a bank account - how do we assess how safe they are? Bear in mind that banks are FCA etc regulated but they aren't safe either - you need to assess the book balance and is the broker near bankruptcy because there aren't enough funds in national schemes to cover you.
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