I also started trading EURUSD with a $300 mini-account, but on May 1, 2006. Since then I have turned that account into $500,000. I now trade in 50 lot size, and have never had a losing trade since I started.
Please tell me, why am I so good?
The spread is much narrower for IB's retail FX. I believe EURUSD is as narrow as 1 or 0.5 pips.
You never pay the spread twice per roundtrip; only buy at the bid and sell at the ask. However, because IB has chosen spreads considerably smaller than other bucket shops, it has chosen to charge a...
Ouch. Might take a while for those knife wounds in your hands to heal.
Just out of curiosity, how did you get your hands on 400 large to throw into your brokerage account? Without knowing exactly what I was doing, my wife would NEVER let that happen....
RoughTrader
P.S. For what it's...
You might try John Carter's newsletters at
http://www.tradethemarkets.com
He's an honest guy and takes the trades in the newsletter in his own accounts.
RoughTrader
It's nice to see more liquidity coming into the metals markets. The liquidity in 100 oz. Gold futures (symbol ZG) has exploded over the last year, making for some very nice trading opportunities. That particular contract is one of my breadwinners.
I hope to see more liquidity in some of the...
Why don't you just stick to the futures? It's not as if there isn't enough money in those markets...
Don't be fooled by people who love to binge on credit to impress others.
RoughTrader
You need to stop this IMMEDIATELY. If you are new to trading, I suggest you start by limiting your trades to perhaps one a day.
A good mental exercise for beginners is to try to read the sentiment of the insturment for that particular day, say, within 1 hour of the start of the open. The next...
Wow, someone needs their morning coffee. I think I misunderstood your approach. I thought you were advocating the use of opinion to override a numerically computed entry signal of a system. It seems you are talking about something else entirely. You are using a rule-based approach to determine...
I have seen traders take a perfectly profitable system and turn the real results into a long-term loser by trying to outsmart it like the way you are describing. If you are still profitable by applying your "opinion-based" filter, more power to you. I would never be able to pull money out of the...
There is a numerical way to guage how much equity should be reserved per contract.
If you backtest your strategy (assuming you're taking a more mechanical approach), you will see a sequence of trades that produce a pattern of wins and losses.
It is widely published that one should take the...
When I say purely mechanical, what I mean is that price action is processed by a numerical algorithm to produce buy and sell orders.
For me, automation is simply an execution tool, but not necessarily a core component of the mechanical strategy.
Discretionary trading can POSSIBLY overlap...
If you traded 25 contracts with $250,000, what will you do if you sustain a $50,000 start trade drawdown?
The question should be asked in the context of fixed risk versus fixed fractional percentage.
When applying either method of position sizing, careful attention must be paid to the...
Coming to this understanding is a great step towards reaching success in trading these markets.
Markets can be terribly efficient on an intraday basis. When looking on timeframes of 5, 15, 30, 60 minutes, the markets do a wonderful job of twisting and turning to make finding tradable biases...