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Actually I did treat all the trades separately, though not with a fixed target. I set the stops the same (below the start of the uptrend - though I would never have let the market get to that stop if it looked as if the trend were over), but I'm not a fan of targets. Trader Tom interestingly...

Success; so this is a 5 minute chart of yesterdays SPX. I had entered pre-market open (14:30 here in the UK) so already had a reasonable profit at market open. As you can see, the market rose quickly from the open, which is when I scaled in as I figured this was a high probability trade. I...

Many thanks for all the thoughtful comments. I am going to attempt to load an image of the market I was trading to show a few points. If this fails, I'll probably just delete this post.

I only trade a very small size with a small account, but today I successfully scaled in to a winning trade for the first time. This feels like a bit of a game changer to me. I read about it recently in Best Loser Wins by Trader Tom (Tom Hougaard), which I can very much recommend. Most of us...

No, you are right. You could invest in tap dancing lessons. Always good to have a fallback option.

Yes, clearly you can not make much money with a small account. However, it seems that many beginners, who are optimistically attempting to make a living at trading, do themselves no favours by starting with a large account and losing a lot of it pretty quickly, which is almost inevitable as...

There are no such rules in the UK. Spread betting is commonplace (though not allowed in the USA I think) and allows you to bet cheaply on major indices, Forex pairs, and shares. There is also no tax on profits from spread betting, as it is classed as gambling. If profits were taxed, losses...

Precisely so.

Perhaps I am lucky, but I get all the education I need from a small account, though I have found that paper trading is not the same as losing even trivial amounts of real money. I would recommend it to anyone who is serious about learning to trade properly. I can bet £0.10 per point on the...

I have been trading as an amateur for around 7 or 8 years, and in that time have done reasonably well some of the time, but have gradually lost money overall, probably around £2000 over that time, which from some of the stories on here, doesn't seem too bad. I have never funded my account with...

Thanks for this. Yes the equity curve looks too bumpy to me, even if there is positive expectancy which I still doubt. The data you used was inside the original test data. From experience it's when you forward test on new data that the results get more significant.

If anyone is interested, I coded up the simple system described at the start of this thread on MT4. The reference looked reasonably professional, the claimed results were good, though on first look the system looked junk. If Opening 5 min candle's up then Buy 2nd candle's open + SL @ 1st...

Yes I took the quiz too, but the results will tell you nothing about Price Action trading sadly. I think Al Brooks would be the first to acknowledge that, most of the time, price action will not give you a tradeable signal on where price is going, but occasionally there are glimpses (the fog...

Well you sound like a nice guy, and I wish you well. From what you say about the paucity of signals, and as I can see no reason at all why planetary movements would affect stock prices, I think your profits are more likely due to randomness (any strategy should be right 50% of the time by...

Is the strategy profitable? I glanced at the link, but it had nothing to do with trading.

How is the forward testing going? That's usually the tricky bit.

So have you validated it's potential?

So what is the mechanism by which planetary movements affect stock prices? Is it a causal relationship?

How does planetary motion affect the stock market?

Well, complexity is fine if it improves results. Surprisingly often, it doesn't, and if you are running an automated system, complication can lead to curve fitting and optimistic results. I think Nicholas Taleb's 'Fooled by Randomness' notion applies a lot to trading. No, I've given up on...