Do full-time forex traders exist or is it just make believe?

Quote from achilles28:

See, I don't get this logic that futures or forex is somehow impossible. Forex and futures are no different than stocks, afiact. Yes, I could day-trade forex only and make a living doing it. Forex is generally more head-fakey, requiring a longer time frame for set-ups (3 mins+). But it's no biggie.
More...
one thing, people need corn, but when it gets too high, they can substitute, sometimes wheat, sometimes rapeseed, or who knows what all

I've never met anybody that needs Google or Apple

I am very new to the forex market and have no personal contacts

But some of these deals can't be completed until you have the Swiss Francs or the Japanese Yen that you need.

So, it's a commodity that people actually need, sometimes it would seem "at any price."
 
Quote from Xspurt:

I didn't mention anything about the length of time training him so I suppose what is short to one is long to another. As far as conventional thought is concerned, training for less than a year to become a highly profitable and consistent trader would be a short time period for most traders to achieve that goal if they tried to invent the wheel themselves.

Knowing nothing about what he is doing you believe the rookie will fail. Is that based on projecting your experience on to him? I say he won't fail. He's been trading for about 12 weeks now with enough control for me to be absolutely 100% certain. Perhaps your mind is in a box of limitations that hold you back and needs reviewing?

As far as psychology is concerned I selected him because he was a certain failure on paper. He had zero trading experience or TA knowledge and when it was the right time for sim trading he was so fearful he found it difficult to hit the mouse, even though I kept saying it was only virtual money. The big plus was I had no bad habits to erase and no presumptions about what worked or didn't' work. He trusted me almost to the point that if I said PA will move along the trend line if you lift the monitor, I think he would have tried it.

I believe the answer to psychological problems lies in technique and not in the brain but that won't apply if your technique has lose control, is close to the 50% hit rate or worse and/or uses wide stops. So I don't approach this as a psychological game, but many traders do and the concepts we build our trading on determines the profit outcome. Traders can be way off the mark and believe that is the reality for everyone.
More...

Sorry, I wasn't saying your rookie would fail. I just meant in general the typical rookie with the typical teacher would fail. You may be an exceptional teacher & he may be an exceptional student, so I wish you both the best.

But I don't see how you can't view this as both a psychological game & a game based on technique. I've read numerous examples of successful traders telling amateurs exactly what to do, as far as technique, & the amateur just can't do it.

I'd bet you could write a book laying out step-by-step how to trade just as your rookie trades, and people would screw it up. It has to be a psychological game (and a technique game).
 
Quote from oldtime:

my mother makes six figures every year, and all she does is buy T Bills

Like Groucho said when they told him "You can't make any money buying T bills"

"You can if you have enough of them"

6 figures? Man, you must be very "special"
More...

Haha, he turned like $50K into $400K trading on a live account. I saw his trade history, and it is legit. He goes after some high R:R trades.

Retail FX is no different that FX futures on the CME. You just have to find the right broker with retail FX for safety of funds. And I would trade longer time frame with retail FX.
 
Quote from Xspurt:

I didn't mention anything about the length of time training him so I suppose what is short to one is long to another. As far as conventional thought is concerned, training for less than a year to become a highly profitable and consistent trader would be a short time period for most traders to achieve that goal if they tried to invent the wheel themselves.

Knowing nothing about what he is doing you believe the rookie will fail. Is that based on projecting your experience on to him? I say he won't fail. He's been trading for about 12 weeks now with enough control for me to be absolutely 100% certain. Perhaps your mind is in a box of limitations that hold you back and needs reviewing?

As far as psychology is concerned I selected him because he was a certain failure on paper. He had zero trading experience or TA knowledge and when it was the right time for sim trading he was so fearful he found it difficult to hit the mouse, even though I kept saying it was only virtual money. The big plus was I had no bad habits to erase and no presumptions about what worked or didn't' work. He trusted me almost to the point that if I said PA will move along the trend line if you lift the monitor, I think he would have tried it.

I believe the answer to psychological problems lies in technique and not in the brain but that won't apply if your technique has lose control, is close to the 50% hit rate or worse and/or uses wide stops. So I don't approach this as a psychological game, but many traders do and the concepts we build our trading on determines the profit outcome. Traders can be way off the mark and believe that is the reality for everyone.
More...

Every rookie is the last, personal profits for you must be sucking ass cause you keep mentoring new rookies!

Pay the sponsorship fee if you wish to advertise for free Mr Cheap or better yet if you got gold to teach live off it you moron! However, we both know you are no moron, just a skillful con artist advertising lies for free.

Damn crooked vendors.
 
??? There are a lot of obstacles to overcome. The least of which is con artists. If you can't make it past that, I give you very little hope of succeeding when it starts getting increasingly harder.

the numbers are really skewed, when they say 95% fail

to you and me that means normal people that have thought things out

it is hard for us to imagine that there are people so gullible that they just sign up, yet they do, and they are included in the statistics

so yes, 95% fail at everything. They failed in High School trying to get a date with a cheerleader, and then just continued their failure until the day they died. Didn't matter if they tried trading or whatever the guy on TV said they could be successful at.

These are not the people you and I are comparing ourself to. So just discount them. Yes, spot forex can be profitable, full time, and I mean fulltime. For those of us that live in USA, it is certainly not a day job.

Like the man said, "It don't really matter what market you are trading as long as you like it (or at least can survive it without it killing you.)

yeah, I like spot forex at ib

I'll be honest with you, recently I have had to click the "pay dividends in cash" to cover some of my mother's health care that isn't covered by medicare, on one of my bond funds, but since I got in the groove, I also got to click the "reinvest dividends" box on my stock funds

think about it before you start mouthing off

Trading can be good when you stop making the same mistakes you made when you first started out and we are all genetically programmed to make to insure our survivability
 
Quote from macattack:

Sorry, I wasn't saying your rookie would fail. I just meant in general the typical rookie with the typical teacher would fail. You may be an exceptional teacher & he may be an exceptional student, so I wish you both the best.

But I don't see how you can't view this as both a psychological game & a game based on technique. I've read numerous examples of successful traders telling amateurs exactly what to do, as far as technique, & the amateur just can't do it.

I'd bet you could write a book laying out step-by-step how to trade just as your rookie trades, and people would screw it up. It has to be a psychological game (and a technique game).
More...

Very good questions and not easily answered with a brief response. Psychology in trading is most often dealing with the problems of discipline and emotional control when a trader has a working system but something breaks mentally and they can't perform robotically. I believe this is remedied by having a high positive expectancy and low risks (i.e. tight stops) and the further we shift from that goal the more we need psychology as an added input.

Another aspect of psychology is the conceptual framework that we use to build our trading model and that that is usually the biggest hurdle to achieving better results. Many traders don't believe it is possible to make a breakthrough where they have been defeated and often this results in bitter repetitive posts on ET.

Finally there is the key: making the visual and mental connections that results in turning chart blindness into awareness of the flow and this probably falls into the realm of psychology. Can everyone get the same results? Yes.. and No. In a single time frame everyone should get very close to the same results BUT once you add in multiple time frames then it requires a high degree of joining up the dots that some are better at than others.

Writing a book and expecting to get good results is extremely limited in my experience. What I found from mentoring both experienced traders and two newbies was that without fail, everyone of them was not doing what they thought they were doing, visual constructs were incorrect and without many corrections they wouldn't have had a chance of making the method work.
 
I am sure there is a correlation between long posts and less facts.

there are only 2,187 full-time forex traders in the world.

most in asia. most with banks. most with deep pockets.

99.2% retail traders fail.

note: my stats are never wrong. never. +-10%
 
Quote from FreakofNature:

Every rookie is the last, personal profits for you must be sucking ass cause you keep mentoring new rookies!

Pay the sponsorship fee if you wish to advertise for free Mr Cheap or better yet if you got gold to teach live off it you moron! However, we both know you are no moron, just a skillful con artist advertising lies for free.

Damn crooked vendors.
More...

This is an example of someone with nothing positive to offer, whose mantra never changes and he just can't get it.

Do you think that if I can take a trader from a $10K account to over $1mm inside 12 mths I want to sell anything? Sit down with a calculator and go figure out if there could be a better way to gear that up much, much further or if I have time for mentoring. If that doesn't make the penny drop, then try getting on my mentoring list or show what I am vending.

I even had to show you the days of the week and mention you by name when I made a call because I knew you'd show up saying it was hindsight and sure enough, without even bothering to read you kicked off on your hindsight mantra. Then when I pointed out that I had mentioned you in the call you disappeared with your tail between your legs...

Quote from FreakofNature:

You have a funny way of making claims.

Before the fact you are Mr. Ambiguity Extraordinaire

After the fact you make it sounds like you were transparent.

You really think people are that stupid to swallow your BS?



I was even thinking of you too and how this mantra demonstrates your reading and comprehension difficulties when I wrote the last sentence from this post. You don't to read before that as you can't understand any of it.

Enjoy the mystery Freak.

Quote from marketsurfer:

What is your chart telling you about Monday? You TA folks speak in riddles that can easily be interpreted after the fact to mean anything. Please be specific. My Price Drivers are signaling bullish for Monday.

I maintain, once TA shows it, its too late or of negligible value in MOST cases. Enough so to negate the value of such an approach. Clearly, it can be shown in a very small number of circumstances to have value-- such as the daily candle in JCP-- but its not repeatable enough to be of interest.

surf


It is telling you the welcome mat has been replaced by the trap door. It's not talking about Monday, it's talking about now - take profits and reverse short. You hold that short until you get a buy signal and that might be on Monday. It might be in a week or a month as this has the potential to roll through a lot of time frames.

This is a dangerous position to be long imo because of the roll over potential. In any event bank profits, sell short and wait for the buy signal.

Xspurt


Ok, we have doubled down into the Dec YM long at 13497 signals are strong for a bullish monday and next week thus far. enjoy! Surf



Great! I do like the sound of doubling - we got double elephants ;)

Xspurt

From the above it was clear that TA would have made a double profit by closing surf's long to bank profits and reversing short to add to profits from the fall.

However surf's price drivers not only overstayed their welcome, they were extra bullish in a TA short set up and doubled up for a double loss instead of a double profit.

Even reversing surf's price driver signals won't help much because of the lack of control.

(For Oilfxpro, freak and the gang of trolls, Monday comes after Friday as every call I make is hindsight to you)

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=250930&perpage=6&pagenumber=39
 
??? IBM developed a Robot that could win "Jeopardy"

and you are still claiming you need to teach traders how to "Think Right"?

I hear ya, that human mind is a real bitch, and it will keep making the same mistakes, over and over again

Big Blue never makes any mistakes, yet it still can't pay it's electric bill
 
Quote from Xspurt:

Very good questions and not easily answered with a brief response. Psychology in trading is most often dealing with the problems of discipline and emotional control when a trader has a working system but something breaks mentally and they can't perform robotically. I believe this is remedied by having a high positive expectancy and low risks (i.e. tight stops) and the further we shift from that goal the more we need psychology as an added input.

Another aspect of psychology is the conceptual framework that we use to build our trading model and that that is usually the biggest hurdle to achieving better results. Many traders don't believe it is possible to make a breakthrough where they have been defeated and often this results in bitter repetitive posts on ET.

Finally there is the key: making the visual and mental connections that results in turning chart blindness into awareness of the flow and this probably falls into the realm of psychology. Can everyone get the same results? Yes.. and No. In a single time frame everyone should get very close to the same results BUT once you add in multiple time frames then it requires a high degree of joining up the dots that some are better at than others.

Writing a book and expecting to get good results is extremely limited in my experience. What I found from mentoring both experienced traders and two newbies was that without fail, everyone of them was not doing what they thought they were doing, visual constructs were incorrect and without many corrections they wouldn't have had a chance of making the method work.
More...

Interesting, thanks. What do you mean, "...without fail, everyone of them was not doing what they thought they were doing, visual constructs were incorrect". Can you go into more detail on that point?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top