Help, I've been chopped!
- Thread starter NoDoji
- Start date
actually nodoji is a woman
Cool.
Why did you make the switch from stocks to futures? Would you recommend futures over forex for a beginner just starting out in daytrading?
Also how many instruments do you think I should be watching?
Futures allow me to focus better (I usually only trade one instrument, occasionally two) and I can trade easily outside regular trading hours.
For a beginner I recommend Forex because you can practice free with Oanda, then you can go live with a very tiny account and trade with some skin in the game, while risking very, very little. The price action concepts you master with such small risk can then be transferred to futures if you want.
Check out Bob Volman's book (Forex Price Action Scalping) for some excellent ideas to get you started.
Also you can "go to school" at BabyPips web site:
www.babypips.com
This site covers a lot of territory, but at the end of it all, I highly recommend mastering the technical analysis of price action because it self-adapts to varying market conditions and any liquid instrument.
No offense to Xhale, but have you ever considered a NoDoji FAQs? You'd save so much time. I'm sure Magna wouldn't mind your maintaining one in Journals.
I apologize if I am asking questions that have already been answered. I will be going through both your posts and Doji's over the next few weeks.
Do either one of you use market profile?
Hey NoDoji... as per your recommendation of this book I just finished it. I did learn quite a bit from it, but at the same time I am left a bit disappointed.
I went down this route because I just found out that my brand new IB broker would classify me as a pattern day trader and freeze my account since I didn't put in 25k, and the whole reason why I opened up this account was to day trade since I didn't want to touch my other account because its a Tax Free Savings Account up here in Canada and I don't want to lose capital in that account. (As a side note, know you are with IB, and if you don't mind, I would love to see a screen capture of how you have your platform set up. Since you are a day trader looking at one one or two instruments, I figure we would have similar needs)
So my main problem is that the boxes he uses for half of the setups seems so difficult to draw in that I see lots of places where I would have drawn the boxes on his very same charts. With a 70 tick chart, (which I have been told doesn't make much sense in forex and hardly anyone offers tick charts for forex which is another confusing aspect), the chart offers lots of places to put these boxes so it almost seemed random. I did pick up excellent Price Action concepts like having the 20 EMA squeeze price out of the box or wanting that congestion to build pressure since an initial thrust out of a box can very easily retrace back. These boxes just seemed to be drawn more in hindsight as opposed to real time.
When I read Al Brooks, I just get more of a sense that he is taking each bar as it comes and although his chart does show all the price action after the fact, he will still say that certain trades would have been good that didn't go far just based on the setup.
Don't get me wrong, the Volman book was a great read and I will probably dabble in Forex for the reasons you state, but I just feel much more confident after reading Al Brooks.
No apology necessary, but some things do tend to get repeated more often than one might expect, and it would be nice to have them archived somewhere for the benefit of the seekers. So much gets lost, esp after a dozen years.
I sound like I'm providing the prologue to The Lord of the Rings.
Ha, never thought of that, lol!