Green Fairies are scary. I have put my trust in a few over the years and although I learned a lot of lessons, it has usually ended in heartache.
In the beginning, they are hard to resist. The lure of their charms promise gorgeous sunrises and excite your imagination. Their claims are fantastic and can be backed up by many people who have fallen under their spells.
Huh? By now, you must be thinking that I am talking about this Green Fairy. Although I sound like I am out of my mind, I am not talking about the Green Muse and I have no intentions of cutting off my ear.
The Green Fairies that I am talking about come in different species. They take the form of multilevel marketing, real estate investing, internet marketing, business franchises and even forex trading. There are countless species and sub species that all promise freedom on so many levels.
All of these areas do have tremendous legitimate opportunities and can provide you a train ride to the city of Financial Freedom. But if I am telling you to stay away from Green Fairies and forex trading is one of them, what gives?
Well, what makes a business opportunity a Green Fairy is
Sorry for the disorganization the past few days, but I moved this blog to another website host and I am still tying up loose ends. Moving over three years of posts, photos and files has proven to be a little more complicated that I thought.
My hope is that this change will lead to a more reliable website and faster loading times. My previous host was slow, went down quite a bit and they jacked up my hosting costs, so it was time to go. Anyway, it might be another couple days before I can get everything tested and back to normal, but I will continue blogging.
How is your trading going? What is on your mind? Feel free to leave a comment below.
When I was brand new to trading, I bought a course that was the worst course I ever bought. I don’t know where this guy got these strategies, but they flat out didn’t work. In fact, he is not allowed to trade other people’s money or do any education courses ever again.
Since this was before I knew about backtesting, I didn’t know any better and just took him at his word that the strategies he was teaching worked. Luckily, that was the only bad course that I have bought since then.
Was I mad? Not really. Click here to read the article I wrote for EzineArticles.com about what I learned from that experience. I think there are some great lessons to be gained, even though it was an unfortunate situation.
I have been trading the Accelerator Trade for a few months and I have officially decided to stop trading it. My initial backtesting was done on more recent years data, going back to 2008.
Those results were really good. I have since gone back to 2001 and also had the good fortune of having an automated script for Forex Tester to help test this trade much faster (thank you Toshiyuki).
My final conclusion verified what I was already thinking. My gut told me that although there was a statistical probability for price to move back to the Weekly Pivot, there was no real motivation for price to do so quickly. This can lead to a loss of sleep and money.
With the Counter Trend Trade, price has been over extended when it hits the S3 or R3 levels. Therefore, it should have a tendency to snap back to some equilibrium point, in this case, a Daily Pivot.
Many times, this move is very quick because traders realize that price has gotten out of hand and want to profit from the uncharacteristic movement. This is a trade that I still like because it seems to perform well in any time period.
The iPhone is the only phone that I have owned that I have no complaints about. Apple makes good stuff. My next computer purchase will be an iPad or MacBook Pro.
I know that I mentioned here that I would never buy a Mac, but I have since found out that a Dell running OS X is not as robust as just having a Mac. So that puts an end to that.
Getting back to the iPhone…what is even better is that brokers are now creating trading apps. My two favorite brokers, Oanda and FXCM have iPhone apps and it makes it so easy to be able to log in from almost anywhere and check my positions.
Anyway, I have been using this case since I bought the iPhone and I think it is one of the best inventions ever! It is a wallet and a case all in one.
My primary concerns when seeing the case online were that it would break easily and there wouldn’t be enough room to fit my cards in the wallet.
The wallet is made of good quality leather and it has held up well in the year and a half that I have had it. The only visible wear is the silver color on the snap has worn off to expose the brass underneath, but other than that, it looks great and works well.
All of my cards fit in the wallet, the pockets were initially very tight with even one card, but once the leather has a chance to stretch, each pocket can hold 2-3 cards securely. You just fold your money in half and put in the middle like a bill fold.
I did have to get rid of some of my cards, but I found away to still keep those cards with me. I just scanned the cards with bar codes or numbers into my computer. Then I transferred the pictures to the iPhone. If the scan is done right, the pictures of the cards with bar codes can actually be scanned on the iPhone at the register.
The wallet is a little bulky to carry around in your pocket, but I measured my naked iPhone with my old slim wallet and compared it to the Sena wallet and it was almost exactly the same. All this without the hassle of worrying about two separate things.
If you have an iPhone, I would highly suggest it as a way to streamline your life.
Recently, I had the desire to have a Metatrader indicator that sent an alert every time a currency pair hit today’s or yesterday’s S3 or R3 pivot point. I know some programming, but I do not know the Metatrader programming language.
Therefore, instead of investing hundreds of hours on figuring out how to program an indicator I decided to look around for a programmer familiar with the Metatrader language, MQL4.
My Google search came up with a couple different possibilities, but I finally decided to give mqlsoft.com a try. The prices were reasonable and it seemed like they had some experience.
I figured that even they did a bad job, there wasn’t too much risk. It is better than beating my head against the wall trying to program it myself.
So I contacted them via the email address and a guy named Witold responded quickly. He is in Poland, but his English was very good. It seemed like he understood was I was looking for, so it gave me more confidence. The questions he asked me also gave me confidence that he knew what he was doing so I sent the money to get the job done.
If there was one thing that I learned from playing sports, it was that pregame routines are important. I used to wonder why we did the same thing over and over. Can’t we mix it up a little? Keep things interesting?
Well there was a reason for doing the same thing before every game. It got our minds focused on the game and was something familiar and calming. Upon doing a little research, I found some pretty funny pregame rituals. Click here to see some of the best ones.
The thing is that as traders, we need to have a pregame routine too. I was listening to a couple of legendary traders talk about the importance of a trading ritual, so I figured it must be important. Click here to see a recent post from fellow forex trader Ryan O’Keefe about his trading routine.
So I decided to adopt my own routine. First I put in my earphones and crank up my iPod. Then I do something similar to this:
I actually do play Low Rider by War before I start trading. It has a good beat to which I can visualize myself making good trades and my account balance going up. I always stop listening at the first break.
Keeping accurate records of past trades is a key to becoming a better trader. My trading records have undergone many versions but this latest method has been working for me for awhile so I thought I would share it.
At times, I strove to keep everything in electronic format. At other times, I neglected to keep any trading records at all. Sometimes I kept records on loose sheets of paper with a printout of my charts. I then proceeded to lose those papers.
This past week had no trades. I was a little disappointed but it gave me a lot of time to do backtesting and I watched some great trading videos. The videos were amazing and I believe that they will help take my trading to the next level.
As I have started to become consistently profitable, I have begun to notice the subtle wisdom in the comments of professional traders that I never noticed before.
A lot of people come into the market looking for the holy grail or the silver bullet that will solve all their financial problems. After all, how hard can it be? You just install a couple programs on your computer or log into a website, and make some money.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am probably one of the few people who will say that there IS a holy grail in trading. The only problem is that it is different for everyone and it can change. So how does one go about finding their grail? Again, that just depends on where you are starting from, your past experiences, your personality, etc.
Based on what I have learned so far, here are some things that you should keep in mind if you are struggling to become consistently profitable:
I just thought I would write a quick post just to say hi. I’m still trading and things have been going well. I haven’t had the time to get back to blogging because I have been trading, traveling and working on my trade reporting database.
I’ll start posting again next month once things settle down again. There will be a lot to share since the last couple of months have been pretty eventful as far as my trading goes. Hope your trading is going well!
I know that I have been slacking the last couple of months with logging my trades on this blog, but it was a very exciting September.
It’s been a little over two and a half years since I started this site and the whole time I have just been treading water. I would get back to break even only to lose another big trade that would put me in the hole again.
Why did I keep doing that? There were several reasons.
First of all, I wasn’t concentrating hard enough on trading. I had too many other things going on and I didn’t take the necessary time to learn the craft. It takes time to backtest strategies and you have to put in the time at the screens to see how things work.
Since August, I have cut back all business related activities that do not relate to trading. I have also carried that over into my personal life and have reduced all expenses and non-essential commitments to a minimum. I only want to do things that I find extremely rewarding or will make me a better trader.
Secondly, I kept sticking to trading methods that didn’t work for me or were marginal from a probability standpoint. I felt that I should continue to trade them because there was just something that I wasn’t understanding and if I stuck with them long enough, they would work.
After awhile, I felt that maybe I should find some new strategies and at least keep my mind open to new ideas. Shortly after I made that decision, things started to fall into place.
The strategies that have been working for me only took me a couple of hours to learn. In fact I taught Zen Trading to my friend and he was able to start making money on the first night.
I finally feel like I am getting somewhere and all of my accounts are now profitable. It was weird, as soon as I learned the techniques, I had a gut feeling that they would suit me well.
Of course I have to post some numbers to back up this claim, but I am still working on my database and reporting system, so that may take some time.
Stay tuned for more detailed information. Hope you are doing well!
Concentrating on the GBPJPY pair has been very beneficial for me. I am now able to watch multiple time frames on this one pair. Below is a screenshot of my current chart setup. Click the thumbnail for a larger image.
Setting up the charts in this way has allowed me to watch pivots and other indicators without cluttering up one chart. In addition, sometimes I forget to look at all the longer time frames, so this setup lets me see everything at a glance.
I recently had the opportunity to meet up with a trading friend that I met via this blog. We were able to sit down talk about what we are up to and what is working or not working in our trading.
One thing that really struck me was the fact that he is only concentrating on one currency pair, the GBPUSD. The great thing is that he is actually doing pretty well at a time when even some professional traders are having difficulty.
That got me thinking about some of the first things I learned about forex.
Just out of curisoity, I was wondering how many of you own a Gekko. A Gekko is the type of dress shirt that Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko wore in Wall Street. It is colored with the exception of the white collar. I don’t own one…thank goodness. Feel free to leave a comment below.
Forex trading is a high risk endeavor and may not be suitable for everyone, click here to read our complete disclosure statement. Everything on this website is for informational purposes only and is NOT financial, legal or tax advice of any kind.
Green Fairies are scary. I have put my trust in a few over the years and although I learned a lot of lessons, it has usually ended in heartache.
When I was brand new to trading, I bought a course that was the worst course I ever bought. I don’t know where this guy got these strategies, but they flat out didn’t work. In fact, he is not allowed to trade other people’s money or do any education courses ever again.
I have been trading the 
The iPhone is the only phone that I have owned that I have no complaints about. Apple makes good stuff. My next computer purchase will be an iPad or MacBook Pro.
for more information.
I recently had the opportunity to meet up with a trading friend that I met via this blog. We were able to sit down talk about what we are up to and what is working or not working in our trading.
