Learning to trade can be a bit like climbing a mountain. When you first start all you can see is this huge task ahead of you and maybe not even see a road or track to get started on your journey. You know where you want to go but maybe not how to get there and not in a safe and risk managed way and you would most likely need a guide.
Tag Archives: Learn to Trade
Why Swing Trading?
I’m often asked ‘What is Swing Trading and why do it, rather than Intra-Day trading? This post is an attempt at answering that question and also to highlight my view on the Pros and Cons of Swing Trading. Continue reading
London Traders Forum – Q3
For several years now I’ve helped Paul Wallace run the London Traders Forum – a once-a-year all-day event for Traders to come together, learn and socialise with each other.
This year’s London Traders Forum will be on Saturday 6th October 2018 in Central London. Please put the date in your diary and keep your eyes peeled for details and early-bird opportunities.
In the meantime the next event will be the Q3 Online Traders Forum on Saturday 7th July.
This is a new initiative from traders, for traders. The idea is for it to be a short, intensive 3 hour online seminar that covers various aspects of the 4M’s of Trading: Markets, Method, Money and Myself. The idea is for you to be able to learn some new trading ideas, whilst in the comfort of your own home, and without sacrificing your entire weekend.
The plan is for there to be one Online London Traders Forum the first Saturday of Q1, Q2 & Q3 with the London Traders Forum at the start of Q4, the main all day event.
For the Q3 Event running from 09:00 AM to 12:30 PM BST, we’ll have the following speakers:
Paul Wallace from FXTraderPaul.com and founder of The London Traders Network will deliver the market analysis section focusing on FX, Indices, Commodities (and perhaps some Crypto) and look at where to focus for possible Q3 Trading Opportunities.
Martin Walker of ForexTradingLondon.com will take a deeper look at Price Action, what are it’s constituent parts, and how to identify and read it on your charts. He will show you how to use this knowledge in your trading. Understanding and being able to read Price Action is key to identifying Trends, Breakouts and False Breakouts, Market Turns and much more.
From Dublin, Ian McFadden from the Symmetry Trading FB page will talk about his way of intra-day trading Oil using the CL Futures contract. Ian has traded using Fibs for over 10 years and he will explain how he uses them to analyse Oil and find intra-day trade set-ups.
There is a charge for £20 to attend. Why? Because we’re not selling anything. Its proper educational content rather than a slick pitch in the hope to up-sell you something. Furthermore the sessions will be recorded, and as an attendee you’ll have access to them afterwards.
It promises to be an enjoyable session that will help you grasp the opportunities that Q3 2018 will present. For further information, timings and tickets etc just go here:
Trade well!
Do The Prep – Get The Pay Back
One of the key elements to being a successful discretionary swing trader is ‘Preparation’. I’ve written about this to some extent before and covered the 5 or 6Ps. The best trades I have had, have all been pre-planned. Thorough preparation before taking any trade, particularly swing trades, tends to pay off handsomely. This entails the following: Continue reading
The 4 Cs..
In previous posts on my Blog I have written about the the 4 Ms and the 5 or 6 Ps. I thought it about time I added the 4 Cs! The 4 Cs came about through Swing Trading. When I am looking for Swing Trades I use Multi-Time Frame Analysis (MTFA) in my trade planning. People have asked me in the past why I ‘laboriously’ look at all the different time frame charts when looking for and planning a trade, rather than stick to a single time frame. Here is why.. Continue reading
How Good Is Your Risk Management?
As the Brexit Referendum looms, it seems an apt moment to write something about Risk and Risk Management.
The UK Brexit Referendum is clearly a High Risk news event and probably far to close to call at the moment, whatever your view. Other High Risk news events include General Elections, the monthly Non-Farm Payroll (normally the first Friday of every month) and also other events such as the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee and BOE Minutes and Interest Rate Decisons by Central Banks various.
As a trader you need to be aware of such High Risk events and conduct your trading accordingly. The last thing you need to do is expose your trading account to too much risk in the run up to such often highly volatile events. Better to scale back or not trade than to essentially toss a coin and become in effect a gambler.
There are many ways you can control your risk when trading: Continue reading
Forex Trading – The Essentials
Whilst doing some Housekeeping in my email account, I came across and was reminded of an email I had sent as a reply to a prospective student, who unfortunately could not afford our Personal Mentorship Programme (PMP) lessons. In my reply I wanted to be helpful, so I tried to summarise the Key areas that he should work on until he was in such a position to be able to take advantage of our PMP. Here is the main body of the email, with a few additional tweeks, containing what I suggested:
‘No problem, the key things you need to concentrate on are: Continue reading
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
Firstly our very best wishes to you and your familes at this Christmas time and thank you for reading our Blog posts and for following our Forex Trading Success Formula, which has plenty more to come in the New Year. As the trading year draws to a close, it is a good time to take stock and analyse how you have done, what you have achieved and what could be improved upon in the coming year. If you can spend some time reflecting on your trading year you should be able to: Continue reading
Successful Trading Is Managing Uncertainty
When you are trading the ‘Hard Right Edge’ of the chart on whatever timeframe, you must always try to ‘Manage Uncertainty’. What do I mean and how do you do you that?
When you enter a trade, from that point onwards you do not know for sure what the market will do next and so all you can do is to try and manage that uncertainty by doing the following: Continue reading
The Importance Of Context
When you plan and take your next trade, please ask yourself this question:
‘Do I know the Context of this trade?’
Knowing the Context of a trade is an important part of planning any trade. Knowing the Context means:
- Is this a Counter-Trend or Trend Trade and on which Time Frame?
- Is it a short term or longer term trade?
- How many reasons are there to take the trade?
- Is this a Lower Time Frame entry into a Higher Time Frame Setup?
- If so has the Higher Time Frame setup triggered yet?
Knowing the Context for your trade can give you a Bias and therefore an edge, but how do you do this in practice?