I'm new to the forex trading and one of the advices that I often come across is to always backtest a strategy first.
First thing that came to mind is to just go through the chart and start moving forward, simulating a trade and logging if the strategy wins or loses. I actually did this in a 15M chart for a range of 3 months, and while the results were enlightening (my strategy sucked only 36% win rate for that pair and strategy), I found the process very tedious.
So my question is are there automated ways to back test a strategy? Like maybe excel or an application?
I was looking into mt5 and expert advisors the other day, and I tried the strategy tester using a free expert advisor. Should I create a script that mimics my strategy and test it using mt5? I have a bit of programming but I don't know where to start.

Hi all,
I just wanted to share my trading experience with you so far, and maybe help some people who may be in the situation as I am. I started trading about 2-3 months ago. I started with baby pips, opened a demo account, and got cocky a couple weeks into it and made a live account with $100, and every other week or so put $20 extra in. (thank God I didn’t put it more than that). Today, my account stands at around $68, with a total P/L of -$131.76. I have been really uncomfortable losing money, even if it’s not a lot, and that uncomfortableness forced me to realize my mistake.
I thought I could half ass a strategy and be a winner in forex, and the market humbled me extremely quickly. I actually didn’t have a strategy at all. It was a lazy mix of a bunch of different typical strategies I saw on YouTube. I also let my emotions get into trades, after a losing trade I would get back in the market in the opposite direction to try and make up for my loss. All bad, I know. I was too cocky.
Just like anything difficult in life, you cannot half ass forex. I spent all of Friday testing an EXTREMELY simple strategy on 4 major pairs, and out of 93 total trades over the last 6 months, the win rate of my strategy is 73%. From now on, I vow to ONLY make a trade when my strategy presents itself. Moral of the story is, if you think you can half ass forex, you better wake up right now. Find a strategy, backtest it, and only trade said strategy. Have some discipline.
Here is my extremely simple, backtested strategy with a 73% win rate that I got from The Trading Channel on YouTube:
Indicators: 200 EMA
Requirements: 2 wicks IN A ROW that TOUCH the 200 EMA, that have candle bodies that both close above or below the 200 EMA. If both candles close above the 200 EMA, go long. If both candles close below the 200 EMA go short. Stay extremely strict with the rules of the strategy.
Here are the pairs that I have tested this strategy on over the past 6 months, that total a 73% win rate:
-GBP/USD: 18/27 winning trades (67%)
-NZD/USD: 15/27 winning trades (71%)
-EUUSD: 15/20 winning trades (75%)
-EUGBP: 20/25 winning trades (80%)
All backtesting was done on the H1 chart. I tried on the daily and H4 charts but the frequency just wasn’t enough. In the video that I got this strategy from he was trying to highlight the importance of the frequency of your strategy. Even if it may have a really high winning percentage, if it only happens once a year it’s not a good strategy.
Also on a side note, I’ve seen a lot of conflicting opinions on whether or not the US election will effect USD pairs, do you guys think the election will mess with my strategy this upcoming week, or should I just trade my strategy and pay not attention to the results of the election?
Thanks for reading, and happy trading
Sincerely, u/emopatriot

Hello everyone. I've noticed a lot of us here are quite secretive about how we trade, especially when we comment on a fellow trader's post. We're quick to tell them what they're doing isn't the "right way" and they should go to babypips or YouTube. There's plenty of strategies we say but never really tell them what is working for us. There's a few others that are open to share their experience and thought processes when considering a valid trade. I have been quite open myself. But I'm always met with the same "well I see what you did is quite solid but what lead you to deem this trade valid for you? "
The answer is quite simple, I have a few things that I consider which are easy rules to follow. I realized that the simpler you make it, the easier it is for you to trade and move on with your day.
I highlight a few "valid" zones and go about my day. I've got an app that alerts me when price enters the zone on my watchlist. This is because I don't just rely on forex trading money, I doubt it would be wise to unless you're trading a 80% win rate strategy. Sometimes opportunities are there and we exploit them accordingly but sometimes we are either distracted by life issues and decide to not go into the markets stressed out or opportunities just aren't there or they are but your golden rules aren't quite met.
My rules are pretty simple, one of the prime golden rules is, "the risk is supposed to be very minimal to the reward I want to yield from that specific trade". i.e I can risk -50 pips for a +150 and more pips gain. My usual target starts at 1:2 but my most satisfying trade would be a 1:3 and above. This way I can lose 6/10 trades and still be profitable.
I make sure to keep my charts clean and simple so to understand what price does without the interference of indicators all over my charts. Not to say if you use indicators for confluence is a complete no-no. Each trader has their own style and I would be a narcissistic asshole if I assumed my way is superior than anybody else's.
NB: I'm doing this for anybody who has a vague or no idea of supply and demand. Everything here has made me profitable or at least break even but doesn't guarantee the same for you. This is just a scratch on the surface so do all you can for due diligence when it comes to understanding this topic with more depth and clear comprehension.
Supply and Demand valid zones properties; what to me makes me think "oh this zone has the potential to make me money, let me put it on my watchlist"? Mind when I say watchlist, not trade it. These are different in this sense.
👉With any zone, you're supposed to watch how price enters the zone, if there's a strong push in the opposite direction or whatever price action you're observing...only then does the zone becomes valid. YOU TRADE THE REACTION, NOT THE EXPECTATION Some setups just fail and that's okay because you didn't gamble. ✍
!!!IMPORTANT SUBJECT TO LEARN BEFORE YOU START SUPPLY AND DEMAND!!!
FTR. Failure to Return.(Please read on these if you haven't. They are extremely important in SnD). Mostly occur after an impulse move from a turning point. See attached examples: RBR(rally base rally)/DBD(drop base drop). They comprise of an initial move to a certain direction, a single candle in the opposite direction and followed by 2 or more strong candles in the initial direction. The opposite candle is your FTR(This is your zone) The first time price comes back(FTB) to a zone with an FTR has high possibilities to be a strong zone.
How to identify high quality zones according to my approach:

1. Engulfing zones; This is a personal favorite. For less errors I identify the best opportunities using the daily and 4H chart.

On the example given, I chose the GBPNZD trade idea I shared here a month ago I believe. A double bottom is easily identified, with the final push well defined Bullish Engulfing candle. To further solidify it are the strong wicks to show strong rejection and failure to close lower than the left shoulder. How we draw our zone is highlight the whole candle just before the Engulfing Candle. That's your zone. After drawing it, you also pay attention to the price that is right where the engulfing starts. You then set a price alert on your preferred app because usually price won't get there immediately. This is the second most important part of trading, PATIENCE. If you can be disciplined enough to not leave a limit order, or place a market order just because you trust your analysis...you've won half the battle because we're not market predictors, we're students. And we trade the reaction.
On the given example, price had already reached the zone of interest. Price action observed was, there was a rejection that drove it out of the zone, this is the reaction we want. Soon as price returns(retests)...this is your time to fill or kill moment, going to a 4H or 1H to make minimum risk trades. (See GBPNZD Example 1&2)

1. Liquidity Run; This approach looks very similar to the Engulfing zones. The difference is, price makes a few rejections on a higher timeframe level(Resistance or support). This gives the novice trader an idea that we've established a strong support or resistance, leading to them either selling or buying given the opportunity. Price then breaks that level trapping the support and resistance trader. At this point, breakout traders have stop orders below or above these levels to anticipate a breakout at major levels with stops just below the levels. Now that the market has enough traders trapped, it goes for the stop losses above or below support and resistance levels after taking them out, price comes back into the level to take out breakout traders' stop losses. This is where it has gathered enough liquidity to move it's desired direction.

The given example on the NZDJPY shows a strong level established twice. With the Bearish Engulfing movement, price leaves a supply zone...that's where we come in. We go to smaller timeframes for a well defined entry with our stops above the recent High targeting the next demand zone.
The second screenshot illustrates how high the reward of this approach is as well. Due diligence is required for this kind of approach because it's not uncommon but usually easily misinterpreted, which is why it's important it's on higher timeframes.
You can back test and establish your own rules on this but the RSI in this case was used for confluence. It showed a strong divergence which made it an even easier trade to take.
...and last but definitely not least,

1. Double Bottom/Top. (I've used double bottoms on examples because these are the only trades I shared here so we'll talk about double bottoms. Same but opposite rules apply on double tops).

The first most important rule here is when you look to your left, price should have made a Low, High and a Lower Low. This way, the last leg(shoulder) should be lower than the first. Some call this "Hidden Zones". When drawing the zones, the top border of the zone is supposed to be on the tip of the Low and covering the Lower Low. **The top border is usually the entry point.
On the first given example I shared this week, NZDCAD. After identifying the structure, you start to look for zones that could further verify the structure for confluence. Since this was identified on the 4H, when you zoom out to the daily chart...there's a very well defined demand zone (RBR). By now you should know how strong these kind of zones are especially if found on higher timeframes. That will now be your kill zone. You'll draw another zone within the bigger zone, if price doesn't close below it...you've got a trade. You'll put your stop losses outside the initial zone to avoid wicks(liquidity runs/stop hunts)
On the second image you'll see how price closed within the zone and rallied upwards towards your targets.
The second example is CHFJPY; although looking lower, there isn't a rally base rally that further solidifies our bias...price still respected the zone. Sometimes we just aren't going to get perfect setups but it is up to us to make calculated risks. In this case, risk is very minimal considering the potential profit.
The third example (EURNZD) was featured because sometimes you just can't always get perfect price action within your desired zone. Which is why it's important to wait for price to close before actually taking a trade. Even if you entered prematurely and were taken out of the trade, the rules are still respected hence a re entry would still yield you more than what you would have lost although revenge trading is wrong.
I hope you guys learnt something new and understand the thought process that leads to deciding which setups to trade from prepared supply and demand trade ideas. It's important to do your own research and back testing that matches your own trading style. I'm more of a swing trader hence I find my zones using the Daily and 4H chart. Keeping it simple and trading the reaction to your watched zone is the most important part about trading any strategy.
Important Note: The trade ideas on this post are trades shared on this sub ever since my being active only because I don't want to share ideas that I may have carefully picked to make my trading approach a blind pick from the millions on the internet. All these were shared here.
Here's a link to the trade ideas analyzed for this post specifically
Questions are welcome on the comments section. Thank you for reading till here.

Hi everyone,
Hope you're having a good day.
I'm looking to tweak my trading strategy so that my trade execution becomes more dependant on a simple probability percentage which will ideally be a combination of different indicators.
Does anyone know if there is a website/post that has listed the probability of various 'common' indicators/buy signals? This would be on a very macro scale & include all major currency pairs, but I'm just curious to know if something like this exists before I begin my own research & back testing.
If there is no specific site with such data available, I would also love to be pointed in the direction of any sites that you consider useful that contains useful historical forex data.
Cheers!

Typically I only win about 30% of my trades but those that I do win have a risk / reward ratio of 1:3. So in the long run I should make profit, in theory. See this graph https://i.gyazo.com/df5f5e928be7e56aeeecf92a630e77c6.png
 
But my god if it isn't the most psychologically challenging thing to accept... When your trade history has 70 losses and only 30 wins, it just makes you feel like a terrible trader and because my win margin is so narrow, in the back of my mind I can't help but think eventually I will just lose it all because I'm not "winning often enough". If that makes sense.
Just out of curiosity, what's your win rate to win ratio?

Its a bit lengthy and I tried to condense it as much as I can. So take everything at a high level as each subject is has a lot more depth but fundamentally if you distill it down its just taking simple things and applying your experience using them to add nuance and better deploy them.
There are exceptions to everything that you will learn with experience or have already learned. If you know something extra or something to add to it to implement it better or more accurately. Then great! However, my intention of this post is just a high level overview. Trading can be far too nuanced to go into in this post and would take forever to type up every exception (not to mention the traders individual personality). If you take the general information as a starting point, hopefully you will learn the edge cases long the way and learn how to use the more effectively if you end up using them. I apologize in advice for any errors or typos.
Introduction After reflecting on my fun (cough) trading journey that was more akin to rolling around on broken glass and wondering if brown glass will help me predict market direction better than green glass. Buying a $100 indicator at 2 am when I was acting a fool, looking at it and going at and going "This is a piece of lagging crap, I miss out on a large part of the fundamental move and never using it for even one trade". All while struggling with massive over trading and bad habits because I would get bored watching a single well placed trade on fold for the day. Also, I wanted to get rich quick.
On top all of that I had a terminal Stage 4 case of FOMO on every time the price would move up and then down then back up. Just think about all those extra pips I could have trading both directions as it moves across the chart! I can just sell right when it goes down, then buy right before it goes up again. Its so easy right? Well, turns out it was not as easy as I thought and I lost a fair chunk of change and hit my head against the wall a lot until it clicked. Which is how I came up with a mixed bag of things that I now call "Trade the Trade" which helped support how I wanted to trade so I can still trade intra day price action like a rabid money without throwing away all my bananas.
Why Make This Post? - Core Topic of Discussion I wish to share a concept I came up with that helped me become a reliable trader. Support the weakness of how I like to trade. Also, explaining what I do helps reinforce my understanding of the information I share as I have to put words to it and not just use internalized processes. I came up with a method that helped me get my head straight when trading intra day.
I call it "Trade the Trade" as I am making mini trades inside of a trade setup I make from analysis on a higher timeframe that would take multiple days to unfold or longer. I will share information, principles, techniques I used and learned from others I talked to on the internet (mixed bag of folks from armatures to professionals, and random internet people) that helped me form a trading style that worked for me. Even people who are not good at trading can say something that might make it click in your head so I would absorbed all the information I could get.I will share the details of how I approach the methodology and the tools in my trading belt that I picked up by filtering through many tools, indicators strategies and witchcraft. Hopefully you read something that ends up helping you be a better trader. I learned a lot from people who make community posts so I wanted to give back now that I got my ducks in a row.
General Trading Advice If your struggling finding your own trading style, fixing weakness's in it, getting started, being reliably profitable or have no framework to build yourself higher with, hopefully you can use the below advice to help provide some direction or clarity to moving forward to be a better trader.

1. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do not throw a million things on your chart from the get go or over analyzing what the market is doing while trying to learn the basics. Tons of stuff on your chart can actually slow your learning by distracting your focus on all your bells and whistles and not the price action.
2. PRICE ACTION. Learn how to read price action. Not just the common formations, but larger groups of bars that form the market structure. Those formations carry more weight the higher the time frame they form on. If struggle to understand what is going on or what your looking at, move to a higher time frame.
3. INDICATORS. If you do use them you should try to understand how every indicator you use calculates its values. Many indicators are lagging indicators, understanding how it calculates the values can help you learn how to identify the market structure before the indicator would trigger a signal . This will help you understand why the signal is a lagged signal. If you understand that you can easily learn to look at the price action right before the signal and learn to watch for that price action on top of it almost trigging a signal so you can get in at a better position and assume less downside risk. I recommend using no more than 1-2 indicators for simplicity, but your free to use as many as you think you think you need or works for your strategy/trading style.
4. PSYCOLOGY. First, FOMO is real, don't feed the beast. When you trade you should always have an entry and exit. If you miss your entry do not chase it, wait for a new entry. At its core trading is gambling and your looking for an edge against the house (the other market participants). With that in mind, treat as such. Do not risk more than you can afford to lose. If you are afraid to lose it will negatively effect your trade decisions. Finally, be honest with your self and bad trading happens. No one is going to play trade cop and keep you in line, that's your job.
5. TRADE DECISION MARKING: Before you enter any trade you should have an entry and exit area. As you learn price action you will get better entries and better exits. Use a larger zone and stop loss at the start while learning. Then you can tighten it up as you gain experience. If you do not have a area you wish to exit, or you are entering because "the markets looking like its gonna go up". Do not enter the trade. Have a reason for everything you do, if you cannot logically explain why then you probably should not be doing it.
6. ROBOTS/ALGOS: Loved by some, hated by many who lost it all to one, and surrounded by scams on the internet. If you make your own, find a legit one that works and paid for it or lost it all on a crappy one, more power to ya. I do not use robots because I do not like having a robot in control of my money. There is too many edge cases for me to be ok with it.However, the best piece of advice about algos was that the guy had a algo/robot for each market condition (trending/ranging) and would make personalized versions of each for currency pairs as each one has its own personality and can make the same type of movement along side another currency pair but the price action can look way different or the move can be lagged or leading. So whenever he does his own analysis and he sees a trend, he turns the trend trading robot on. If the trend stops, and it starts to range he turns the range trading robot on. He uses robots to trade the market types that he is bad at trading. For example, I suck at trend trading because I just suck at sitting on my hands and letting my trade do its thing.

Trade the Trade - The Methodology

Base Principles These are the base principles I use behind "Trade the Trade". Its called that because you are technically trading inside your larger high time frame trade as it hopefully goes as you have analyzed with the trade setup. It allows you to scratch that intraday trading itch, while not being blind to the bigger market at play. It can help make sense of why the price respects, rejects or flat out ignores support/resistance/pivots.

1. Trade Setup: Find a trade setup using high level time frames (daily, 4hr, or 1hr time frames). The trade setup will be used as a base for starting to figure out a bias for the markets direction for that day.
2. Indicator Data: Check any indicators you use (I use Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index) for any useful information on higher timeframes.
3. Support Resistance: See if any support/resistance/pivot points are in currently being tested/resisted by the price. Also check for any that are within reach so they might become in play through out the day throughout the day (which can influence your bias at least until the price reaches it if it was already moving that direction from previous days/weeks price action).
4. Currency Strength/Weakness: I use the TradeVision currency strength/weakness dashboard to see if the strength/weakness supports the narrative of my trade and as an early indicator when to keep a closer eye for signs of the price reversing.Without the tool, the same concept can be someone accomplished with fundamentals and checking for higher level trends and checking cross currency pairs for trends as well to indicate strength/weakness, ranging (and where it is in that range) or try to get some general bias from a higher level chart that may help you out. However, it wont help you intra day unless your monitoring the currency's index or a bunch of charts related to the currency.
5. Watch For Trading Opportunities: Personally I make a mental short list and alerts on TradingView of currency pairs that are close to key levels and so I get a notification if it reaches there so I can check it out. I am not against trading both directions, I just try to trade my bias before the market tries to commit to a direction. Then if I get out of that trade I will scalp against the trend of the day and hold trades longer that are with it.Then when you see a opportunity assume the directional bias you made up earlier (unless the market solidly confirms with price action the direction while waiting for an entry) by trying to look for additional confirmation via indicators, price action on support/resistances etc on the low level time frame or higher level ones like hourly/4hr as the day goes on when the price reaches key areas or makes new market structures to get a good spot to enter a trade in the direction of your bias.Then enter your trade and use the market structures to determine how much of a stop you need. Once your in the trade just monitor it and watch the price action/indicators/tools you use to see if its at risk of going against you. If you really believe the market wont reach your TP and looks like its going to turn against you, then close the trade. Don't just hold on to it for principle and let it draw down on principle or the hope it does not hit your stop loss.
6. Trade Duration Hold your trades as long or little as you want that fits your personality and trading style/trade analysis. Personally I do not hold trades past the end of the day (I do in some cases when a strong trend folds) and I do not hold trades over the weekends. My TP targets are always places I think it can reach within the day. Typically I try to be flat before I sleep and trade intra day price movements only. Just depends on the higher level outlook, I have to get in at really good prices for me to want to hold a trade and it has to be going strong. Then I will set a slightly aggressive stop on it before I leave. I do know several people that swing trade and hold trades for a long period of time. That is just not a trading style that works for me.

Enhance Your Success Rate Below is information I picked up over the years that helped me enhance my success rate with not only guessing intra day market bias (even if it has not broken into the trend for the day yet (aka pre London open when the end of Asia likes to act funny sometimes), but also with trading price action intra day.
People always say "When you enter a trade have an entry and exits. I am of the belief that most people do not have problem with the entry, its the exit. They either hold too long, or don't hold long enough. With the below tools, drawings, or instruments, hopefully you can increase your individual probability of a successful trade.
**P.S.*\* Your mileage will vary depending on your ability to correctly draw, implement and interpret the below items. They take time and practice to implement with a high degree of proficiency. If you have any questions about how to do that with anything listed, comment below and I will reply as I can. I don't want to answer the same question a million times in a pm.
Tools and Methods Used This is just a high level overview of what I use. Each one of the actions I could go way more in-depth on but I would be here for a week typing something up of I did that. So take the information as a base level understanding of how I use the method or tool. There is always nuance and edge cases that you learn from experience.

• Fundamentals
  • I keep a general high level Macro outlook for currencies. I dont get too deep into Fundamentals and just keep an eye out for news. If I am already in a trade I will hold it if its far enough away from my entry. However, I wont enter right before/during news as it can invalidate your setup.
• Price Action
  • I started with the basics of learning the standard price action formations/patterns and candles. You can find tons of free info on that online, google is your friend. Then I stared at charts and said "why did the price do that or do this etc" then after a while I started to understand what's happening without having to think about it and I can see the market structure without having to look as closely as I did in the past.
  • After many many hours of staring at 5 min charts for 15 hours a day 5 days a week I learned how to look at 5 min charts and be like "Oh that's a hammer on the 15 min etc. If you keep track of time you can do the same for hourly candles as well and you will start to see market structure naturally. However I typically trade in a two chart panel window so I have a 15 min and 5 min chart up when trading intra day so I dont have to think too hard about it.
• Support/Resistance Lines
  • Draw support resistance lines on Daily/4hr timeframes. I prefer to use body of the candle instead of the wick for support/resistance.
  • You can find support/resistance liquidity levels through out the day as well and trade those if the price retraces back through levels its already been through that same day.
  • It would be a bit length to explain exactly the best place to draw them. If your unsure there is plenty of free resources on the internet. Just try to use your head and look for price levels where the price was "Supported" or it "Resisted" that price level then slap a line on it. Draw as few or as many lines as you feel helps you and your style. I tend to lean on the side of fewer. I typically do about 6 lines main support/resistances (3 of each).
• Fibonacci Extensions
  • Draw two Fibonacci Extensions. One on the daily timeframe, and then one on the 4hr time frame. Then you can trade the Fibonacci levels and use them for TP targets or entry zones if price action respects the level. Also you can use it along with support/resistance and pivots if they happen to line up or are very close.
  • I cannot really figure out how to put it into words how to draw a Fib if you dont know how. I will have to make a picture to demonstrate it. If your interested post below and I will draw one up and post a link. Probably the easiest way to understand. Just keep in mind the Fib you draw on the 4hr time frame will be inside the daily timeframe one.
• Currency Strength/Weakness
  • The TradeVision2020 dashboard that I use just helps me keep a tab on the current market post plus any swing strength/momentum a currency might have on higher time frames. Helps me look for shifts in the market or confirmation that the bias it already has in momentum is continuing. I have found that often currencies when they get really/weak or strong might continue for several days or even longer like a full week or more. We recently had what felt like 1 week or so of flat out Yen weakness which was making some things wonky. All it does is allow me to look at the dashboard instead of a million other charts.
• Indicators
  • I use two that work well for my intra day style. The Stochastic RSI is just like a RSI but its faster. The second is the Relative Vigor Index which I use to detect swings in momentum and divergences in bullish/bearish momentum. I have used many others in the past, but as I have grown and got better as a trader I have found making my analysis simpler has improved my trading.I dont like the whole idea of have 43 different indicators on 32 different time frames light up a dashboard to be green for me to enter a trade. With how I do it now, I have a clear understanding of what I expect to happen and why. That way when it does happen I understand the move and dont get freaked out if the market moves funny after I am in the trade.

Conclusion
I use the above tools/indicators/resources/philosophy's to trade intra day price action that sometimes ends up as noise in the grand scheme of the markets movement.use that method until the price action for the day proves the bias assumption wrong. Also you can couple that with things like Stoch RSI + Relative Vigor Index to find divergences which can increase the probability of your targeted guesses.
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Trade Example from Yesterday This is an example of a trade I took today and why I took it. I used the following core areas to make my trade decision.

• Fundamental Bias: I already had a bullish fundamental outlook on EUUSD with expecting the markets to price in future similes due a higher an higher chance of Biden winning on paper as the election closed in and a "Blue wave" coming which would lead to a weaker dollar. Also, the Euro Zone is getting hammered with COVID pretty hard plus Brexit drama so I had a strong Euro bias.NOTE: As frame of reference, all the other pairs I trade I traded as if they were ranging and trade a range. Markets are messed up right now.
• Currency Strength/Weakness: I use a tool that gives me a currency strength/weakness dashboard called TradeVision2020. Helps me track individual currency strength/weakness intra day. Took me about a month to get used to it, but helps me keep track of intra day strength/weakness that can add a bias to trade direction as the day unfolds. Like "Will this run have a 2nd or 3rd push higher" or "I should look to TP at the first sign of weakness in the push" type bias data. You still got to use your brain and figure out the best decision. It wont make choices for you, its only a guide.NOTE: I am not trying to adverse the tool (if providing the code is against sub rules let me know), its just a tool I use every day that helps me with directional bias calls. I am sharing the coupon code that was given to me when I found out about the tool in the TradingView forex chatroom and the guy gave me the code to use when I signed up. I dont want someone to read the name and want to try it out then overpay for no reason. The coupon will give you 40% off. Coupon Code: 3F7A0T5T
• Higher Timeframe Analysis: Detected some early signs of Bearish Divergence on the 1hr chart using a on a higher time frame using a Stochastic RSI. Then I saw more confirmation on 5 min charts using Relative Vigor Index to help time my entry mid session.
• Pivot Points: I treat pivot points like support/resistance and trade them as such using price action to give me some idea how its being treated by the market. Pretty straight forward.

It may seem like a lot of stuff to process on the fly while trying to figure out live price action but, for the fundamental bias for a pair should already baked in your mindset for any currency pair you trade. For the currency strength/weakness I stare at the dashboard 12-15 hours a day so I am always trying to keep a pulse on what's going or shifts so that's not really a factor when I want to enter as I would not look to enter if I felt the market was shifting against me. Then the higher timeframe analysis had already happened when I woke up, so it was a game of "Stare at the 5 min chart until the price does something interesting"
Trade Example: Today , I went long EUUSD long bias when I first looked at the chart after waking up around 9-10pm Eastern. Fortunately, the first large drop had already happened so I had a easy baseline price movement to work with. I then used tool for currency strength/weakness monitoring, Pivot Points, and bearish divergence detected using Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index.
I first noticed Bearish Divergence on the 1hr time frame using the Stochastic RSI and got confirmation intra day on the 5 min time frame with the Relative Vigor Index. I ended up buying the second mini dip around midnight Eastern because it was already dancing along the pivot point that the price had been dancing along since the big drop below the pivot point and dipped below it and then shortly closed back above it. I put a stop loss below the first large dip. With a TP goal of the middle point pivot line
Then I waited for confirmation or invalidation of my trade. I ended up getting confirmation with Bearish Divergence from the second large dip so I tightened up my stop to below that smaller drip and waited for the London open. Not only was it not a lower low, I could see the divergence with the Relative Vigor Index.
It then ran into London and kept going with tons of momentum. Blew past my TP target so I let it run to see where the momentum stopped. Ended up TP'ing at the Pivot Point support/resistance above the middle pivot line.
Random Note: The Asian session has its own unique price action characteristics that happen regularly enough that you can easily trade them when they happen with high degrees of success. It takes time to learn them all and confidently trade them as its happening. If you trade Asia you should learn to recognize them as they can fake you out if you do not understand what's going on.
​
TL;DR At the end of the day there is no magic solution that just works. You have to find out what works for you and then what people say works for them. Test it out and see if it works for you or if you can adapt it to work for you. If it does not work or your just not interested then ignore it.
At the end of the day, you have to use your brain to make correct trading decisions. Blindly following indicators may work sometimes in certain market conditions, but trading with information you don't understand can burn you just as easily as help you. Its like playing with fire. So, get out there and grind it out. It will either click or it wont. Not everyone has the mindset or is capable of changing to be a successful trader. Trading is gambling, you do all this work to get a edge on the house. Trading without the edge or an edge you understand how to use will only leave your broker happy in the end.

Hi, we have a group of 12 people in our Slack. We are looking to expand this number and hopefully you will be a good fit :) . We are searching for people who have some experience with technical analysis based trading or are at least experienced with paper trading. This could either be in Cryptocurrencies which is the main focus of the group. Or could be in other markets like Forex or Stocks.
We have a variety of skill levels in the group from beginners through to profitable, we all want to improve quickly. Ideally you would have the same aspirations. One of the main goals of this group is to help each other to become consistently profitable traders who can trade as their full time job.
Everyone in the group trades separately and has their own accounts. We don't want to sell you anything, we are just building a community that aims to help each other succeed.
Some of the things we do in the slack are:

• Video Calls
• Group back testing.
• Group market analysis.
• Discussions about fundamentals.
• Deep dive into record keeping systems.
• Group trade analysis.
• Group learning.
• Group strategy troubleshooting.
• Strategy sharing.
• Risk management analysis.
• Occasional social / fun events.

If you are interested in finding out more about the group or want to join, either comment below or Pm me with the below template.
Expression of interest template:
Name:
Country:
Time Zone:
How much experience you have in trading:
What you trade:
Additional comments:
---
Example expression of interest:
Name: Ben.
Country: Australia.
Time Zone: AEDT (GMT+11).
How much experience you have in trading: 6 Months.
What you trade: Cryptocurrency spot and futures. Mostly BTC, ETH, ADA, LTC, ATOM, XTZ, ETC, LINK, THETA.
Additional comments: I have been trading as a pair with 1 other person for the last 6 months. We have been meeting 5 days a week for those 5 months. Working together has been really beneficial for us. The slack group has been around for nearly 2 months now and has made a positive difference to my trading. It took the benefits I was getting from trading with 1 other person and multiplied them.
If you have any other questions ask below :)

I am a Software Engineer / Data Scientist and I decided to give a go at automating a strategy based on the ParallaxFX strategy floating around and backtests the results, also due to some inspiration by Vanguer
 
I backtested on the majors 4H timeframe between January 2015 to January 2020.
 
I am only considering trades from the top and bottom bands for now.
 
My trading criteria is:
 
Upper Band
Indecision candle

• open and close above the band
  
• Stochastic above 0.8
  

Setup candle

• Descending
  
• Closes > 38.2 fib (or 'below' the 38.2 fib)
  
• Has lower low than indecision
  
• Has lower close than indecision
  
• TP is above the lower band
  

 
Lower Band
Indecision candle

• open and close below the band
  
• Stochastic below 0.2
  

Setup candle

• Ascending
  
• Closes > 38.2 fib (or 'above' the 38.2 fib)
  
• Has higher high than indecision
  
• Has higher close than indecision
  
• TP is below the upper band
  

 
Entry: 38.2 Fib
Stop Loss: 100 Fib
Take Profit: -161.8 Fib
RRR: 3.23
 
If a candle meets my trade criteria I open the trade and forget about it.
 
I started with a balance of 500 EUR and a risk of 1%. The results use compound gain / loss and I only considered one currency pair at a time.
 
The results were not that impressive...
EUUSD

• Trades: 29
  
• Wins: 10
  
• Losses: 19
  
• Balance: 567.45
  

AUD/USD

• Trades: 29
  
• Wins: 7
  
• Losses: 22
  
• Balance: 500.92
  

GBP/USD

• Trades: 25
  
• Wins: 5
  
• Losses: 20
  
• Balance: 479.55
  

NZD/USD

• Trades: 26
  
• Wins: 6
  
• Losses: 20
  
• Balance: 495.07
  

USD/CAD

• Trades: 22
  
• Wins: 4
  
• Losses: 18
  
• Balance: 473.90
  

USD/CHF

• Trades: 28
  
• Wins: 7
  
• Losses: 21
  
• Balance: 505.98
  

 
Due to this being automated I can test a variety of parameters pretty quickly and come back with trading screenshots, results, etc.
 
I am considering a higher timeframe but the number of trades is already fairly low.
 
Here is a link to a Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16cO0ZSCGakkbK90lh-FBIC3ZJIxOj9fI?usp=sharing) with screenshots from each trade and a log of the system as it makes the trades. The candles highlighted in yellow / purple are where the trade is entered. I do not have the picture marked as a win / lose but it should be obvious by the candle formation.

Literally every one I have ever come across is full of fake reviews on a fake website

I'm interested in understanding back testing strategies, and have heard a few podcasts mention Forex Tester. I'm lost most weekends as i'm using IG INdex demo account, and cannot really trade or backtest on the platform.
Are there other, better software out there? Or even open-source or free?

You've presumably heard "retracement" or "follow" much of the time in case you're keen on exchanging the monetary business sectors. Be that as it may, do you really understand what value retracements are, the reason they're so significant and how to appropriately exploit them? Maybe not, yet regardless of whether you do, the present exercise will reveal new insight into how to use these incredibly amazing business sector occasions…
A retracement in a market is a pretty simple idea to characterize and comprehend. Basically, it's actually what it seems like: a period when cost remembers back on an ongoing move, either up or down. Consider "remembering your means"; returning a similar way you came. It's fundamentally an inversion of an ongoing value move.
For what reason are retracements significant? For various reasons: They are occasions to enter the market at a "superior value", they take into account ideal stop misfortune arrangement, improved danger prize and then some. A remember passage is more traditionalist than a "market section" for instance and is viewed as a "more secure" passage type. Eventually, the objective of a dealer is get the best passage cost and oversee hazard on a par with conceivable while additionally expanding restores; the retracement section is a device that permits you to do every one of the three of these things.
This exercise will cover all parts of exchanging retracements and will assist you with understanding them better and put them to use to ideally improve your general exchanging execution.
Presently, how about we examine a portion of the Pros and Cons of retracement exchanging before we take a gander at some model graphs…
Professionals of Retracement Trading
We should discuss a portion of the many "Geniuses" of retracement exchanging. Frankly, retracement exchanging is fundamentally how you exchange like an expert rifleman, which, on the off chance that you've followed me for any timeframe, you know is my favored strategy for exchanging.
Higher Probability Entries – The very idea of a draw back or backtrack implies that cost is probably going to keep moving toward the underlying move when the follow closes. Henceforth, on the off chance that you see a solid value activity signal at a level after a retracement, it's high-likelihood passage since all signs are highlighting value bobbing starting there. Presently, it doesn't generally occur, however hanging tight for a remember to a level with a sign, is the most elevated likelihood way you can exchange. Markets pivot back to the "signify" or "normal" cost again and again; this is clear by taking a gander at any value outline for a couple of moments. Along these lines, when you see this revolution or backtrack occur, begin searching for a section point there in light of the fact that it's a lot higher-likelihood passage point than just entering "at market" like most brokers do.
Less Premature Stop-Outs – A retracement permits greater adaptability with stop misfortune arrangement. Essentially, in that you can put the prevent further away from any territory on the diagram that is probably going to be hit (if the exchange you're taking is to exercise by any stretch of the imagination). Setting prevents further away from key levels or moving midpoints or further away from a pin bar high or low for instance, gives the exchange a higher possibility of working out.
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Better Risk Rewards – Retracement passages hypothetically permit you to put a "more tight" stop misfortune on an exchange since you're entering more like a key level or you're entering at a pin bar half level on an exchange section stunt passage for instance. In this way, should you decide to do as such, you can put a stop a lot nearer than if you entered an exchange that didn't occur after a follow or on the off chance that you entered a pin bar exchange at the high or low of the pin, for instance. Model: a 100 pip stop and 200 pip target can undoubtedly turn into a 50 pip stop and 250 pip focus on a follow passage. Note: you don't have to put a more tight stop, it's discretionary, however the choice IS There on a backtrack section in the event that you need it. The other option, utilizing a standard width stop has the benefit of diminishing the odds of an untimely stop out.
A danger prize can likewise be somewhat expanded regardless of whether you utilize a standard stop misfortune, rather than a "more tight one". Model: a 100 pip stop and a 200 pip target can without much of a stretch become a 100 pip stop and a 250 pip target. Why? This is on the grounds that a remember passage lets you enter the market when it has "more space" to run toward you, because of the way that cost has pulled back and it consequently has more separation to move before it follows again when contrasted with in the event that you entered at a "more awful cost" further up or down.
Cons of Retracement Trading
Obviously I will be straightforward with you and told you a portion of the "cons" of retracement exchanging, there are a not many that you ought to know about. Notwithstanding, this doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt to learn retracement exchanging and add it to your exchanging "tool stash", in light of the fact that the geniuses FAR exceed the cons.
More Missed Trades: Good exchanges will "move away" now and then when hanging tight for a retracement that doesn't occur, for instance. This can test your nerves and exchanging attitude and will bother even the best dealers. In any case, trust me, passing up exchanges isn't the most exceedingly terrible thing on the planet and it's smarter to pass up certain exchanges than to over-exchange, that is without a doubt.
Less Trades in General – A great deal of the time, advertises just don't remember enough to trigger the more moderate passage that returns with a force. All things being equal, they may simply prop up with insignificant retracements. This implies you will have less opportunities to exchange by and large when contrasted with somebody who isn't essentially hanging tight for follows.
Because of the over two focuses, retracement exchanging can be disappointing and takes unimaginable order. In any case, in the event that you build up this order you'll be WELL in front of the majority of losing dealers thus retracement exchanging can assist you with building up the control you should need to prevail at exchanging regardless of what passage technique you wind up utilizing.
Retracements Provide Flexibility in Stop Loss Placements
Setting your stop misfortune at some unacceptable point can get you taken out of an exchange rashly, that you in any case were spot on. By figuring out how to sit tight for market pull backs or retracements, you won't just enter the market at a higher-likelihood point, however you'll likewise have the option to put your stop misfortune at a lot more secure point on the diagram.
Regularly, dealers get debilitate in light of the fact that they get halted out of an exchange that actually they were spot on. Putting a stop misfortune at some unacceptable point on a diagram can get you removed from an exchange before the market truly gets an opportunity to get moving toward you. A retracement presents a clever answer for this issue by permitting you to put a more secure and more extensive stop misfortune on an exchange, giving you a superior possibility at bringing in cash on that exchange.
At the point when a market follows or pulls back, particularly inside a moving business sector, it is giving you an occasion to put your stop misfortune at a point on the outline that is significantly more averse to take you out of an exchange. Since most remembers occur into help or opposition levels, you can put the stop misfortune further past that level (more secure) which is fundamentally less inclined to be hit than if it was nearer to the level. Utilizing what I call a "standard" stop misfortune (not a tight one) in this case will give you the most obvious opportunity at keeping away from an untimely take out of an exchange.

So I'm working on a Forex strategy back testing script using pandas. For part of the strategy, I need to get the absolute value of num1 - num2.
for example
ans = abs(1.31968-1.31977)
expected result is 0.0009
however I am getting 9.000000000014552e-05 which is throwing my results off.
Any ideas, suggestions?

Real quick before I get into my next steps of my FX Journey, id like to say thank you to all the people who commented on my last post! All of the tips I got were really eye-opening and introduced me to different parts of FX trading that I didn't even know existed. So thank you so much, and I hope to get more interesting feedback from you guys in the future! Also Im going to probably change my writing frequency from daily to biweekly. I think writing about every little trade is not going to be as beneficial to me as writing about my overall progress at certain points throughout the week.
I started this trading day out by learning up on order flow. A whole bunch of you guys suggested really interesting youtubers to watch, and I started with Mr. pip's series on order flow. After I finished up watching a few of his videos, I started to tweak my trading plan so that I could get in some chart time. I changed currency pair from EUUSD to the AUD/USD, the time frame from the 4 hour to the 1 hour, and my indicators from RSI, Stochastic, 2 SMAs and ADX to ATR, RSI, and Ichimoku Kinko Hyo. I also added a little fundamental analysis in my trading plan because I think that I am being far too reliant on my indicators. I planned to check the economic calendar and determine the general trend of the currency pairs that are strongly correlated to the AUD/USD before I began my chart analysis. In addition to all of my analysis, I tried to practice using the techniques I learned in Mr. Pip's videos and analyze the order flow of the chart. Even if my analysis of order flow is wrong, as long as I am getting practice I am learning.
Eventhough I planned to use today to back-test indicators and find a solid new plan, I did not have enough time. I ended up getting on my demo account really late in the day, and started to force myself to enter a trade. Destructive habits like this could lead into some massive issues when I eventually get into live trading. To combat this harmful attitude specifically, I will restrict myself to trading on certain parts of the day (for example session overlaps, news releases, and earlier in the day). Despite this mistake I still continued with my trading strategy. I calculated all the currency correlations for AUS/USD using the past weeks economic data, and set my indicators in place. After checking the overall trend of the most strongly correlated pairs (Positive: EUUSD, GPB/USD, Negative: USD/CAD, USD/JPY) I started to analyze the order flow. All the correlated currencies, except for EUUSD, indicated that the AUD/USD would fall, while my order flow analysis indicated the opposite. Seeing as though I am extremely new to order flow, I dismissed this analysis, and ended up forcing a trade on the AUD/USD going short when my indicators seemed to line up correctly. I learned from last time that I should not alter or close my trade purely based on emotion, and to just wait till the market hits my stop loss or take profit. I included a trailing stop loss of 60 pips this time, but I have no evidence to base that number range on. The trade is currently open and I am down about 30 pips.
Although I am not labeling this trade as a loser yet, I can definitely see a lot of holes in my trading strategy. The most obvious mistake in my eyes right now is my use of indicators. Currently all my trades are purely based on what my indicators say, and since I do not have any back-tested data to support the credibility of my indicators, it feels a lot like strategic gambling. Another issue is that I feel far too reliant on indicators alone. I think that if I can find ways to include various types of analysis efficiently and evenly in my trading plan I will become a much more skillful and well-rounded trader. In order to combat these two issues I will begin forming various types of trading strategies this weekend and back-test them all extensively. I also plan on researching more on price action, order flow, and Naked Forex.
Once again any and all feedback is welcome. I am just beginning Forex, but it had been a huge passion of mine and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know. We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide. I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life
The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a third outcome. If you hedged against the possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge dynamically. In wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy
The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then - quelle surprise! - the rate gets better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs
You may have heard about the mythical ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens, you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.

Over the weekend my trading strategy changed drastically. At first I decided to let indicators completely rule my trading strategy; however, I quickly ran into issues with that ideology. My trading turned into gambling, and could easily be replicated by a simple program. To combat this issue I pushed back-testing indicators from the prior weekend to after I solidify my technical, sentimental, and fundamental analysis. I started learning Naked Forex, order flow analysis, and price action analysis over the weekend, and have started practicing them during the weekday. Although my win percentage is fairly low, I found that my analysis is getting stronger with each trade I take.
My first trade was on the 30 min EUUSD chart. I saw that the market was entering an ascending triangle and started to expect a bullish breakout. I looked at the market sentiment on fxdaily, and saw that most of the market was bearish. I assumed that the bearish presence in the market were the retail traders, and assumed that the market would move in the opposite direction of their expectations. I used order flow analysis to find the momentum and projection of the market, and ended up placing a buy stop in order to catch the market on the expected breakout. One thing I did not factor was multiple time frame analysis. I did not see that the market had entered a channel, and that I placed a trade when it had hit the resistance level. The price reached my buy stop, but proceeded to drop until it hit my stop loss.
As I went back to analyze my technical analysis, I found that I misread the order flow. I also realized that there were many parts of technical analysis that I didn't factor in, such as multiple time frame analysis, major support/resistance levels, and Fibonacci levels. I also decided to take more precaution when looking at the market sentiment, and try back-testing that data before basing another trade off of it.
Although this trade was a loser, I still learned a great deal from it, and feel like I benefited more than my previous trades. The chart analysis was tough to begin, but progressively got easier as I looked for more and more trades. For the time being I decided to stick with the EUUSD, and exclusively look for repeating market behavior and reactions in order to strengthen my market sense and improve my technical analysis before I start back-testing and using indicators. I also have started to pay more attention to candlestick patterns and their link to trend behavior.
Overall I believe that improving my technical analysis is a step in the right direction for my trading journey. I finally feel like i'm trading with my own mind rather than being overly reliant on the indicators on my chart.

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please do your own research or you will certainly lose money. I'm not a statistician, data scientist, well-seasoned trader, or anything else that would qualify me to make statements such as the below with any weight behind them. Take them for the incoherent ramblings that they are.
TL;DR at the bottom for those not interested in the details.
This is a bit of a novel, sorry about that. It was mostly for getting my own thoughts organized, but if even one person reads the whole thing I will feel incredibly accomplished.

Background

For those of you not familiar, please see the various threads on this trading system here. I can't take credit for this system, all glory goes to ParallaxFX!
I wanted to see how effective this system was at H1 for a couple of reasons: 1) My current broker is TD Ameritrade - their Forex minimum is a mini lot, and I don't feel comfortable enough yet with the risk to trade mini lots on the higher timeframes(i.e. wider pip swings) that ParallaxFX's system uses, so I wanted to see if I could scale it down. 2) I'm fairly impatient, so I don't like to wait days and days with my capital tied up just to see if a trade is going to win or lose.
This does mean it requires more active attention since you are checking for setups once an hour instead of once a day or every 4-6 hours, but the upside is that you trade more often this way so you end up winning or losing faster and moving onto the next trade. Spread does eat more of the trade this way, but I'll cover this in my data below - it ends up not being a problem.
I looked at data from 6/11 to 7/3 on all pairs with a reasonable spread(pairs listed at bottom above the TL;DR). So this represents about 3-4 weeks' worth of trading. I used mark(mid) price charts. Spreadsheet link is below for anyone that's interested.

System Details

I'm pretty much using ParallaxFX's system textbook, but since there are a few options in his writeups, I'll include all the discretionary points here:

• I'm using the stop entry version - so I wait for the price to trade beyond the confirmation candle(in the direction of my trade) before entering. I don't have any data to support this decision, but I've always preferred this method over retracement-limit entries. Maybe I just like the feeling of a higher winrate even though there can be greater R:R using a limit entry. Variety is the spice of life.
• I put my stop loss right at the opposite edge of the confirmation candle. NOT at the edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. I'll get into this more below - not enough trades are saved to justify the wider stops. (Wider stop means less $ per pip won, assuming you still only risk 1%).
• All my profit/loss statistics are based on a 1% risk per trade. Because 1 is real easy to multiply.
• There are definitely some questionable trades in here, but I tried to make it as mechanical as possible for evaluation purposes. They do fit the definitions of the system, which is why I included them. You could probably improve the winrate by being more discretionary about your trades by looking at support/resistance or other techniques.
• I didn't use MBB much for either entering trades, or as support/resistance indicators. Again, trying to be pretty mechanical here just for data collection purposes. Plus, we all make bad trading decisions now and then, so let's call it even.
• As stated in the title, this is for H1 only. These results may very well not play out for other time frames - who knows, it may not even work on H1 starting this Monday. Forex is an unpredictable place.
• I collected data to show efficacy of taking profit at three different levels: -61.8%, -100% and -161.8% fib levels described in the system using the passive trade management method(set it and forget it). I'll have more below about moving up stops and taking off portions of a position.

And now for the fun. Results!

• Total Trades: 241
• Raw Winrates:
  • TP at -61.8%: 177 out of 241: 73.44%
  • TP at -100%: 156 out of 241: 64.73%
  • TP at -161.8%: 121 out of 241: 50.20%
• Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
  • TP at -61.8%: 5.22%
  • TP at -100%: 23.55%
  • TP at -161.8%: 29.14%

As you can see, a higher target ended up with higher profit despite a much lower winrate. This is partially just how things work out with profit targets in general, but there's an additional point to consider in our case: the spread. Since we are trading on a lower timeframe, there is less overall price movement and thus the spread takes up a much larger percentage of the trade than it would if you were trading H4, Daily or Weekly charts. You can see exactly how much it accounts for each trade in my spreadsheet if you're interested. TDA does not have the best spreads, so you could probably improve these results with another broker.
EDIT: I grabbed typical spreads from other brokers, and turns out while TDA is pretty competitive on majors, their minors/crosses are awful! IG beats them by 20-40% and Oanda beats them 30-60%! Using IG spreads for calculations increased profits considerably (another 5% on top) and Oanda spreads increased profits massively (another 15%!). Definitely going to be considering another broker than TDA for this strategy. Plus that'll allow me to trade micro-lots, so I can be more granular(and thus accurate) with my position sizing and compounding.

A Note on Spread

As you can see in the data, there were scenarios where the spread was 80% of the overall size of the trade(the size of the confirmation candle that you draw your fibonacci retracements over), which would obviously cut heavily into your profits.
Removing any trades where the spread is more than 50% of the trade width improved profits slightly without removing many trades, but this is almost certainly just coincidence on a small sample size. Going below 40% and even down to 30% starts to cut out a lot of trades for the less-common pairs, but doesn't actually change overall profits at all(~1% either way).
However, digging all the way down to 25% starts to really make some movement. Profit at the -161.8% TP level jumps up to 37.94% if you filter out anything with a spread that is more than 25% of the trade width! And this even keeps the sample size fairly large at 187 total trades.
You can get your profits all the way up to 48.43% at the -161.8% TP level if you filter all the way down to only trades where spread is less than 15% of the trade width, however your sample size gets much smaller at that point(108 trades) so I'm not sure I would trust that as being accurate in the long term.
Overall based on this data, I'm going to only take trades where the spread is less than 25% of the trade width. This may bias my trades more towards the majors, which would mean a lot more correlated trades as well(more on correlation below), but I think it is a reasonable precaution regardless.

Time of Day

Time of day had an interesting effect on trades. In a totally predictable fashion, a vast majority of setups occurred during the London and New York sessions: 5am-12pm Eastern. However, there was one outlier where there were many setups on the 11PM bar - and the winrate was about the same as the big hours in the London session. No idea why this hour in particular - anyone have any insight? That's smack in the middle of the Tokyo/Sydney overlap, not at the open or close of either.
On many of the hour slices I have a feeling I'm just dealing with small number statistics here since I didn't have a lot of data when breaking it down by individual hours. But here it is anyway - for all TP levels, these three things showed up(all in Eastern time):

• 7pm-4am: Fewer setups, but winrate high.
• 5am-6am: Lots of setups, but but winrate low.
• 12pm-3pm Medium number of setups, but winrate low.

I don't have any reason to think these timeframes would maintain this behavior over the long term. They're almost certainly meaningless. EDIT: When you de-dup highly correlated trades, the number of trades in these timeframes really drops, so from this data there is no reason to think these timeframes would be any different than any others in terms of winrate.
That being said, these time frames work out for me pretty well because I typically sleep 12am-7am Eastern time. So I automatically avoid the 5am-6am timeframe, and I'm awake for the majority of this system's setups.

Moving stops up to breakeven

This section goes against everything I know and have ever heard about trade management. Please someone find something wrong with my data. I'd love for someone to check my formulas, but I realize that's a pretty insane time commitment to ask of a bunch of strangers.
Anyways. What I found was that for these trades moving stops up...basically at all...actually reduced the overall profitability.
One of the data points I collected while charting was where the price retraced back to after hitting a certain milestone. i.e. once the price hit the -61.8% profit level, how far back did it retrace before hitting the -100% profit level(if at all)? And same goes for the -100% profit level - how far back did it retrace before hitting the -161.8% profit level(if at all)?
Well, some complex excel formulas later and here's what the results appear to be. Emphasis on appears because I honestly don't believe it. I must have done something wrong here, but I've gone over it a hundred times and I can't find anything out of place.

• Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
  • Winrate: 46.4%
  • Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 5.36%
• Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
  • Winrate: 65.97%
  • Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): -1.01% (yes, a net loss)

Now, you might think exactly what I did when looking at these numbers: oof, the spread killed us there right? Because even when you move your SL to 0%, you still end up paying the spread, so it's not truly "breakeven". And because we are trading on a lower timeframe, the spread can be pretty hefty right?
Well even when I manually modified the data so that the spread wasn't subtracted(i.e. "Breakeven" was truly +/- 0), things don't look a whole lot better, and still way worse than the passive trade management method of leaving your stops in place and letting it run. And that isn't even a realistic scenario because to adjust out the spread you'd have to move your stoploss inside the candle edge by at least the spread amount, meaning it would almost certainly be triggered more often than in the data I collected(which was purely based on the fib levels and mark price). Regardless, here are the numbers for that scenario:

• Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
  • Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 46.4%
  • Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 17.97%
• Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
  • Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 65.97%
  • Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 11.60%

From a literal standpoint, what I see behind this behavior is that 44 of the 69 breakeven trades(65%!) ended up being profitable to -100% after retracing deeply(but not to the original SL level), which greatly helped offset the purely losing trades better than the partial profit taken at -61.8%. And 36 went all the way back to -161.8% after a deep retracement without hitting the original SL. Anyone have any insight into this? Is this a problem with just not enough data? It seems like enough trades that a pattern should emerge, but again I'm no expert.
I also briefly looked at moving stops to other lower levels (78.6%, 61.8%, 50%, 38.2%, 23.6%), but that didn't improve things any. No hard data to share as I only took a quick look - and I still might have done something wrong overall.
The data is there to infer other strategies if anyone would like to dig in deep(more explanation on the spreadsheet below). I didn't do other combinations because the formulas got pretty complicated and I had already answered all the questions I was looking to answer.

2-Candle vs Confirmation Candle Stops

Another interesting point is that the original system has the SL level(for stop entries) just at the outer edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. Out of pure laziness, I set up my stops just based on the confirmation candle. And as it turns out, that is much a much better way to go about it.
Of the 60 purely losing trades, only 9 of them(15%) would go on to be winners with stops on the 2-candle formation. Certainly not enough to justify the extra loss and/or reduced profits you are exposing yourself to in every single other trade by setting a wider SL.
Oddly, in every single scenario where the wider stop did save the trade, it ended up going all the way to the -161.8% profit level. Still, not nearly worth it.

Correlated Trades

As I've said many times now, I'm really not qualified to be doing an analysis like this. This section in particular.
Looking at shared currency among the pairs traded, 74 of the trades are correlated. Quite a large group, but it makes sense considering the sort of moves we're looking for with this system.
This means you are opening yourself up to more risk if you were to trade on every signal since you are technically trading with the same underlying sentiment on each different pair. For example, GBP/USD and AUD/USD moving together almost certainly means it's due to USD moving both pairs, rather than GBP and AUD both moving the same size and direction coincidentally at the same time. So if you were to trade both signals, you would very likely win or lose both trades - meaning you are actually risking double what you'd normally risk(unless you halve both positions which can be a good option, and is discussed in ParallaxFX's posts and in various other places that go over pair correlation. I won't go into detail about those strategies here).
Interestingly though, 17 of those apparently correlated trades ended up with different wins/losses.
Also, looking only at trades that were correlated, winrate is 83%/70%/55% (for the three TP levels).
Does this give some indication that the same signal on multiple pairs means the signal is stronger? That there's some strong underlying sentiment driving it? Or is it just a matter of too small a sample size? The winrate isn't really much higher than the overall winrates, so that makes me doubt it is statistically significant.
One more funny tidbit: EUCAD netted the lowest overall winrate: 30% to even the -61.8% TP level on 10 trades. Seems like that is just a coincidence and not enough data, but dang that's a sucky losing streak.
EDIT: WOW I spent some time removing correlated trades manually and it changed the results quite a bit. Some thoughts on this below the results. These numbers also include the other "What I will trade" filters. I added a new worksheet to my data to show what I ended up picking.

• Total Trades: 75
• Raw Winrates:
  • TP at -61.8%: 84.00%
  • TP at -100%: 73.33%
  • TP at -161.8%: 60.00%
  • Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 53.33%
  • Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 53.33% (yes, oddly the exact same winrate. but different trades/profits)
• Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
  • TP at -61.8%: 18.13%
  • TP at -100%: 26.20%
  • TP at -161.8%: 34.01%
  • Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 19.20%
  • Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 17.29%

To do this, I removed correlated trades - typically by choosing those whose spread had a lower % of the trade width since that's objective and something I can see ahead of time. Obviously I'd like to only keep the winning trades, but I won't know that during the trade. This did reduce the overall sample size down to a level that I wouldn't otherwise consider to be big enough, but since the results are generally consistent with the overall dataset, I'm not going to worry about it too much.
I may also use more discretionary methods(support/resistance, quality of indecision/confirmation candles, news/sentiment for the pairs involved, etc) to filter out correlated trades in the future. But as I've said before I'm going for a pretty mechanical system.
This brought the 3 TP levels and even the breakeven strategies much closer together in overall profit. It muted the profit from the high R:R strategies and boosted the profit from the low R:R strategies. This tells me pair correlation was skewing my data quite a bit, so I'm glad I dug in a little deeper. Fortunately my original conclusion to use the -161.8 TP level with static stops is still the winner by a good bit, so it doesn't end up changing my actions.
There were a few times where MANY (6-8) correlated pairs all came up at the same time, so it'd be a crapshoot to an extent. And the data showed this - often then won/lost together, but sometimes they did not. As an arbitrary rule, the more correlations, the more trades I did end up taking(and thus risking). For example if there were 3-5 correlations, I might take the 2 "best" trades given my criteria above. 5+ setups and I might take the best 3 trades, even if the pairs are somewhat correlated.
I have no true data to back this up, but to illustrate using one example: if AUD/JPY, AUD/USD, CAD/JPY, USD/CAD all set up at the same time (as they did, along with a few other pairs on 6/19/20 9:00 AM), can you really say that those are all the same underlying movement? There are correlations between the different correlations, and trying to filter for that seems rough. Although maybe this is a known thing, I'm still pretty green to Forex - someone please enlighten me if so! I might have to look into this more statistically, but it would be pretty complex to analyze quantitatively, so for now I'm going with my gut and just taking a few of the "best" trades out of the handful.
Overall, I'm really glad I went further on this. The boosting of the B/E strategies makes me trust my calculations on those more since they aren't so far from the passive management like they were with the raw data, and that really had me wondering what I did wrong.

What I will trade

Putting all this together, I am going to attempt to trade the following(demo for a bit to make sure I have the hang of it, then for keeps):

• "System Details" I described above.
• TP at -161.8%
• Static SL at opposite side of confirmation candle - I won't move stops up to breakeven.
• Trade only 7am-11am and 4pm-11pm signals.
• Nothing where spread is more than 25% of trade width.

Looking at the data for these rules, test results are:

• Winrate: 58.19%
• Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%

I'll be sure to let everyone know how it goes!

Other Technical Details

• ATR is only slightly elevated in this date range from historical levels, so this should fairly closely represent reality even after the COVID volatility leaves the scalpers sad and alone.
• The sample size is much too small for anything really meaningful when you slice by hour or pair. I wasn't particularly looking to test a specific pair here - just the system overall as if you were going to trade it on all pairs with a reasonable spread.

Raw Data

Here's the spreadsheet for anyone that'd like it. (EDIT: Updated some of the setups from the last few days that have fully played out now. I also noticed a few typos, but nothing major that would change the overall outcomes. Regardless, I am currently reviewing every trade to ensure they are accurate.UPDATE: Finally all done. Very few corrections, no change to results.)
I have some explanatory notes below to help everyone else understand the spiraled labyrinth of a mind that put the spreadsheet together.

• I'm on the East Coast in the US, so the timestamps are Eastern time.
• Time stamp is from the confirmation candle, not the indecision candle. So 7am would mean the indecision candle was 6:00-6:59 and the confirmation candle is 7:00-7:59 and you'd put in your order at 8:00.
• I found a couple AM/PM typos as I was reviewing the data, so let me know if a trade doesn't make sense and I'll correct it.

Insanely detailed spreadsheet notes

For you real nerds out there. Here's an explanation of what each column means:

• Pair - duh
• Date/Time - Eastern time, confirmation candle as stated above
• Win to -61.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -61.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
• Win to -100%? - whether the trade made it to the -100% TP level before it hit the original SL.
• Win to -161.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -161.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
• Retracement level between -61.8% and -100% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -61.8%, but before hitting -100%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -61.8% to -100%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
• Retracement level between -100% and -161.8% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -100%, but before hitting -161.8%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -100% to -161.8%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
• Trade Width(Pips) - the size of the confirmation candle, and thus the "width" of your trade on which to determine position size, draw fib levels, etc.
• Loser saved by 2 candle stop? - for all losing trades, whether or not the 2-candle stop loss would have saved the trade and how far it ended up getting if so. "No" means it didn't save it, N/A means it wasn't a losing trade so it's not relevant.
• Spread(ThinkorSwim) - these are typical spreads for these pairs on ToS.
• Spread % of Width - How big is the spread compared to the trade width? Not used in any calculations, but interesting nonetheless.
• True Risk(Trade Width + Spread) - I set my SL at the opposite side of the confirmation candle knowing that I'm actually exposing myself to slightly more risk because of the spread(stop order = market order when submitted, so you pay the spread). So this tells you how many pips you are actually risking despite the Trade Width. I prefer this over setting the stop inside from the edge of the candle because some pairs have a wide spread that would mess with the system overall. But also many, many of these trades retraced very nearly to the edge of the confirmation candle, before ending up nicely profitable. If you keep your risk per trade at 1%, you're talking a true risk of, at most, 1.25% (in worst-case scenarios with the spread being 25% of the trade width as I am going with above).
• Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -61.8% - not going to go into huge detail, see the spreadsheet for calculations if you want. But, in a nutshell, if the trade was a win to 61.8%, it returns a positive # based on 61.8% of the trade width, minus the spread. Otherwise, it returns the True Risk as a negative. Both normalized to the 1% risk you started with.
• Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100% - same as the last, but 100% of Trade Width.
• Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -161.8% - same as the last, but 161.8% of Trade Width.
• Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100%, and move SL to breakeven at 61.8% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then full TP at 100%.
• Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread take off half of position at -61.8%, move SL to breakeven, TP 100% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you took of half the position and moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then TP the remaining half at 100%.
• Overall Growth(-161.8% TP, 1% Risk) - pretty straightforward. Assuming you risked 1% on each trade, what the overall growth level would be chronologically(spreadsheet is sorted by date).

Pairs

1. AUD/CAD
2. AUD/CHF
3. AUD/JPY
4. AUD/NZD
5. AUD/USD
6. CAD/CHF
7. CAD/JPY
8. CHF/JPY
9. EUAUD
10. EUCAD
11. EUCHF
12. EUGBP
13. EUJPY
14. EUNZD
15. EUUSD
16. GBP/AUD
17. GBP/CAD
18. GBP/CHF
19. GBP/JPY
20. GBP/NZD
21. GBP/USD
22. NZD/CAD
23. NZD/CHF
24. NZD/JPY
25. NZD/USD
26. USD/CAD
27. USD/CHF
28. USD/JPY

TL;DR

Based on the reasonable rules I discovered in this backtest:

• Date range: 6/11-7/3
• Winrate: 58.19%
• Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%

Demo Trading Results

Since this post, I started demo trading this system assuming a 5k capital base and risking ~1% per trade. I've added the details to my spreadsheet for anyone interested. The results are pretty similar to the backtest when you consider real-life conditions/timing are a bit different. I missed some trades due to life(work, out of the house, etc), so that brought my total # of trades and thus overall profit down, but the winrate is nearly identical. I also closed a few trades early due to various reasons(not liking the price action, seeing support/resistance emerge, etc).
A quick note is that TD's paper trade system fills at the mid price for both stop and limit orders, so I had to subtract the spread from the raw trade values to get the true profit/loss amount for each trade.
I'm heading out of town next week, then after that it'll be time to take this sucker live!

• 86 Trades
  • Date range: 7/9-7/30
  • Winrate: 52.32%
  • Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 20.73%
    • Starting Balance: $5,000
    • Ending Balance: $6,036.51

Live Trading Results

I started live-trading this system on 8/10, and almost immediately had a string of losses much longer than either my backtest or demo period. Murphy's law huh? Anyways, that has me spooked so I'm doing a longer backtest before I start risking more real money. It's going to take me a little while due to the volume of trades, but I'll likely make a new post once I feel comfortable with that and start live trading again.