• We all know it's difficult for retail individual trader to gauge real forex volume.
  
• But synthetic volume synthesized from tick data streamed from your broker can give you an approximation of the real volume.
  
• This approximation is probably far from perfect, but it's better than nothing. I don't know how close it is to the real volume (who knows what the real volume is in forex?). However, it was good enough to provide new insights and break my algos' plateau and improve their performance.
  
• It's possible to create a profitable strategy that only uses price data.
  
• However, if you ignore volume, then you're missing out a lot, and your algos will never reach their full potential because volume can give you some insights about the market that price can never will.
  
• It takes little effort to synthesize synthetic volume from tick data. The result is worth this extra effort.
  

That is a list of my humble newbie opinions from my recent discoveries. Feedbacks, suggestions and advice will be highly appreciated.

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.
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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.

Now, I’ve been practicing with Trading 212 (both investing and trading) for years but didn’t start investing money because I was underage.
DISCLAIMER: When I was younger, I thought day trading was “the way to go” to make a lot of money (for some people it is... for me it really isn’t). I luckily figured this out before I bought some “day trading guru’s course for ONLY $299”... fucking bargain btw👌🤯 ...not
I started actually investing in March, and for whatever reason (can’t remember) I decided to go with EToro...
BE WISE ON WHO YOU CHOOSE !

1. Let’s start with the NUMBER OF STOCKS.

Trading 212: Invest - 3012 stocks available Etoro - 2037 stocks available
And the stocks that Etoro doesn’t have aren’t just foreign stocks like ones listed on the foreign stock markets like FSE or LSE. They also have US companies “missing”. This becomes very apparent when you find some “great” companies to invest in for the long term and they aren’t even listed.
THIS IS ANOTHER THING - they also dictate who you can invest in. For example, I wanted to invest in Spire Healthcare back in March/April, and even though they have it listed, it won’t allow you buy any shares... STILL TO THIS DAY??? ( if anyone knows why, let me know down below please )

1. ETFs

Trading 212: Invest - 446
EToro - 151 - although they do have ones like SPY, VOO and VTI

1. Fees

Trading 212: Invest -
Min deposit - EUR 1, USD 1 Deposit fee - none min withdrawal fee - EUR 1, USD 1 Withdrawal fee - no fees
Commission - commission free, unless you buy UK stocks, then you pay 0.5% stamp duty reserve tax because... the British Government can do what they want 🤷‍♂️
EToro -
Min deposit - USD 200 - first deposit, afterwards USD 50 ( I never even realised this lol )
Deposit fee: none
Min withdrawal amount: USD 30
Withdrawal fee: USD 5

1. Fractional shares

•Trading 212: invest - as little as €1. MOST BUT NOT ALL shares can be bought fractionally as some have a min trade quantity of 1 share.
•Etoro - min amount to open ANY POSITION is $50, defeats the purpose of fraction shares ???? 🤔
🚨——> Now there are a COUPLE ISSUES with this...
But the main issue is a more PERSONAL ONE.
I’m sick of having to think and buy my family things that don’t want or need for birthdays or Christmas...
So I buy them a share, of a good company that I think is a good investment. Sometimes I DO NOT want to spend a minimum of $50 😂 Call me cheap lol but I’ve got pilot school to pay for... and it’s EXPENSIVE.

1. MISCELLANEOUS

• Social Trading -

Now Etoro does have CopyTrading. Personally I’ve never used it because I prefer to have an influence over who I invest in, whether it’s the right choice or not. But for some people, they prefer a more “hands-off” approach, so it is good for them.
ANOTHER POSITIVE FOR ETORO - on their app for each company you can chat with other users, and people can post their latest thoughts and research on the company. Trading 212 doesn’t exactly have this but they do have a similar feature which is a forum separate to the app.

• Layout -

I personally prefer the layout of Trading 212, especially when looking into the graphs, or even trying to find out what your ROI is. It’s a much more user-friendly interface, in my opinion.
Etoro doesn’t offer the ability to transfer open positions to another broker... which is shit. Trading 212 will be implementing the ability to transfer from/to other broker by the end of 2020 (supposedly).
Also, Etoro’s customer service is actually really helpful, with their live chat feature. And doesn’t take too long to connect.
—————————
Just to top it off -
Trading 212: invest - you can get a free share worth up to £100
So IN MY OPINION I would 100% go with Trading 212 for INVESTING, and that’s why I’m switching
I only invest, I DO NOT day trade, use CFDs, swing trade, trade commodities, trade forex or (currently) invest in cryptos
This is why, imo, I believe Trading 212 is better than Etoro
Let me know what your opinions are! Also let me know if I’ve missed anything

There are a lot of opportunities online for anyone that wants to make a little extra money. From a part-time hustle to an all-out digital career, there are loads of ways that you can make money with an electronic device, and a connection to the internet.
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1. Paid Surveys - Did you know that thousands of South Africans earn extra income by simply participating in online surveys to help local companies improve their products? Finally, now you have an opportunity to do this as well! You can find a list of the top survey sites for South Africa HERE
2. Selling Your Photos Online - Selling photos is a wonderful way to make money online if you have an aptitude for photography. Two popular platforms that you can try are Shutterlock and Unsplash. Every platform will have different requirements, but they will all pay you in hard cash. Though the photography market is quite hectic, it’s still a good method of gaining a passive income if you’re persistent and professional. Plus, the opportunity for additional sales is higher when your photos become popular. Many companies need photos of landscapes, and we all know that South Africa has some of the most amazing scenery in the world. In some cases, a smartphone is enough to get started, depending on the stock photo site you choose.
3. Be a Freelance Content Writer - Freelance writing is a serious online business. The internet enters most areas of our life, and the need for blog articles and various types of content is exploding. There are many kinds of online writing work, and many people need things like product descriptions or simple reviews. Before going further in this direction, you first need to set up a blog or website. This will be an amazing portfolio where you can demonstrate to potential clients or businesses that you can deliver great work. A LinkedIn profile can be created to function as an online portfolio as well. Don’t forget that many writing clients will want to see specialized work, so be sure to consider what area you would like to specialize in. The pay for online writing varies, but with some practice, you should be able to make a decent part-time income.
4. Sell Unwanted Goods - You can sell your unwanted stuff to people who want it and make your side business a real money maker. There’s plenty of options to use for sales such as Gumtree or Amazon. Don’t forget to do some research and see what assets have recently been sold so you have a target price. If you a business, you can sell other people’s goods as well. Many people don’t have the time or patience to sell goods online, and you can do it for them. If you charge a reasonable percentage of the sales, you can make a solid business out of selling used goods online.
5. Build a Personal blog/website - Not only can you write for companies to gain income but you’re also able to run your own blog to raise money as well. Set your expectations at a reasonable level because this job requires consistent practice and lots of patience. Bloggers make a profit, often through press coverage, advertising products, and writing sponsored guest posts. You will need to run the blog for a while before you can expect to see any profits, but it is very simple to get started. Check out some of the other ideas on this list for ways to leverage a blog for greater income, like selling drop shipped items.
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9. Online Business with Etsy - Try selling DIY designs and crafts on Etsy if you’re a skilled maker. An Etsy shop is basically free to operate, and you can make real money with the platform. Once your registration is complete, you can start posting photos of your works, and people can purchase your products. There is really no limit to what can be sold on Etsy, but make sure that you are able to send your goods to other countries, as many buyers are likely to be in the EU or North America. A PayPal account is important to have and also a popular payment choice so that customers can pay you quickly. Take nice pictures of the items to help draw purchasers into a sale. Make sure that you have good customer service as well, or you won’t be selling on the platform for very long!
10. Forex Trading - You might have heard about trading FOREX or Contract For Difference (CFD) trading. The basics of this online money-making are simple. You will choose a currency pair, and bet on the direction of one currency vs. the other. For example, you could speculate that the EURO will appreciate vs. the RAND (or just about any currency). If you are correct, and then sell the contract, you will make profits. While this might sound easy, most people who do this lose money. In addition to currency, most retail FOREX brokers will allow you to trade in other markets, such as commodities, or shares. If you are looking for a reliable income, this probably isn’t right for you. On the other hand, if you don’t mind taking on risks, trading FOREX can be extremely profitable.

The foreign currency market is the largest of all of the trading markets with an almost unbelievable 5 trillion dollars changing hands each day. Until recently Forex trading was consigned to heavy weight traders and brokers who could afford the high minimum trading amounts required.
However, the recent appeal of trading online has prompted a further development in the foreign exchange boom. Increased leverages are now not just available for the big scale traders but also for the starter and lower volume speculators. Whereas minimum deposits were at one time in the thousands of dollars range now they are in the hundreds. Nowadays, a trader can enter the foreign exchange with little more than a credit card, a Forex trading account and a laptop or PC. The boom has led to a number of brokers entering the market to meet the demand in online trading, but getting a suitable broker out of so many options can be difficult.
Deciding on a Forex broker
Take a look at this list of fundamentals to think about when making your selection of a suitable Forex broker:
Foreign currencies
All Forex brokers provide the "majors" as pairs to trade upon. These principal moneys include the US dollar (USD), the Japanese Yen (JPY) and the British pound (GBP). Further brokerages host platforms that have the alternative to exchange lesser known moneys. The more sluggish Forex currencies or"exotics" encounter even more volatility as opposed to the "majors" which can provide intriguing trading options. If you are planning on trading on one of the weaker, "exotic" currencies make sure that it on the list of currencies to invest with on your broker of choice's platform. In short make sure that you work with currencies that you have an interest in.
Trades
A lot of currency brokerages have reduced their minimum deposits to as low as $100. Higher leverage sums which were formerly only made accessible for expert traders are currently on hand for the lower end traders. The good thing about this is that with a 50:1 leverage, on a trading account of $1,000 the user can now sustain a place of $50,000. Be careful to remember, however, that leverage is a sort of financial loan, whilst the strength of your account is markedly increased the potential sum to be lost is also boosted.
Regulation
Each one of the leading Forex firms will have made sure that they are listed by one or more of the main regulatory authorities. For a user to observe that a company is fully regulated shows that the brokerage service is a serious operation devoted to fair market procedures. Signing up for membership with an unregulated broker is not advised, even more so with such a wide choice of regulated brokers out there..
Minimum amounts for deposit
Every broker will designate a minimum deposit amount prior to the start of trading. Smaller deposit amounts can be put down using beginner or low volume trading accounts whereas the high roller accounts require higher minimums to begin. As there are such larger numbers of brokers operating the initial deposit amounts can play a significant role as each company pushes for your custom by trying to out compete rival companies with more tempting welcome offers. You will notice that it can be to your gain if you browse a little.
Commissions and Spreads
Forex brokerages profit though commissions and spreads. The broker's commission can either be set on a per transaction basis or over a set of transactions. The spread refers to the amount between the actual and the bidding prices of a currency or currency pair. Usually the spread is comes in at around 3-5 pips.
Margins
It is not unconventional for a broker to require that you fund your account with an advanced amount of capital to counter balance any potential losses that may be experienced. This advanced amount is known as a margin or margin requirement. Be sure that the conditions of the margin requirement are suited to your degree of trading.
Trading Platforms
The most widespread platform in the online Forex market is the Meta trading platform. It is very reliable and can be accessed both on your computer and your mobile device. Some brokers use their own proprietary trading platform as well so it is advisable to take the time to find out how trusted it is and whether there are any interruptions between messaging between their platform and the actual foreign exchange.
Support
See if you can get as much information as possible about the level of support available with a broker. Good indicators of a broker's level of service can include the trading education materials they have and if there is a live chat option. Together with this, many top companies display documentation, tutorials and eBooks to educate you on how to improve your chances of achieving profitable returns and cutting down minimising the risks.
Forex trading involves risks. You can minimise the risks by researching your broker and testing out your trading strategy thoroughly.

Someone posted on here a few days ago asking about forex and forex trading in Kenya, I have gone through the responses and clearly, most people don’t have an idea. It is 3am in the morning and am in a good mood so let me make this post. This will be a comprehensive and lengthy post so grab a pen and paper and sit down. We’ll be here a while.
FIRST OF ALL, who am I..?
I am a forex trader, in Nairobi, Kenya..i have been actively involved in forex since I found out about it in Feb 2016 when I somehow ended up in a wealth creation seminar (lol) in pride inn Westlands, the one close to Mpaka Rd. Luckily for me, it was not one of those AIM global meetings or I’d be on Facebook selling God knows what those guys sell. I did not take it seriously till August of the same year and I have been active ever since.
I don’t teach, mentor or sell a course or signals, I trade my own money. I am also posting from a throwaway account because I don’t want KRA on my ass.
What the fuck is forex and forex trading.
In simple plain English, forex is like the stock market but for currencies. Stock Market = Shares, forex = currencies. If you want more in-depth explanation, google is your friend.
These currencies are pegged on specific countries, united states- dollar, UK- pound, euro zone- euro, Switzerland- Swiss franc, Kenya- Kenya shilling.. you get the point. Now, there are specific events and happenings between these economies that affect the movement and values of the currencies, driving their value (purchasing power up and down). Forex trading exploits these movements to make money. When the value is going up, we buy and vice versa (down –sell)
Is forex trading illegal in Kenya? Is it a scam?
Illegal, no. scam, no. All the banks in the world do it (KCB made about 4 billion from trading forex in 2019)
Have there been scams involving forex in Kenya?
Yes. Here is one that happened recently. This one is the most infamous one yet. Best believe that this is not the end of these type of scams because the stupidity, greed and gullibility of human beings is unfathomable.
However, by the end of this post, I hope you won’t fall for such silliness.
What next how do I make it work..?
Am glad you asked. Generally, there are two ways to go about it. One, you teach yourself. This is the equivalent of stealing our dad’s car and hoping that the pedal you hit is the brake and not the accelerator. It is the route I took, it is the most rewarding and a huge ego boost when you finally make it on your own. Typically, this involves scouring the internet for hours upon hours going down rabbit holes, thinking you have made it telling all your friends how you will be a millionaire then losing all your money. Some people do not have the stomach for that.
The second route is more practical, structured and smarter.
First Learn the basics. There is a free online forex course at www.babypips.com/learn/forex this is merely an introductory course. Basically it is learning the parts of a car before they let you inside the car.
Second, start building your strategy. By the time you are done with the babypips, you will have a feel of what the forex market is, what interests you, etc. Tip..Babypips has a lot of garbage. It is good for introductory purposes but not good for much else, pick whatever stick to you or jumps at you the first time. Nonsense like indicators should be ignored.
The next step is now the most important. Developing the skill and building your strategy. As a beginner, you want to exhaust your naivety before jumping into the more advanced stuff. Eg can you identify a trend, what is a pair, what is position sizing, what is metatrader 4 and how to operate it, what news is good for a currency, when can I trade, what are the different trading sessions, what is technical analysis, what is market sentiment, what are bullish conditions what is emotion management, how does my psychology affect my trading (more on this later) an I a swing, scalper or day trader etc
Mentors and forex courses.. you have probably seen people advertising how they can teach and mentor you on how to trade forex and charging so much money for it. Somehow it seems that these people are focused on the teaching than the trading. Weird, right..? Truth is trading is hard, teaching not quite. A common saying in the industry is “Those who can’t trade, teach” you want to avoid all these gurus on Facebook and Instagram, some are legit but most are not. Sifting the wheat from the chaff is hard but I did that for you. The info is available online on YouTube, telegram channels etc. am not saying not to spend money on a course, if you find a mentor whose style resonates with you and the course is reasonably priced, please, go ahead and buy..it will cut your learning curve in half. People are different. What worked for me might not work for you.
Here are some nice YouTube channels to watch. These guys are legit..

1. Sam sieden
   
2. Cuebanks
   
3. TheCoinFx
   
4. The trading channel
   
5. Astro
   
6. Forex family
   
7. Wicksdontlie
   

Advanced stuff

1. ICT

After a short period of time, you will be able to sniff out bs teachers with relative ease. You will also discover some of your own and expand the list. Two tips, start with the oldest videos first and whichever of these resonates with you, stick with till the wheels fall off.
How long will it take until things start making sense
Give yourself time to grow and learn. This is all new to you and you are allowed to make mistakes, to fail and discover yourself. Realistically, depending on the effort you put in, you will not start seeing results until after 6 months. Could take longeshorter so there is no guarantee.
Social media, Mentality, Psychology and Books
Online, forex trading might not have the best reputation online because it takes hard work and scammers and gurus give it a bad name. However, try to not get sucked into the Instagram trader lifestyle as it is nowhere close to what the reality is. You will not make millions tomorrow or the day after, you might never even make it in this market. But that is the reality of life. Nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed.
Your mentality, beliefs and ego will be challenged in this market. You will learn things that will make you blood boil, you will ask yourself daily, how is this possible, why don’t they teach this in school..bla bla bla..it will be hard but growth is painful, if it wasn’t we’d all be billionaires. Take a break, take a walk, drink a glass of whatever you like or roll one..detox. Chill with your girl (or man) Gradually you will develop mental toughness that will set you up for life. Personally, I sorta ditched religion and picked up stoicism. Whatever works for you.
Psychology, this is unfortunately one of the most neglected aspects of your personal development in this journey. Do you believe in yourself? Can you stand by your convictions when everyone is against you? Can you get up every day uncertain of the future? There will be moments where you will question yourself, am I even doing the right thing? the right way? It is normal and essential for your growth. People who played competitive sports have a natural advantage here. Remember the game is first won in your head then on the pitch.
Books: ironically, books that helped me the most were the mindset books, Think and grow rich, trading for a living, 4 hour work week, the monk who sold his Ferrari..just google mindset and psychology books, most trading books are garbage. Watch and listen to people who have made it in the investing business. Ray Dalio, warren, Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn.
This is turning out to be lengthier than I anticipated so I’ll try to be brief for the remaining parts.
Brokers
You will need to open up an account with a broker. Get a broker who is regulated. Australian ones (IC Market and Pepperstone) are both legit, reliable and regulated. Do your research. I’d avoid local ones because I’ve heard stories of wide spreads and liquidity problems. International brokers have never failed me. There are plenty brokers, there is no one size fits all recommendation. If it ain’t broke..don’t fix it.
Money transfer.
All brokers accept wire transfers, you might need to call your bank to authorize that, avoid Equity bank. Stanchart and Stanbic are alright. Large withdrawals $10k+ you will have to call them prior. Get Skrill and Neteller if you don’t like banks like me, set up a Bitcoin wallet for faster withdrawals, (Payoneer and Paypal are accepted by some brokers, just check with them.)
How much money can I make..?
I hate this question because people have perceived ceilings of income in their minds, eg 1 million ksh is too much to make per month or 10,000ksh is too little. Instead, work backwards. What % return did I make this month/ on this trade. Safaricom made 19.5% last year, if you make 20% you have outperformed them. If you reach of consistency where you can make x% per month on whatever money you have, then there are no limits to how much you can make.
How much money do I need to start with..?
Zero. You have all the resources above, go forth. There are brokers who provide free bonuses and withdraw-able profits. However, to make a fulltime income you will need some serious cash. Generally, 50,000 kes. You can start lower or higher but if you need say 20k to live comfortably and that is a 10% return per month, then you can do the math on how big your account should be. Of course things like compound interest come into play but that is dependent on your skill level. I have seen people do spectacular things with very little funds.
Taxes..?
Talk to a lawyer or an accountant. I am neither.
Family? Friends?
Unfortunately, people will not understand why you spend hundreds of hours watching strangers on the internet so it is best to keep it from them. Eventually you will make it work and they will come to your corner talking about how they always knew you’d make it.
The journey will be lonely, make some trading buddies along the way. You’d be surprised at how easy it is when people are united by their circumstances (and stupidity) I have guys who are my bros from South Africa and Lebanon who I have never met but we came up together and are now homies. Join forums, ask questions and grow. That is the only way to learn. Ideally, a group of 5-10 friends committed to learning and growth is the best model. Pushing each other to grow and discovering together.
Forex is real and you can do amazing things with it. It is not a get rich quick scheme. If you want a quick guaranteed income, get a job.
And now it is 5am, fuck.
This is oversimplified and leaves out many many aspects.
Happy to answer any questions.

I worked with many HFT startups and I have a pretty good idea of the initial costs that such trading shops have.
Data: High-frequency strategies are data-intensive, so you need to get the best data providers at the tick level (level 3). That’s expensive. Depending on the market you are in (forex, futures, bonds, etc) the cost could vary. FX is even more complex, because of its highly fragmented nature, so they will need to have a broad view of all of them. Each provider cost could start from $5k per month each, up to $50k per month
Servers: You will need power. A decent server (please don’t use the cloud), could cost you 20k at least. It needs to have 32-cores at least. You can rent a dedicated server, and its cost could start from $2k per month
Collocation: That powerful server must be placed inside a collocated environment. The idea is to reduce the latency as much as you can, so being close to the exchanges/venues is the best choice. These data centers will charge you for your server space and for the connectivity you use (cross-connection). This varies considerably depending on the markets you are in.
Software: this would be the most expensive piece of your setup. Remember, that the software is the brain of your operation. Not only needs to get ALL the data from the exchanges/venues but normalize it, store it, manipulate it, and prepare it to be consumed by your strategies(s) that will be doing tons of different calculations based on the data they receive. And all that must be done in a fraction of milliseconds (hopefully within 10–50 microseconds)
On top of that, you must be sure, that you will have all the different modules in place: price aggregators, order management systems (OMS), execution management systems (EMS), smart order routing (SOR), liquidity manager (LM), risk management systems (RMS). and any interface you may need (to databases, storage, monitoring systems, reporting, etc)
Cost-wise, all of this will depends on what you choose. If you go with an off-the-shelf solution (not recommended, cheaper, you don’t own anything, slow), or you start your own development (time to market +1 year, very costly). The cost could vary between $300K to $1M
People: you will need human resources. This is not a one-guy operation. You will need to have software engineers, quantitative analysts, and researchers. Think about 150k /year at the low end.
Brokers/Prime Brokers: you will need to open up a brokerage account to have access to the trading venues. They will require you to have a minimum capital to trade (besides the commissions/fees they may charge). So, that adds up to your initial setup cost.
Conclusions
It’s a very lucrative business but is hard to get started. Usually, startups try to start small and grow as they see profits, but that always falls into failure. If you do that, you will fail to have all the above points I’ve listed.
Your initial investment is high, and keeping in mind that after having all these startup costs, all your infrastructure in place, and the software ready to run, your first profitable trades could start to come in after 6 to 12 months of operations.
I hope my question is not as vague as the others…
Please, let me know if I was missing something else, so we can add it to this list 😎
​
Ariel Silahian
http://www.sisSoftwareFactory.com/blog

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.

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Hi,
exactly four years ago, I started copying eToro investors / traders that I selected using the broker's built-in search engine (profitable in last two years, already being copied by others), followed by manual filtering, to take into account fluctuations in yearly returns, composition of their portfolios etc. With that, I got a list of 10 people whom I started to copy on a demo account:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u52f0XHfr-LauIscKcFDYF0yGTTUr6VY/view?usp=sharing
In the screenshot you can see that in case of the first two of them the amount invested was $10,000, while for the rest it was just $100. This is because I started copying the first two a couple of weeks earlier; eventually I changed this into $100 the same day I made the screenshot and this is when my calculations start - so this thing is irrelevant, I just cannot travel in time to make another screenshot.
What I did after that?
Well, within the next six weeks my profits oscillated between -$11 and +$9.50 (the biggest profit was on Nov 9, a day after US presidential elections). I found this "boring" and discontinued experimenting with copy trading.
Today I looked back at those ten traders. Here is what I found. Firstly, seven of them are not with eToro anymore; investorNo1, Simple-Stock-Mkt, tradingrelax, 4exPirate, primit, Gallojack, xjurokx. The other three traders are:

• toppertrader: not being copied by anyone and for a good reason: his loss this year alone is 61.16%!
• Jean-marcLenfant: copied by only 67 people; his loss this year is -1.09% but in general he is quite successful, with yearly profits ranging from 3.57% to 7.32%.
• Girem2: he has no copiers, his profit this year is 41.45% but in 2018 he experienced a loss of 83.15%!

My observations and thoughts are as follows:

1. Seven out of ten traders are not with eToro anymore, which makes me wonder why. I have no proof but my guess is they simply performed poorly, lost their copiers and closed their accounts. This is already alarming but what if they opened another account? Or, even worse, multiple accounts? They could be investing small money and try different risky approaches, hoping that at least one account will turn out profitable in the long turn, attracting potential copiers. (I'm not claiming that those 7 particular traders did this, it's just my general suspicion regarding some of eToro traders)
2. I'm unable to calculate what would be my profit if I never stopped copying them, because I cannot check at what day and with what profit those seven traders left eToro. I'm guessing this would be an immense loss. On the other hand, considering the three traders who are still with eToro, I would lose more than a quarter of my assets!

What now?
I must be a quite adventurous person or at least an incorrigible optimist, because a month ago (exactly on Aug 26th) I started copying three traders with real money. Here is who they are.
rubymza (Heloise Greeff)

• invests in stocks, with GOOG, INTC, BLDP, MA, MSFT, AMZN, V, MU, IBM and NXPI making up 50.3% of her portfolio (allocation of each of them is in between 3.02% and 6.85%)
• active since 2016 (only the year 2016 ended with a loss)
• has 3044 copiers and $2M-$5M of copy assets under management
• strategy (her own words): "My investing strategy focusses mostly on US indices, tech and pharma, promising future (5-10years) growth. My trades are based on technical analysis using machine learning to understand patterns and trends in the markets. I prefer to keep a diverse portfolio to spread risk while achieving great returns."
• she gave an interview for Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago
• own experience: I just happened to run across her second worst month ever on eToro; my loss is -6.27% at the time of writing

​
OlivierDanvel (Olivier Jean Andre Danvel)

• he is a Forex trader, making typically 21 trades per week; his favorite currency pairs are EURCHF (12% of trades), CADCHF and GBPUSD; the trades, however, typically make up below 5% of his portfolio (at least whenever I'm checking it), making most of my funds unused
• active since January 2017: surprisingly enough, he has every single month profitable, though monthly profits are in the range of 0.03% to 3.34% only
• has 8977 copiers and more than $5M of copy assets under management
• strategy (his own words): "I monitor currency pairs all day to find the best entry. There is some management/scaling position for perfect entry. The risk control is a big part of my strategy," (quite vague, to be honest)
• own experience: my current profit is 0.26%

​
rayvahey (Raymond Noel Vahey)

• commodities compose 76% of his portfolio and his favorite assets are Gold and Oil (at the moment, Gold makes up half of invested amount)
• active since July 2016, with the following yearly profits, starting from 2016: 6.56%, 10.05%, 13.09%, 32.26% and -2.03% (the current year)
• has 1493 copiers and $1M-$2M of copy assets under management
• strategy (his own words): "My system is based on patterns, and a variety of technical analysis tools and some fundamental analysis. I primarily trade in commodities. " (quite vague as well)
• own experience: my profit with rayvahey is 2.56%

What was my strategy to hand-pick these particular traders? First I did some basic scanning using eToro's built-in search engine. The most important filter was that the trader was profitable within the last two years: unfortunately, eToro does not allow to reach details of earlier performance automatically. To know how the trader performed before 2019, I had to look at stats in the profile of each of them. I was also taking into account how often they trade (to avoid those who do only a couple of trades yearly), whether they were trading recently and whether they write posts regularly in their feed. With this, I got a list of fifteen candidates to copy:

• olivierdanvel
• marianopardo
• rubymza
• rayvahey
• martidg97
• overit
• misterg23
• knw500
• jianswang
• reinhardtcoetzee
• miyoshi
• alderique
• jarodd76
• benson9904
• big-profits

As you already know, I finally chose three of them. Rubymza seemed to be the most trustworthy stock trader, based on profits, posts feed and regular trading, among other things. Regarding OlivierDanvel, his uniqueness is the ability to record continuous profits with the Forex market. Finally, with rayvahey I wanted to increase my exposure to the commodities market.
Wish me good luck!
Michael
​
P.S.
You might find those copy-trading related readings interesting:

• https://www.etoro.com/copytrade
• https://www.investopedia.com/etoro-review-5072808
• https://socialtradingvlog.com/
• https://stockupwithjoe.com/etoro-copy-trade
• https://blockonomi.com/etoro-copy-trading-guide/
• https://www.quora.com/Does-copying-best-traders-concept-of-etoro-really-work
• https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-get-rich-by-copying-the-trades-of-top-traders-in-eToro-Zulu-trade/answeLutz-Enke

​
Disclosures:

• What you see here is my personal opinion, my own investments and should not be treated as investing advice
• I’m an amateur investor

After a few...especially trying...interactions with unhappy ban recipients today, I thought it would be fun to share a little info on what moderators do to keep this place clean. :)
The forex industry is full of shady characters. Any industry sitting on the intersection of financial independence, work, and money, is bound to attract them. There are many reasons for this; the lower barrier to entry compared to other markets, the lack of public knowledge on the subject, and greedy human nature to name a few.
Moderating a subreddit dedicated to forex (or anything trading realted for that matter,) presents extra challenges beyond your regular sub. Marketers and scammers are super motivated, and MLM / referral marketing is extremely popular right now, which can turn everyday regular users into sources of spam.
How we currently tackle this problem involves technology (scripts, bots, and automod,) a mod review workflow, and some smart sleuthing when needed.
The mod team and our scripts aren't perfect though... but the few false positives we get are a very, very small fraction of all mod actions taken (~1%.) Unfortunately, that means some otherwise sincere members get handled roughly, and that can really suck.. I wish there was a better way, but the alternative is this place becomes a wild west and starts looking like your gmail spam folder.
That said, here's my personal stats for JUST the last 24 hours:

• Bans: 14 [edit: 16 now before day's end, two more responding to a 'where can I learn how to trade' post.]
• All mod actions (including bans, post and comment removal, etc..): 63
• Ban appeals: 2

And I'm just one of the mods. . .
So what scammer and marketing trends are we seeing lately?

• Content marketing - Infographics with instagram handles watermarked in them, or a blog-like post with a embedded links to their own site.
• Personal/direct selling - trying to move the conversation out of public view, usually by taking things to DM, or promoting a 3rd party chatroom where the rules here no longer apply.
• Shills - Fake accounts used to boost the credit of another user, or service. It's no coincidence that a user asking about 'ULRA PRO SIGNALZ' will quickly have 5+ replies by low karma, new users, saying how great the service is. [edit: here's an example I just caught..]
• Fake P/L Porn - We see this quite often. It's easy to fake MT4 account statements and MT4 Mobile screenshots, and new users can't tell the difference so these posts will get a lot of undeserved attention. When people ask how OP made such mad cash, a sales pitch is usually coming right up.

Honestly, it can be really frustrating at times.. luckily the scripts we have in place make weeding out ~80% of these jokers quite easy and quick. Heck, we had one scammer who blew through 12+ accounts over the last few days trying to scam people but none of their posts ever saw the light of day thanks to the spam triggers I've written.
What motivates the mod team to keep this place clean? That's an easy answer: The majority of users here are new to trading. Making sure they aren't food for the wolves is important.
But even with all the measures we take, some bad actors still get through.
So here's where you can help: Use the report button! Anytime you see something that you think fits the descriptions listed above, or violates our sidebar rules, just report it. Even if you're not 100% sure, don't be afraid to use the report tool.. The worst thing that can happen is the mod team reviews and approves it, but the best outcome is you directly help keep this place clean and humming! :)
And the mod team is always looking to improve where it can: I've already talked about what we do to scrub away bad actors, but one place we could do better is education. The plan is to rewrite a good portion of the wiki to include the following sections:

• Spotting scams and scammers
• How to properly compare brokers and regulatory bodies
• The real reason why your old high school friend wants you to sign up to IML, and 10 ways to politely tell him to pound sand
• No, that hot instagram model won't sleep with you if you buy her online course
• Why all signal services are trash and can die in a fire

(Titles above are a work in progress ;P)
Are you a good writer and want to help out with this? Think you can write up a killer wiki article on spotting scam artists? Message the mods and let us know!
Finally, a reminder, we are still interested in taking on more moderators and will be revisiting that very shortly. If you'd be interested, read through this post and reply accordingly: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/h7ok6k/seeking_more_mods_recruitment_thread/

edit to add: Thanks /joeledg for the suggestion on LightSpeed, I looked into them more deeply and have engaged with Robert Morse over on Elite Trader. They do tick off all the boxes (except the last, but that's really last on my list and not important) below. Please ignore the total misinformation (what really is the point of that??) you'll find in the responses below.
https://www.lightspeed.com/automated-trading/
I ignored them before because of lack of API focus, but just found they support colo/cross connect as well as everything else on the list. So that is pretty savvy.
It's possible the retail API trader is too small of a market to focus on exclusively, but that doesn't stop with providing them good service anyways. I still think there's an opportunity there with the right prioritization and engineering team, but that's a different discussion.
--
Looking for a broker, ideally API Only. (Competitive with IB!)
Some ideal features -

• API retail traders are warmly welcomed, supported, and encouraged
• Should go without saying, but dead simple, rock solid security.
• US stocks/options support
• pure focus on API/algotrading, very basic UI (none is fine with me), no market data support but see below regarding latency.
• low commissions, obviously, but more importantly described and billed with precision and transparency
• order execution transparency, flexibility. Smart routing isn't that important to me, but I do need fine grained control
• order fill ratio rules with smart billing and generally well implemented throttling
• detailed latency comparison against exchanges and routing performance (how fast do messages flow through your broker to exchanges). Focused support for the usual algotrading trading suspect exchanges here. Know your customers.
• DC co-location / cross connect support / generally great network infra
• API performance / C++ support / protocol serialization speeds. Clear, simple python facade to C++ API. Fix is nice, but not required. I want speed and control.
• latency compatibility with data providers (broker doesn't need to supply market data, but needs to ideally have colocation offering which has very low latency against low cost API data providers, eg nanex or nanex like offering)
• paper trading / dev account for staging new code.
• great documentation is nice, but constantly updated example code is required. Best to simply have a reference implementation used for full coverage integration testing that you support. Use good tools to measure coverage. Example code be similar to average use cases. Github for that code would be wise. Think like a developer!
• broad markets support is nice (futures,forex,international, OTC,bonds,etc).

Add your ideas, fellow algotraders.

If you are into the forex business, you surely understand the importance of Forex Brokerage Tools that help in the profitability and productivity of the forex brokerage business.
Let us put some light on the essential forex brokerage tools:

Forex CRM:

CRM which is known as Customer Relationship Management is the most important tool when it comes to running a successful business.
CRM is also known as the backbone of the organization as it gulps all the information about your clients and the activities, etc. Being a single software it is of multi-utility.
Not only does this tool serve as an all under one roof platform, but it also enables you to execute marketing strategies, cross-selling and upselling to current customers, and establish brand recognition between traders, all personalized and automated centered on exclusive information.
A good forex CRM helps in Accounting and analysing also it helps in generating reports and helps in increasing the sales by promptly listing down the data required helping management get the utmost solution.
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Copy Trader:

For traders who lack experience in a forex market or who have minimal time to dedicate to trading for them copy trading is an ultimate solution.
Copy trading is where the positions of one trader are copied when they are opened or closed by another trader’s account. This can be either automatic or manual, and it’s up to a person to decide how they want to do copy trading.
Copy-trading or social trading is one of the finest forex brokerage tools that lead to profitability where a novice trader could easily copy the strategies of the experienced trader and eventually they could grow into a confident and reliable trader.

Risk Management Tool:

The risk management tool is one of the most essential and effective tools to be used in order to generate the productivity of the business.
As we all know that the forex market is highly volatile and unpredictable which could lead to uncertainties and certain risks.
With a proper risk management tool, one can easily encounter the risks and could take effective measures to overcome them.
A good risk management tool removes unnecessary losses for your client hence growing your efficiency. In order to be able to handle multiple traders or trading groups and various positions that contribute to optimum customer loyalty and profitability for your brokerage, you should be able to track your positions and risk at any given time.

Conclusion:

All the above mentioned Forex Brokerage Tools are highly recommended for all the forex brokers either you are new to the business or maybe experienced. By using these tools you can increase the growth of your forex brokerage business making it run for a longer period of time.

(no promotional content, no affiliate links)
Hi,
exactly four years ago, I started copying eToro investors / traders that I selected using the broker's built-in search engine (profitable in last two years, already being copied by others), followed by manual filtering, to take into account fluctuations in yearly returns, composition of their portfolios etc. With that, I got a list of 10 people whom I started to copy on a demo account:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u52f0XHfr-LauIscKcFDYF0yGTTUr6VY/view?usp=sharing
In the screenshot you can see that in case of the first two of them the amount invested was $10,000, while for the rest it was just $100. This is because I started copying the first two a couple of weeks earlier; eventually I changed this into $100 the same day I made the screenshot and this is when my calculations start - so this thing is irrelevant, I just cannot travel in time to make another screenshot.
What I did after that?
Well, within the next six weeks my profits oscillated between -$11 and +$9.50 (the biggest profit was on Nov 9, a day after US presidential elections). I found this "boring" and discontinued experimenting with copy trading.
Today I looked back at those ten traders. Here is what I found. Firstly, seven of them are not with eToro anymore; investorNo1, Simple-Stock-Mkt, tradingrelax, 4exPirate, primit, Gallojack, xjurokx. The other three traders are:

• toppertrader: not being copied by anyone and for a good reason: his loss this year alone is 61.16%!
• Jean-marcLenfant: copied by only 67 people; his loss this year is -1.09% but in general he is quite successful, with yearly profits ranging from 3.57% to 7.32%.
• Girem2: he has no copiers, his profit this year is 41.45% but in 2018 he experienced a loss of 83.15%!

My observations and thoughts are as follows:

1. Seven out of ten traders are not with eToro anymore, which makes me wonder why. I have no proof but my guess is they simply performed poorly, lost their copiers and closed their accounts. This is already alarming but what if they opened another account? Or, even worse, multiple accounts? They could be investing small money and try different risky approaches, hoping that at least one account will turn out profitable in the long turn, attracting potential copiers. (I'm not claiming that those 7 particular traders did this, it's just my general suspicion regarding some of eToro traders)
2. I'm unable to calculate what would be my profit if I never stopped copying them, because I cannot check at what day and with what profit those seven traders left eToro. I'm guessing this would be an immense loss. On the other hand, considering the three traders who are still with eToro, I would lose more than a quarter of my assets!

What now?
I must be a quite adventurous person or at least an incorrigible optimist, because a month ago (exactly on Aug 26th) I started copying three traders with real money. Here is who they are.
rubymza (Heloise Greeff)

• invests in stocks, with GOOG, INTC, BLDP, MA, MSFT, AMZN, V, MU, IBM and NXPI making up 50.3% of her portfolio (allocation of each of them is in between 3.02% and 6.85%)
• active since 2016 (only the year 2016 ended with a loss)
• has 3044 copiers and $2M-$5M of copy assets under management
• strategy (her own words): "My investing strategy focusses mostly on US indices, tech and pharma, promising future (5-10years) growth. My trades are based on technical analysis using machine learning to understand patterns and trends in the markets. I prefer to keep a diverse portfolio to spread risk while achieving great returns."
• she gave an interview for Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago
• own experience: I just happened to run across her second worst month ever on eToro; my loss is -6.27% at the time of writing

​
OlivierDanvel (Olivier Jean Andre Danvel)

• he is a Forex trader, making typically 21 trades per week; his favorite currency pairs are EURCHF (12% of trades), CADCHF and GBPUSD; the trades, however, typically make up below 5% of his portfolio (at least whenever I'm checking it), making most of my funds unused
• active since January 2017: surprisingly enough, he has every single month profitable, though monthly profits are in the range of 0.03% to 3.34% only
• has 8977 copiers and more than $5M of copy assets under management
• strategy (his own words): "I monitor currency pairs all day to find the best entry. There is some management/scaling position for perfect entry. The risk control is a big part of my strategy," (quite vague, to be honest)
• own experience: my current profit is 0.26%

​
rayvahey (Raymond Noel Vahey)

• commodities compose 76% of his portfolio and his favorite assets are Gold and Oil (at the moment, Gold makes up half of invested amount)
• active since July 2016, with the following yearly profits, starting from 2016: 6.56%, 10.05%, 13.09%, 32.26% and -2.03% (the current year)
• has 1493 copiers and $1M-$2M of copy assets under management
• strategy (his own words): "My system is based on patterns, and a variety of technical analysis tools and some fundamental analysis. I primarily trade in commodities. " (quite vague as well)
• own experience: my profit with rayvahey is 2.56%

What was my strategy to hand-pick these particular traders? First I did some basic scanning using eToro's built-in search engine. The most important filter was that the trader was profitable within the last two years: unfortunately, eToro does not allow to reach details of earlier performance automatically. To know how the trader performed before 2019, I had to look at stats in the profile of each of them. I was also taking into account how often they trade (to avoid those who do only a couple of trades yearly), whether they were trading recently and whether they write posts regularly in their feed. With this, I got a list of fifteen candidates to copy:

• olivierdanvel
• marianopardo
• rubymza
• rayvahey
• martidg97
• overit
• misterg23
• knw500
• jianswang
• reinhardtcoetzee
• miyoshi
• alderique
• jarodd76
• benson9904
• big-profits

As you already know, I finally chose three of them. Rubymza seemed to be the most trustworthy stock trader, based on profits, posts feed and regular trading, among other things. Regarding OlivierDanvel, his uniqueness is the ability to record continuous profits with the Forex market. Finally, with rayvahey I wanted to increase my exposure to the commodities market.
Wish me good luck!
Michael
​
P.S.
You might find those copy-trading related readings interesting:

• https://www.etoro.com/copytrade
• https://www.investopedia.com/etoro-review-5072808
• https://socialtradingvlog.com/
• https://stockupwithjoe.com/etoro-copy-trade
• https://blockonomi.com/etoro-copy-trading-guide/
• https://www.quora.com/Does-copying-best-traders-concept-of-etoro-really-work
• https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-get-rich-by-copying-the-trades-of-top-traders-in-eToro-Zulu-trade/answeLutz-Enke

​
Disclosures:

• What you see here is my personal opinion, my own investments and should not be treated as investing advice
• I’m an amateur investor

The majority of this sub is focused on technical analysis. I regularly ridicule such "tea leaf readers" and advocate for trading based on fundamentals and economic news instead, so I figured I should take the time to write up something on how exactly you can trade economic news releases.
This post is long as balls so I won't be upset if you get bored and go back to your drooping dick patterns or whatever.

How economic news is released

First, it helps to know how economic news is compiled and released. Let's take Initial Jobless Claims, the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits around the United States from Sunday through Saturday. Initial in this context means the first claim for benefits made by an individual during a particular stretch of unemployment. The Initial Jobless Claims figure appears in the Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, which compiles information from all of the per-state departments that report to the DOL during the week. A typical number is between 100k and 250k and it can vary quite significantly week-to-week.
The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report contains data that lags 5 days behind. For example, the Report issued on Thursday March 26th 2020 contained data about the week ending on Saturday March 21st 2020.
In the days leading up to the Report, financial companies will survey economists and run complicated mathematical models to forecast the upcoming Initial Jobless Claims figure. The results of surveyed experts is called the "consensus"; specific companies, experts, and websites will also provide their own forecasts. Different companies will release different consensuses. Usually they are pretty close (within 2-3k), but for last week's record-high Initial Jobless Claims the reported consensuses varied by up to 1M! In other words, there was essentially no consensus.
The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is released each Thursday morning at exactly 8:30 AM ET. (On Thanksgiving the Report is released on Wednesday instead.) Media representatives gather at the Frances Perkins Building in Washington DC and are admitted to the "lockup" at 8:00 AM ET. In order to be admitted to the lockup you have to be a credentialed member of a media organization that has signed the DOL lockup agreement. The lockup room is small so there is a limited number of spots.
No phones are allowed. Reporters bring their laptops and connect to a local network; there is a master switch on the wall that prevents/enables Internet connectivity on this network. Once the doors are closed the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is distributed, with a heading that announces it is "embargoed" (not to be released) prior to 8:30 AM. Reporters type up their analyses of the report, including extracting key figures like Initial Jobless Claims. They load their write-ups into their companies' software, which prepares to send it out as soon as Internet is enabled. At 8:30 AM the DOL representative in the room flips the wall switch and all of the laptops are connected to the Internet, releasing their write-ups to their companies and on to their companies' partners.
Many of those media companies have externally accessible APIs for distributing news. Media aggregators and squawk services (like RanSquawk and TradeTheNews) subscribe to all of these different APIs and then redistribute the key economic figures from the Report to their own subscribers within one second after Internet is enabled in the DOL lockup.
Some squawk services are text-based while others are audio-based. FinancialJuice.com provides a free audio squawk service; internally they have a paid subscription to a professional squawk service and they simply read out the latest headlines to their own listeners, subsidized by ads on the site. I've been using it for 4 months now and have been pretty happy. It usually lags behind the official release times by 1-2 seconds and occasionally they verbally flub the numbers or stutter and have to repeat, but you can't beat the price!
Important - I’m not affiliated with FinancialJuice and I’m not advocating that you use them over any other squawk. If you use them and they misspeak a number and you lose all your money don’t blame me. If anybody has any other free alternatives please share them!

How the news affects forex markets

Institutional forex traders subscribe to these squawk services and use custom software to consume the emerging data programmatically and then automatically initiate trades based on the perceived change to the fundamentals that the figures represent.
It's important to note that every institution will have "priced in" their own forecasted figures well in advance of an actual news release. Forecasts and consensuses all come out at different times in the days leading up to a news release, so by the time the news drops everybody is really only looking for an unexpected result. You can't really know what any given institution expects the value to be, but unless someone has inside information you can pretty much assume that the market has collectively priced in the experts' consensus. When the news comes out, institutions will trade based on the difference between the actual and their forecast.
Sometimes the news reflects a real change to the fundamentals with an economic effect that will change the demand for a currency, like an interest rate decision. However, in the case of the Initial Jobless Claims figure, which is a backwards-looking metric, trading is really just self-fulfilling speculation that market participants will buy dollars when unemployment is low and sell dollars when unemployment is high. Generally speaking, news that reflects a real economic shift has a bigger effect than news that only matters to speculators.
Massive and extremely fast news-based trades happen within tenths of a second on the ECNs on which institutional traders are participants. Over the next few seconds the resulting price changes trickle down to retail traders. Some economic news, like Non Farm Payroll Employment, has an effect that can last minutes to hours as "slow money" follows behind on the trend created by the "fast money". Other news, like Initial Jobless Claims, has a short impact that trails off within a couple minutes and is subsequently dwarfed by the usual pseudorandom movements in the market.
The bigger the difference between actual and consensus, the bigger the effect on any given currency pair. Since economic news releases generally relate to a single currency, the biggest and most easily predicted effects are seen on pairs where one currency is directly effected and the other is not affected at all. Personally I trade USD/JPY because the time difference between the US and Japan ensures that no news will be coming out of Japan at the same time that economic news is being released in the US.
Before deciding to trade any particular news release you should measure the historical correlation between the release (specifically, the difference between actual and consensus) and the resulting short-term change in the currency pair. Historical data for various news releases (along with historical consensus data) is readily available. You can pay to get it exported into Excel or whatever, or you can scroll through it for free on websites like TradingEconomics.com.
Let's look at two examples: Initial Jobless Claims and Non Farm Payroll Employment (NFP). I collected historical consensuses and actuals for these releases from January 2018 through the present, measured the "surprise" difference for each, and then correlated that to short-term changes in USD/JPY at the time of release using 5 second candles.
I omitted any releases that occurred simultaneously as another major release. For example, occasionally the monthly Initial Jobless Claims comes out at the exact same time as the monthly Balance of Trade figure, which is a more significant economic indicator and can be expected to dwarf the effect of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report.
USD/JPY correlation with Initial Jobless Claims (2018 - present)
USD/JPY correlation with Non Farm Payrolls (2018 - present)
The horizontal axes on these charts is the duration (in seconds) after the news release over which correlation was calculated. The vertical axis is the Pearson correlation coefficient: +1 means that the change in USD/JPY over that duration was perfectly linearly correlated to the "surprise" in the releases; -1 means that the change in USD/JPY was perfectly linearly correlated but in the opposite direction, and 0 means that there is no correlation at all.
For Initial Jobless Claims you can see that for the first 30 seconds USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the difference between consensus and actual jobless claims. That is, fewer-than-forecast jobless claims (fewer newly unemployed people than expected) strengthens the dollar and greater-than-forecast jobless claims (more newly unemployed people than expected) weakens the dollar. Correlation then trails off and changes to a moderate/weak positive correlation. I interpret this as algorithms "buying the dip" and vice versa, but I don't know for sure. From this chart it appears that you could profit by opening a trade for 15 seconds (duration with strongest correlation) that is long USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is lower than the consensus and short USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is higher than expected.
The chart for Non Farm Payroll looks very different. Correlation is positive (higher-than-expected payrolls strengthen the dollar and lower-than-expected payrolls weaken the dollar) and peaks at around 45 seconds, then slowly decreases as time goes on. This implies that price changes due to NFP are quite significant relative to background noise and "stick" even as normal fluctuations pick back up.
I wanted to show an example of what the USD/JPY S5 chart looks like when an "uncontested" (no other major simultaneously news release) Initial Jobless Claims and NFP drops, but unfortunately my broker's charts only go back a week. (I can pull historical data going back years through the API but to make it into a pretty chart would be a bit of work.) If anybody can get a 5-second chart of USD/JPY at March 19, 2020, UTC 12:30 and/or at February 7, 2020, UTC 13:30 let me know and I'll add it here.

Backtesting

So without too much effort we determined that (1) USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the Initial Jobless Claims figure for the first 15 seconds after the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (when no other major news is being released) and also that (2) USD/JPY is strongly positively correlated with the Non Farms Payroll figure for the first 45 seconds after the release of the Employment Situation report.
Before you can assume you can profit off the news you have to backtest and consider three important parameters.
Entry speed: How quickly can you realistically enter the trade? The correlation performed above was measured from the exact moment the news was released, but realistically if you've got your finger on the trigger and your ear to the squawk it will take a few seconds to hit "Buy" or "Sell" and confirm. If 90% of the price move happens in the first second you're SOL. For back-testing purposes I assume a 5 second delay. In practice I use custom software that opens a trade with one click, and I can reliably enter a trade within 2-3 seconds after the news drops, using the FinancialJuice free squawk.
Minimum surprise: Should you trade every release or can you do better by only trading those with a big enough "surprise" factor? Backtesting will tell you whether being more selective is better long-term or not.
Hold time: The optimal time to hold the trade is not necessarily the same as the time of maximum correlation. That's a good starting point but it's not necessarily the best number. Backtesting each possible hold time will let you find the best one.
The spread: When you're only holding a position open for 30 seconds, the spread will kill you. The correlations performed above used the midpoint price, but in reality you have to buy at the ask and sell at the bid. Brokers aren't stupid and the moment volume on the ECN jumps they will widen the spread for their retail customers. The only way to determine if the news-driven price movements reliably overcome the spread is to backtest.
Stops: Personally I don't use stops, neither take-profit nor stop-loss, since I'm automatically closing the trade after a fixed (and very short) amount of time. Additionally, brokers have a minimum stop distance; the profits from scalping the news are so slim that even the nearest stops they allow will generally not get triggered.
I backtested trading these two news releases (since 2018), using a 5 second entry delay, real historical spreads, and no stops, cycling through different "surprise" thresholds and hold times to find the combination that returns the highest net profit. It's important to maximize net profit, not expected value per trade, so you don't over-optimize and reduce the total number of trades taken to one single profitable trade. If you want to get fancy you can set up a custom metric that combines number of trades, expected value, and drawdown into a single score to be maximized.
For the Initial Jobless Claims figure I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 25 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 30 seconds elapsed) and only trade when the difference between consensus and actual is 7k or higher. That leads to 30 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... -0.0093 yen per unit per trade.
Yep, that's a loss of approx. $8.63 per lot.
Disappointing right? That's the spread and that's why you have to backtest. Even though the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has a strong correlation with movement in USD/JPY, it's simply not something that a retail trader can profit from.
Let's turn to the NFP. There I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 75 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 80 seconds elapsed) and trade every single NFP (no minimum "surprise" threshold). That leads to 20 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... +0.1306 yen per unit per trade.
That's a profit of approx. $121.25 per lot. Not bad for 75 seconds of work! That's a +6% ROI at 50x leverage.

Make it real

If you want to do this for realsies, you need to run these numbers for all of the major economic news releases. Markit Manufacturing PMI, Factory Orders MoM, Trade Balance, PPI MoM, Export and Import Prices, Michigan Consumer Sentiment, Retail Sales MoM, Industrial Production MoM, you get the idea. You keep a list of all of the releases you want to trade, when they are released, and the ideal hold time and "surprise" threshold. A few minutes before the prescribed release time you open up your broker's software, turn on your squawk, maybe jot a few notes about consensuses and model forecasts, and get your finger on the button. At the moment you hear the release you open the trade in the correct direction, hold it (without looking at the chart!) for the required amount of time, then close it and go on with your day.
Some benefits of trading this way: * Most major economic releases come out at either 8:30 AM ET or 10:00 AM ET, and then you're done for the day. * It's easily backtestable. You can look back at the numbers and see exactly what to expect your return to be. * It's fun! Packing your trading into 30 seconds and knowing that institutions are moving billions of dollars around as fast as they can based on the exact same news you just read is thrilling. * You can wow your friends by saying things like "The St. Louis Fed had some interesting remarks on consumer spending in the latest Beige Book." * No crayons involved.
Some downsides: * It's tricky to be fast enough without writing custom software. Some broker software is very slow and requires multiple dialog boxes before a position is opened, which won't cut it. * The profits are very slim, you're not going to impress your instagram followers to join your expensive trade copying service with your 30-second twice-weekly trades. * Any friends you might wow with your boring-ass economic talking points are themselves the most boring people in the world.
I hope you enjoyed this long as fuck post and you give trading economic news a try!