How to Find the Best Place to Set Your Stop Loss « Trading ...

Law of Forex - What "Law" do you believe in the Forex Market?

The "law" i mean here is a pattern, phenomenon or a rules that the Forex Market / or a certain currency pair always obey , or something that always happen.
Some silly example like "EURUSD will never be lower than xx value" , or "A certain economic news with positive result will guarantee a certain currency to go bull" , or "a certain pattern followed by a certain pattern, then this will happen" , a certain time/day of the week has the most volume , "RSI always works when pair with another indicator" , "MACD doesn't work unless xxx" ,"a mixture of indicators plus another price action is a sign of something happen" etc..
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Tell us what do you believe and and your opinion on it, let us know!
submitted by Billbabaganz to Forex [link] [comments]

Former investment bank FX trader: some thoughts

Former investment bank FX trader: some thoughts
Hi guys,
I have been using reddit for years in my personal life (not trading!) and wanted to give something back in an area where i am an expert.
I worked at an investment bank for seven years and joined them as a graduate FX trader so have lots of professional experience, by which i mean I was trained and paid by a big institution to trade on their behalf. This is very different to being a full-time home trader, although that is not to discredit those guys, who can accumulate a good amount of experience/wisdom through self learning.
When I get time I'm going to write a mid-length posts on each topic for you guys along the lines of how i was trained. I guess there would be 15-20 topics in total so about 50-60 posts. Feel free to comment or ask questions.
The first topic is Risk Management and we'll cover it in three parts
Part I
  • Why it matters
  • Position sizing
  • Kelly
  • Using stops sensibly
  • Picking a clear level

Why it matters

The first rule of making money through trading is to ensure you do not lose money. Look at any serious hedge fund’s website and they’ll talk about their first priority being “preservation of investor capital.”
You have to keep it before you grow it.
Strangely, if you look at retail trading websites, for every one article on risk management there are probably fifty on trade selection. This is completely the wrong way around.
The great news is that this stuff is pretty simple and process-driven. Anyone can learn and follow best practices.
Seriously, avoiding mistakes is one of the most important things: there's not some holy grail system for finding winning trades, rather a routine and fairly boring set of processes that ensure that you are profitable, despite having plenty of losing trades alongside the winners.

Capital and position sizing

The first thing you have to know is how much capital you are working with. Let’s say you have $100,000 deposited. This is your maximum trading capital. Your trading capital is not the leveraged amount. It is the amount of money you have deposited and can withdraw or lose.
Position sizing is what ensures that a losing streak does not take you out of the market.
A rule of thumb is that one should risk no more than 2% of one’s account balance on an individual trade and no more than 8% of one’s account balance on a specific theme. We’ll look at why that’s a rule of thumb later. For now let’s just accept those numbers and look at examples.
So we have $100,000 in our account. And we wish to buy EURUSD. We should therefore not be risking more than 2% which $2,000.
We look at a technical chart and decide to leave a stop below the monthly low, which is 55 pips below market. We’ll come back to this in a bit. So what should our position size be?
We go to the calculator page, select Position Size and enter our details. There are many such calculators online - just google "Pip calculator".
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https://preview.redd.it/y38zb666e5h51.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26e4fe569dc5c1f43ce4c746230c49b138691d14
So the appropriate size is a buy position of 363,636 EURUSD. If it reaches our stop level we know we’ll lose precisely $2,000 or 2% of our capital.
You should be using this calculator (or something similar) on every single trade so that you know your risk.
Now imagine that we have similar bets on EURJPY and EURGBP, which have also broken above moving averages. Clearly this EUR-momentum is a theme. If it works all three bets are likely to pay off. But if it goes wrong we are likely to lose on all three at once. We are going to look at this concept of correlation in more detail later.
The total amount of risk in our portfolio - if all of the trades on this EUR-momentum theme were to hit their stops - should not exceed $8,000 or 8% of total capital. This allows us to go big on themes we like without going bust when the theme does not work.
As we’ll see later, many traders only win on 40-60% of trades. So you have to accept losing trades will be common and ensure you size trades so they cannot ruin you.
Similarly, like poker players, we should risk more on trades we feel confident about and less on trades that seem less compelling. However, this should always be subject to overall position sizing constraints.
For example before you put on each trade you might rate the strength of your conviction in the trade and allocate a position size accordingly:
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https://preview.redd.it/q2ea6rgae5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4332cb8d0bbbc3d8db972c1f28e8189105393e5b
To keep yourself disciplined you should try to ensure that no more than one in twenty trades are graded exceptional and allocated 5% of account balance risk. It really should be a rare moment when all the stars align for you.
Notice that the nice thing about dealing in percentages is that it scales. Say you start out with $100,000 but end the year up 50% at $150,000. Now a 1% bet will risk $1,500 rather than $1,000. That makes sense as your capital has grown.
It is extremely common for retail accounts to blow-up by making only 4-5 losing trades because they are leveraged at 50:1 and have taken on far too large a position, relative to their account balance.
Consider that GBPUSD tends to move 1% each day. If you have an account balance of $10k then it would be crazy to take a position of $500k (50:1 leveraged). A 1% move on $500k is $5k.
Two perfectly regular down days in a row — or a single day’s move of 2% — and you will receive a margin call from the broker, have the account closed out, and have lost all your money.
Do not let this happen to you. Use position sizing discipline to protect yourself.
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Kelly Criterion

If you’re wondering - why “about 2%” per trade? - that’s a fair question. Why not 0.5% or 10% or any other number?
The Kelly Criterion is a formula that was adapted for use in casinos. If you know the odds of winning and the expected pay-off, it tells you how much you should bet in each round.
This is harder than it sounds. Let’s say you could bet on a weighted coin flip, where it lands on heads 60% of the time and tails 40% of the time. The payout is $2 per $1 bet.
Well, absolutely you should bet. The odds are in your favour. But if you have, say, $100 it is less obvious how much you should bet to avoid ruin.
Say you bet $50, the odds that it could land on tails twice in a row are 16%. You could easily be out after the first two flips.
Equally, betting $1 is not going to maximise your advantage. The odds are 60/40 in your favour so only betting $1 is likely too conservative. The Kelly Criterion is a formula that produces the long-run optimal bet size, given the odds.
Applying the formula to forex trading looks like this:
Position size % = Winning trade % - ( (1- Winning trade %) / Risk-reward ratio
If you have recorded hundreds of trades in your journal - see next chapter - you can calculate what this outputs for you specifically.
If you don't have hundreds of trades then let’s assume some realistic defaults of Winning trade % being 30% and Risk-reward ratio being 3. The 3 implies your TP is 3x the distance of your stop from entry e.g. 300 pips take profit and 100 pips stop loss.
So that’s 0.3 - (1 - 0.3) / 3 = 6.6%.
Hold on a second. 6.6% of your account probably feels like a LOT to risk per trade.This is the main observation people have on Kelly: whilst it may optimise the long-run results it doesn’t take into account the pain of drawdowns. It is better thought of as the rational maximum limit. You needn’t go right up to the limit!
With a 30% winning trade ratio, the odds of you losing on four trades in a row is nearly one in four. That would result in a drawdown of nearly a quarter of your starting account balance. Could you really stomach that and put on the fifth trade, cool as ice? Most of us could not.
Accordingly people tend to reduce the bet size. For example, let’s say you know you would feel emotionally affected by losing 25% of your account.
Well, the simplest way is to divide the Kelly output by four. You have effectively hidden 75% of your account balance from Kelly and it is now optimised to avoid a total wipeout of just the 25% it can see.
This gives 6.6% / 4 = 1.65%. Of course different trading approaches and different risk appetites will provide different optimal bet sizes but as a rule of thumb something between 1-2% is appropriate for the style and risk appetite of most retail traders.
Incidentally be very wary of systems or traders who claim high winning trade % like 80%. Invariably these don’t pass a basic sense-check:
  • How many live trades have you done? Often they’ll have done only a handful of real trades and the rest are simulated backtests, which are overfitted. The model will soon die.
  • What is your risk-reward ratio on each trade? If you have a take profit $3 away and a stop loss $100 away, of course most trades will be winners. You will not be making money, however! In general most traders should trade smaller position sizes and less frequently than they do. If you are going to bias one way or the other, far better to start off too small.

How to use stop losses sensibly

Stop losses have a bad reputation amongst the retail community but are absolutely essential to risk management. No serious discretionary trader can operate without them.
A stop loss is a resting order, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. For a recap on the various order types visit this chapter.
The valid concern with stop losses is that disreputable brokers look for a concentration of stops and then, when the market is close, whipsaw the price through the stop levels so that the clients ‘stop out’ and sell to the broker at a low rate before the market naturally comes back higher. This is referred to as ‘stop hunting’.
This would be extremely immoral behaviour and the way to guard against it is to use a highly reputable top-tier broker in a well regulated region such as the UK.
Why are stop losses so important? Well, there is no other way to manage risk with certainty.
You should always have a pre-determined stop loss before you put on a trade. Not having one is a recipe for disaster: you will find yourself emotionally attached to the trade as it goes against you and it will be extremely hard to cut the loss. This is a well known behavioural bias that we’ll explore in a later chapter.
Learning to take a loss and move on rationally is a key lesson for new traders.
A common mistake is to think of the market as a personal nemesis. The market, of course, is totally impersonal; it doesn’t care whether you make money or not.
Bruce Kovner, founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates
There is an old saying amongst bank traders which is “losers average losers”.
It is tempting, having bought EURUSD and seeing it go lower, to buy more. Your average price will improve if you keep buying as it goes lower. If it was cheap before it must be a bargain now, right? Wrong.
Where does that end? Always have a pre-determined cut-off point which limits your risk. A level where you know the reason for the trade was proved ‘wrong’ ... and stick to it strictly. If you trade using discretion, use stops.

Picking a clear level

Where you leave your stop loss is key.
Typically traders will leave them at big technical levels such as recent highs or lows. For example if EURUSD is trading at 1.1250 and the recent month’s low is 1.1205 then leaving it just below at 1.1200 seems sensible.
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If you were going long, just below the double bottom support zone seems like a sensible area to leave a stop
You want to give it a bit of breathing room as we know support zones often get challenged before the price rallies. This is because lots of traders identify the same zones. You won’t be the only one selling around 1.1200.
The “weak hands” who leave their sell stop order at exactly the level are likely to get taken out as the market tests the support. Those who leave it ten or fifteen pips below the level have more breathing room and will survive a quick test of the level before a resumed run-up.
Your timeframe and trading style clearly play a part. Here’s a candlestick chart (one candle is one day) for GBPUSD.
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https://preview.redd.it/moyngdy4f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=91af88da00dd3a09e202880d8029b0ddf04fb802
If you are putting on a trend-following trade you expect to hold for weeks then you need to have a stop loss that can withstand the daily noise. Look at the downtrend on the chart. There were plenty of days in which the price rallied 60 pips or more during the wider downtrend.
So having a really tight stop of, say, 25 pips that gets chopped up in noisy short-term moves is not going to work for this kind of trade. You need to use a wider stop and take a smaller position size, determined by the stop level.
There are several tools you can use to help you estimate what is a safe distance and we’ll look at those in the next section.
There are of course exceptions. For example, if you are doing range-break style trading you might have a really tight stop, set just below the previous range high.
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https://preview.redd.it/ygy0tko7f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=34af49da61c911befdc0db26af66f6c313556c81
Clearly then where you set stops will depend on your trading style as well as your holding horizons and the volatility of each instrument.
Here are some guidelines that can help:
  1. Use technical analysis to pick important levels (support, resistance, previous high/lows, moving averages etc.) as these provide clear exit and entry points on a trade.
  2. Ensure that the stop gives your trade enough room to breathe and reflects your timeframe and typical volatility of each pair. See next section.
  3. Always pick your stop level first. Then use a calculator to determine the appropriate lot size for the position, based on the % of your account balance you wish to risk on the trade.
So far we have talked about price-based stops. There is another sort which is more of a fundamental stop, used alongside - not instead of - price stops. If either breaks you’re out.
For example if you stop understanding why a product is going up or down and your fundamental thesis has been confirmed wrong, get out. For example, if you are long because you think the central bank is turning hawkish and AUDUSD is going to play catch up with rates … then you hear dovish noises from the central bank and the bond yields retrace lower and back in line with the currency - close your AUDUSD position. You already know your thesis was wrong. No need to give away more money to the market.

Coming up in part II

EDIT: part II here
Letting stops breathe
When to change a stop
Entering and exiting winning positions
Risk:reward ratios
Risk-adjusted returns

Coming up in part III

Squeezes and other risks
Market positioning
Bet correlation
Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits
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Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
submitted by getmrmarket to Forex [link] [comments]

New to Trading? Here's some tips

So there seems to be a lot of new people on this sub. And makes sense if you have questions a lot of time you'll turn to reddit for the answers (I know I do). Well here are some tips that I think would benefit new traders.
  1. Don't trade ANY Euro pairs. Look I know it's the most traded pair it goes up and down really fast and there's so much potential for you to make money. Turns out there's even more for you to lose money. It's way too volatile specially if you don't know what you're doing. EUUSD is the worst offender.
  2. Trade the Daily. Might think you're cool looking at charts every x amount of times during the day. You get to tell your friends and family that you trade all day and they might be impressed at what you're doing but unless you have some years under you stick to the daily. There's less noise. You can see clearer trends and when you don't stare at the screen all day you're less emotional therefore a more effective trader. I only look at the chart 15 minutes a day to either enter close or manage my trades. Whatever happens when I'm gone is what happens.
  3. There is no holy grail indicator Look for it all you want. It doesn't exist. There are good indicators. There are bad indicators. There are some indicators that are so broken if you do the opposite of what they're intended for you'll actually make a profit. But the fact remains that there's no perfect one. Stop looking. What you should be looking for is an indicator that fits with your strategy.
  4. What currencies to pick. I actually never see this brought up. The notion in forex is that all pairs can be traded equally. To a certain extent that's not false. But until you get the hang of it stick to a strict trading diet. Look for pairs that trend a lot. Duh look for the trend I can hear you say. When I say trend I don't mean a couple of days or weeks. I mean a couple of months. Half a year. Pairs that do that have a higher tendency to stick with one direction for a while. That's where you make your money. An easy way to identify those pairs as well is putting together a volatile currency (USD) with a less volatile one(JPY).
  5. USE YOUR SL Trust me even if not putting a SL has netted you all kinds of gains eventually the market will turn around and bite you. With no safety net you'll lose most if not all your profit. The best offense is a good defense.
  6. How to pick your TP and SL level. Most new traders care so much about that. I put it near the bottom because in my opinion you should know everything listed first. This is my opinion and I use it for my strategy I use the ATR(average true range) indicator. It's a really helpful tool that helps you identify the range at which the candles will either rise or fall. Obviously you want to set your TP inside of that range and your SL slightly outside of it.
  7. Lot sizes. Everyone has a different story about how they pick their lot size. The general consensus is don't risk over 2% of your account. But I'm a simple man and I can't be bothered to figure out what my risk is every single time. So what I do is I put $0.10 for every $100 I have on the account. I then assign $300(minimum) to each pair. That's $0.30 per pair. It's easy to remember. 10 cent for every $100. If you're able to blow $100 with $0.10 then you probably shouldn't trade.
  8. How to avoid reversals. Tbh you can't. There's no way to predict the future so eventually you'll get hit by one. What you can do however is minimize the blow. How I do it is for every pair I take two trades. If you remember in the previous tip is said I do about$0.30 per pair well I divide it 2:1. I take one trade with a TP(2) and one without (1). If my TP is hit I pocket that amount and if the trend keeps going in my direction I make even more. If the trend decides to end or reverses my losses are minimal because at least I kept half.
  9. There is NO right way to trade. Stop listening to people telling the best way to trade is fundamentals or naked charts of to use some specific indicator. There are no right way to do this. It's as flexible and unlimited as your imagination. I personally use indicators but if that's not your thing do YOU! Just remember to manage your trades properly and be level headed when trading. Hell if your trading strategy is flipping a coin with proper trade management you'd probably make some money (don't quote me on that).
  10. Trade money you're willing to lose Don't trade your rent money.
That's all I have for now. If anyone sees this and wants to add more feel free. Hope this helps someone.
submitted by MannyTrade to Forex [link] [comments]

Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part II

Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part II
Firstly, thanks for the overwhelming comments and feedback. Genuinely really appreciated. I am pleased 500+ of you find it useful.
If you didn't read the first post you can do so here: risk management part I. You'll need to do so in order to make sense of the topic.
As ever please comment/reply below with questions or feedback and I'll do my best to get back to you.
Part II
  • Letting stops breathe
  • When to change a stop
  • Entering and exiting winning positions
  • Risk:reward ratios
  • Risk-adjusted returns

Letting stops breathe

We talked earlier about giving a position enough room to breathe so it is not stopped out in day-to-day noise.
Let’s consider the chart below and imagine you had a trailing stop. It would be super painful to miss out on the wider move just because you left a stop that was too tight.
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Imagine being long and stopped out on a meaningless retracement ... ouch!
One simple technique is simply to look at your chosen chart - let’s say daily bars. And then look at previous trends and use the measuring tool. Those generally look something like this and then you just click and drag to measure.
For example if we wanted to bet on a downtrend on the chart above we might look at the biggest retracement on the previous uptrend. That max drawdown was about 100 pips or just under 1%. So you’d want your stop to be able to withstand at least that.
If market conditions have changed - for example if CVIX has risen - and daily ranges are now higher you should incorporate that. If you know a big event is coming up you might think about that, too. The human brain is a remarkable tool and the power of the eye-ball method is not to be dismissed. This is how most discretionary traders do it.
There are also more analytical approaches.
Some look at the Average True Range (ATR). This attempts to capture the volatility of a pair, typically averaged over a number of sessions. It looks at three separate measures and takes the largest reading. Think of this as a moving average of how much a pair moves.
For example, below shows the daily move in EURUSD was around 60 pips before spiking to 140 pips in March. Conditions were clearly far more volatile in March. Accordingly, you would need to leave your stop further away in March and take a correspondingly smaller position size.
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ATR is available on pretty much all charting systems
Professional traders tend to use standard deviation as a measure of volatility instead of ATR. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Averages are useful but can be misleading when regimes switch (see above chart).
Once you have chosen a measure of volatility, stop distance can then be back-tested and optimised. For example does 2x ATR work best or 5x ATR for a given style and time horizon?
Discretionary traders may still eye-ball the ATR or standard deviation to get a feeling for how it has changed over time and what ‘normal’ feels like for a chosen study period - daily, weekly, monthly etc.
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Reasons to change a stop

As a general rule you should be disciplined and not change your stops. Remember - losers average losers. This is really hard at first and we’re going to look at that in more detail later.
There are some good reasons to modify stops but they are rare.
One reason is if another risk management process demands you stop trading and close positions. We’ll look at this later. In that case just close out your positions at market and take the loss/gains as they are.
Another is event risk. If you have some big upcoming data like Non Farm Payrolls that you know can move the market +/- 150 pips and you have no edge going into the release then many traders will take off or scale down their positions. They’ll go back into the positions when the data is out and the market has quietened down after fifteen minutes or so. This is a matter of some debate - many traders consider it a coin toss and argue you win some and lose some and it all averages out.
Trailing stops can also be used to ‘lock in’ profits. We looked at those before. As the trade moves in your favour (say up if you are long) the stop loss ratchets with it. This means you may well end up ‘stopping out’ at a profit - as per the below example.
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The mighty trailing stop loss order
It is perfectly reasonable to have your stop loss move in the direction of PNL. This is not exposing you to more risk than you originally were comfortable with. It is taking less and less risk as the trade moves in your favour. Trend-followers in particular love trailing stops.
One final question traders ask is what they should do if they get stopped out but still like the trade. Should they try the same trade again a day later for the same reasons? Nope. Look for a different trade rather than getting emotionally wed to the original idea.
Let’s say a particular stock looked cheap based on valuation metrics yesterday, you bought, it went down and you got stopped out. Well, it is going to look even better on those same metrics today. Maybe the market just doesn’t respect value at the moment and is driven by momentum. Wait it out.
Otherwise, why even have a stop in the first place?

Entering and exiting winning positions

Take profits are the opposite of stop losses. They are also resting orders, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price.
Imagine I’m long EURUSD at 1.1250. If it hits a previous high of 1.1400 (150 pips higher) I will leave a sell order to take profit and close the position.
The rookie mistake on take profits is to take profit too early. One should start from the assumption that you will win on no more than half of your trades. Therefore you will need to ensure that you win more on the ones that work than you lose on those that don’t.
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Sad to say but incredibly common: retail traders often take profits way too early
This is going to be the exact opposite of what your emotions want you to do. We are going to look at that in the Psychology of Trading chapter.
Remember: let winners run. Just like stops you need to know in advance the level where you will close out at a profit. Then let the trade happen. Don’t override yourself and let emotions force you to take a small profit. A classic mistake to avoid.
The trader puts on a trade and it almost stops out before rebounding. As soon as it is slightly in the money they spook and cut out, instead of letting it run to their original take profit. Do not do this.

Entering positions with limit orders

That covers exiting a position but how about getting into one?
Take profits can also be left speculatively to enter a position. Sometimes referred to as “bids” (buy orders) or “offers” (sell orders). Imagine the price is 1.1250 and the recent low is 1.1205.
You might wish to leave a bid around 1.2010 to enter a long position, if the market reaches that price. This way you don’t need to sit at the computer and wait.
Again, typically traders will use tech analysis to identify attractive levels. Again - other traders will cluster with your orders. Just like the stop loss we need to bake that in.
So this time if we know everyone is going to buy around the recent low of 1.1205 we might leave the take profit bit a little bit above there at 1.1210 to ensure it gets done. Sure it costs 5 more pips but how mad would you be if the low was 1.1207 and then it rallied a hundred points and you didn’t have the trade on?!
There are two more methods that traders often use for entering a position.
Scaling in is one such technique. Let’s imagine that you think we are in a long-term bulltrend for AUDUSD but experiencing a brief retracement. You want to take a total position of 500,000 AUD and don’t have a strong view on the current price action.
You might therefore leave a series of five bids of 100,000. As the price moves lower each one gets hit. The nice thing about scaling in is it reduces pressure on you to pick the perfect level. Of course the risk is that not all your orders get hit before the price moves higher and you have to trade at-market.
Pyramiding is the second technique. Pyramiding is for take profits what a trailing stop loss is to regular stops. It is especially common for momentum traders.
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Pyramiding into a position means buying more as it goes in your favour
Again let’s imagine we’re bullish AUDUSD and want to take a position of 500,000 AUD.
Here we add 100,000 when our first signal is reached. Then we add subsequent clips of 100,000 when the trade moves in our favour. We are waiting for confirmation that the move is correct.
Obviously this is quite nice as we humans love trading when it goes in our direction. However, the drawback is obvious: we haven’t had the full amount of risk on from the start of the trend.
You can see the attractions and drawbacks of both approaches. It is best to experiment and choose techniques that work for your own personal psychology as these will be the easiest for you to stick with and build a disciplined process around.

Risk:reward and win ratios

Be extremely skeptical of people who claim to win on 80% of trades. Most traders will win on roughly 50% of trades and lose on 50% of trades. This is why risk management is so important!
Once you start keeping a trading journal you’ll be able to see how the win/loss ratio looks for you. Until then, assume you’re typical and that every other trade will lose money.
If that is the case then you need to be sure you make more on the wins than you lose on the losses. You can see the effect of this below.
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A combination of win % and risk:reward ratio determine if you are profitable
A typical rule of thumb is that a ratio of 1:3 works well for most traders.
That is, if you are prepared to risk 100 pips on your stop you should be setting a take profit at a level that would return you 300 pips.
One needn’t be religious about these numbers - 11 pips and 28 pips would be perfectly fine - but they are a guideline.
Again - you should still use technical analysis to find meaningful chart levels for both the stop and take profit. Don’t just blindly take your stop distance and do 3x the pips on the other side as your take profit. Use the ratio to set approximate targets and then look for a relevant resistance or support level in that kind of region.

Risk-adjusted returns

Not all returns are equal. Suppose you are examining the track record of two traders. Now, both have produced a return of 14% over the year. Not bad!
The first trader, however, made hundreds of small bets throughout the year and his cumulative PNL looked like the left image below.
The second trader made just one bet — he sold CADJPY at the start of the year — and his PNL looked like the right image below with lots of large drawdowns and volatility.
Would you rather have the first trading record or the second?
If you were investing money and betting on who would do well next year which would you choose? Of course all sensible people would choose the first trader. Yet if you look only at returns one cannot distinguish between the two. Both are up 14% at that point in time. This is where the Sharpe ratio helps .
A high Sharpe ratio indicates that a portfolio has better risk-adjusted performance. One cannot sensibly compare returns without considering the risk taken to earn that return.
If I can earn 80% of the return of another investor at only 50% of the risk then a rational investor should simply leverage me at 2x and enjoy 160% of the return at the same level of risk.
This is very important in the context of Execution Advisor algorithms (EAs) that are popular in the retail community. You must evaluate historic performance by its risk-adjusted return — not just the nominal return. Incidentally look at the Sharpe ratio of ones that have been live for a year or more ...
Otherwise an EA developer could produce two EAs: the first simply buys at 1000:1 leverage on January 1st ; and the second sells in the same manner. At the end of the year, one of them will be discarded and the other will look incredible. Its risk-adjusted return, however, would be abysmal and the odds of repeated success are similarly poor.

Sharpe ratio

The Sharpe ratio works like this:
  • It takes the average returns of your strategy;
  • It deducts from these the risk-free rate of return i.e. the rate anyone could have got by investing in US government bonds with very little risk;
  • It then divides this total return by its own volatility - the more smooth the return the higher and better the Sharpe, the more volatile the lower and worse the Sharpe.
For example, say the return last year was 15% with a volatility of 10% and US bonds are trading at 2%. That gives (15-2)/10 or a Sharpe ratio of 1.3. As a rule of thumb a Sharpe ratio of above 0.5 would be considered decent for a discretionary retail trader. Above 1 is excellent.
You don’t really need to know how to calculate Sharpe ratios. Good trading software will do this for you. It will either be available in the system by default or you can add a plug-in.

VAR

VAR is another useful measure to help with drawdowns. It stands for Value at Risk. Normally people will use 99% VAR (conservative) or 95% VAR (aggressive). Let’s say you’re long EURUSD and using 95% VAR. The system will look at the historic movement of EURUSD. It might spit out a number of -1.2%.
​
A 5% VAR of -1.2% tells you you should expect to lose 1.2% on 5% of days, whilst 95% of days should be better than that
This means it is expected that on 5 days out of 100 (hence the 95%) the portfolio will lose 1.2% or more. This can help you manage your capital by taking appropriately sized positions. Typically you would look at VAR across your portfolio of trades rather than trade by trade.
Sharpe ratios and VAR don’t give you the whole picture, though. Legendary fund manager, Howard Marks of Oaktree, notes that, while tools like VAR and Sharpe ratios are helpful and absolutely necessary, the best investors will also overlay their own judgment.
Investors can calculate risk metrics like VaR and Sharpe ratios (we use them at Oaktree; they’re the best tools we have), but they shouldn’t put too much faith in them. The bottom line for me is that risk management should be the responsibility of every participant in the investment process, applying experience, judgment and knowledge of the underlying investments.Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital
What he’s saying is don’t misplace your common sense. Do use these tools as they are helpful. However, you cannot fully rely on them. Both assume a normal distribution of returns. Whereas in real life you get “black swans” - events that should supposedly happen only once every thousand years but which actually seem to happen fairly often.
These outlier events are often referred to as “tail risk”. Don’t make the mistake of saying “well, the model said…” - overlay what the model is telling you with your own common sense and good judgment.

Coming up in part III

Available here
Squeezes and other risks
Market positioning
Bet correlation
Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits
​
***
Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
submitted by getmrmarket to Forex [link] [comments]

Some trading wisdom, tools and information I picked up along the way that helped me be a better trader. Maybe it can help you too.

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

I Automated & Backtested ParallaxFX Strategy

I am a Software Engineer / Data Scientist and I decided to give a go at automating a strategy based on the ParallaxFX strategy floating around and backtests the results, also due to some inspiration by Vanguer
 
I backtested on the majors 4H timeframe between January 2015 to January 2020.
 
I am only considering trades from the top and bottom bands for now.
 
My trading criteria is:
 
Upper Band
Indecision candle
Setup candle
 
Lower Band
Indecision candle
Setup candle
 
Entry: 38.2 Fib
Stop Loss: 100 Fib
Take Profit: -161.8 Fib
RRR: 3.23
 
If a candle meets my trade criteria I open the trade and forget about it.
 
I started with a balance of 500 EUR and a risk of 1%. The results use compound gain / loss and I only considered one currency pair at a time.
 
The results were not that impressive...
EUUSD
AUD/USD
GBP/USD
NZD/USD
USD/CAD
USD/CHF
 
Due to this being automated I can test a variety of parameters pretty quickly and come back with trading screenshots, results, etc.
 
I am considering a higher timeframe but the number of trades is already fairly low.
 
Here is a link to a Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16cO0ZSCGakkbK90lh-FBIC3ZJIxOj9fI?usp=sharing) with screenshots from each trade and a log of the system as it makes the trades. The candles highlighted in yellow / purple are where the trade is entered. I do not have the picture marked as a win / lose but it should be obvious by the candle formation.
submitted by TribeFX to Forex [link] [comments]

Read Carefully Experts!

This may appear to be a noob question, but read on carefully and please try and understand the point I'm trying to make! I'm hoping your answers might be helpful to people both learning Forex and looking to get into it, so please don't hate on me for this post.
I am relatively new to FX and have learned about break and retest strategies, MACD crossovers and stop losses below structure and risk to reward ratios (usually going for 1:1 or 2/3:1) and so on. I say this only so you know I've a general (very basic) understanding of charts, price action etc.
I definitely do NOT expect to step into the markets and instantly win a majority of my trades, however, to illustrate my thoughts please note the example below.
If I am winning 2% on a winning trade and losing 1% on a losing trade (2:1 reward risk per trade), a strategy that wins just 50% of the time trading once per trading day would be +10% each month. (10 days of -1%, 10 days of +2%). +10% is a HUGE increase in accounts and if a $1000 account was +10% per month for 12 months the end of year balance would be over $3138.43 or a 213.84% return!
This leads me to a theory that almost NO system can be returning 50% on a 2:1 reward risk, even with careful trade selection (let's say I monitor the 7 major pairs, gold and GBP/JPY as I do and pick one entry a day) Am I wrong? I appreciate it is a hypothetical example designed to make a point, but my thoughts are if you monitored lots of pairs and took only ONE entry a day, we might expect to win 50% of the time.
Let's expand this further. I have seen numerous algos (can't name them but looking like they win at LEAST 50% of the time) which tempt me because they appear to indicate moves I could jump on and where I could pull a bunch of pips out of the market. However, there surely cannot be a holy grail or are people making this type of insane return? It cannot be as easy as buying an algo, signing up to $300,000 worth of FTMO funding and earning 10% per month for an easy $21,000 per month income with profit share. Or maybe it is and I'm just cynical?! I end up getting tempted by courses etc. in the hope that if I spent £400 on a good course it would open the door to what I need to do, but I'm nervous this is just another huge mistake.
I genuinely would love to trade Forex for a living. Really I would. I hope it's possible and I hope to learn a strategy I can wash, rinse and repeat. I love watching videos and live streamers who seem to have a great understanding of what's going on but I wonder if it's really possible. It seems a million miles away but I'm determined to keep learning and trading.
Reading your considered thoughts to this post would be helpful for me and I'm sure others and thank you for reading it.
submitted by mal4291 to Forex [link] [comments]

Forex Signals Reddit: top providers review (part 1)

Forex Signals Reddit: top providers review (part 1)

Forex Signals - TOP Best Services. Checked!

To invest in the financial markets, we must acquire good tools that help us carry out our operations in the best possible way. In this sense, we always talk about the importance of brokers, however, signal systems must also be taken into account.
The platforms that offer signals to invest in forex provide us with alerts that will help us in a significant way to be able to carry out successful operations.
For this reason, we are going to tell you about the importance of these alerts in relation to the trading we carry out, because, without a doubt, this type of system will provide us with very good information to invest at the right time and in the best assets in the different markets. financial
Within this context, we will focus on Forex signals, since it is the most important market in the world, since in it, multiple transactions are carried out on a daily basis, hence the importance of having an alert system that offers us all the necessary data to invest in currencies.
Also, as we all already know, cryptocurrencies have become a very popular alternative to investing in traditional currencies. Therefore, some trading services/tools have emerged that help us to carry out successful operations in this particular market.
In the following points, we will detail everything you need to know to start operating in the financial markets using trading signals: what are signals, how do they work, because they are a very powerful help, etc. Let's go there!

What are Forex Trading Signals?

https://preview.redd.it/vjdnt1qrpny51.jpg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bc541fc996701e5b4dd940abed610b59456a5625
Before explaining the importance of Forex signals, let's start by making a small note so that we know what exactly these alerts are.
Thus, we will know that the signals on the currency market are received by traders to know all the information that concerns Forex, both for assets and for the market itself.
These alerts allow us to know the movements that occur in the Forex market and the changes that occur in the different currency pairs. But the great advantage that this type of system gives us is that they provide us with the necessary information, to know when is the right time to carry out our investments.
In other words, through these signals, we will know the opportunities that are presented in the market and we will be able to carry out operations that can become quite profitable.
Profitability is precisely another of the fundamental aspects that must be taken into account when we talk about Forex signals since the vast majority of these alerts offer fairly reliable data on assets. Similarly, these signals can also provide us with recommendations or advice to make our operations more successful.

»Purpose: predict movements to carry out Profitable Operations

In short, Forex signal systems aim to predict the behavior that the different assets that are in the market will present and this is achieved thanks to new technologies, the creation of specialized software, and of course, the work of financial experts.
In addition, it must also be borne in mind that the reliability of these alerts largely lies in the fact that they are prepared by financial professionals. So they turn out to be a perfect tool so that our investments can bring us a greater number of benefits.

The best signal services today

We are going to tell you about the 3 main alert system services that we currently have on the market. There are many more, but I can assure these are not scams and are reliable. Of course, not 100% of trades will be a winner, so please make sure you apply proper money management and risk management system.

1. 1000pipbuilder (top choice)

Fast track your success and follow the high-performance Forex signals from 1000pip Builder. These Forex signals are rated 5 stars on Investing.com, so you can follow every signal with confidence. All signals are sent by a professional trader with over 10 years investment experience. This is a unique opportunity to see with your own eyes how a professional Forex trader trades the markets.
The 1000pip Builder Membership is ordinarily a signal service for Forex trading. You will get all the facts you need to successfully comply with the trading signals, set your stop loss and take earnings as well as additional techniques and techniques!
You will get easy to use trading indicators for Forex Trades, including your entry, stop loss and take profit. Overall, the earnings target per months is 350 Pips, depending on your funding this can be a high profit per month! (In fact, there is by no means a guarantee, but the past months had been all between 600 – 1000 Pips).
>>>Know more about 1000pipbuilder
Your 1000pip builder membership gives you all in hand you want to start trading Forex with success. Read the directions and wait for the first signals. You can trade them inside your demo account first, so you can take a look at the performance before you make investments real money!
Features:
  • Free Trial
  • Forex signals sent by email and SMS
  • Entry price, take profit and stop loss provided
  • Suitable for all time zones (signals sent over 24 hours)
  • MyFXBook verified performance
  • 10 years of investment experience
  • Target 300-400 pips per month
Pricing:
https://preview.redd.it/zjc10xx6ony51.png?width=668&format=png&auto=webp&s=9b0eac95f8b584dc0cdb62503e851d7036c0232b
VISIT 1000ipbuilder here

2. DDMarkets

Digital Derivatives Markets (DDMarkets) have been providing trade alert offerings since May 2014 - fully documenting their change ideas in an open and transparent manner.
September 2020 performance report for DD Markets.
Their manner is simple: carry out extensive research, share their evaluation and then deliver a trading sign when triggered. Once issued, daily updates on the trade are despatched to members via email.
It's essential to note that DDMarkets do not tolerate floating in an open drawdown in an effort to earnings at any cost - a common method used by less professional providers to 'fudge' performance statistics.
Verified Statistics: Not independently verified.
Price: plans from $74.40 per month.
Year Founded: 2014
Suitable for Beginners: Yes, (includes handy to follow trade analysis)
VISIT
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3. JKonFX

If you are looking or a forex signal service with a reliable (and profitable) music record you can't go previous Joel Kruger and the team at JKonFX.
Trading performance file for JKonFX.
Joel has delivered a reputable +59.18% journal performance for 2016, imparting real-time technical and fundamental insights, in an extremely obvious manner, to their 30,000+ subscriber base. Considered a low-frequency trader, alerts are only a small phase of the overall JKonFX subscription. If you're searching for hundreds of signals, you may want to consider other options.
Verified Statistics: Not independently verified.
Price: plans from $30 per month.
Year Founded: 2014
Suitable for Beginners: Yes, (includes convenient to follow videos updates).
VISIT

The importance of signals to invest in Forex

Once we have known what Forex signals are, we must comment on the importance of these alerts in relation to our operations.
As we have already told you in the previous paragraph, having a system of signals to be able to invest is quite advantageous, since, through these alerts, we will obtain quality information so that our operations end up being a true success.

»Use of signals for beginners and experts

In this sense, we have to say that one of the main advantages of Forex signals is that they can be used by both beginners and trading professionals.
As many as others can benefit from using a trading signal system because the more information and resources we have in our hands. The greater probability of success we will have. Let's see how beginners and experts can take advantage of alerts:
  • Beginners: for inexperienced these alerts become even more important since they will thus have an additional tool that will guide them to carry out all operations in the Forex market.
  • Professionals: In the same way, professionals are also recommended to make use of these alerts, so they have adequate information to continue bringing their investments to fruition.
Now that we know that both beginners and experts can use forex signals to invest, let's see what other advantages they have.

»Trading automation

When we dedicate ourselves to working in the financial world, none of us can spend 24 hours in front of the computer waiting to perform the perfect operation, it is impossible.
That is why Forex signals are important, because, in order to carry out our investments, all we will have to do is wait for those signals to arrive, be attentive to all the alerts we receive, and thus, operate at the right time according to the opportunities that have arisen.
It is fantastic to have a tool like this one that makes our work easier in this regard.

»Carry out profitable Forex operations

These signals are also important, because the vast majority of them are usually quite profitable, for this reason, we must get an alert system that provides us with accurate information so that our operations can bring us great benefits.
But in addition, these Forex signals have an added value and that is that they are very easy to understand, therefore, we will have a very useful tool at hand that will not be complicated and will end up being a very beneficial weapon for us.

»Decision support analysis

A system of currency market signals is also very important because it will help us to make our subsequent decisions.
We cannot forget that, to carry out any type of operation in this market, previously, we must meditate well and know the exact moment when we will know that our investments are going to bring us profits .
Therefore, all the information provided by these alerts will be a fantastic basis for future operations that we are going to carry out.

»Trading Signals made by professionals

Finally, we have to recall the idea that these signals are made by the best professionals. Financial experts who know perfectly how to analyze the movements that occur in the market and changes in prices.
Hence the importance of alerts, since they are very reliable and are presented as a necessary tool to operate in Forex and that our operations are as profitable as possible.

What should a signal provider be like?

https://preview.redd.it/j0ne51jypny51.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=5578ff4c42bd63d5b6950fc6401a5be94b97aa7f
As you have seen, Forex signal systems are really important for our operations to bring us many benefits. For this reason, at present, there are multiple platforms that offer us these financial services so that investing in currencies is very simple and fast.
Before telling you about the main services that we currently have available in the market, it is recommended that you know what are the main characteristics that a good signal provider should have, so that, at the time of your choice, you are clear that you have selected one of the best systems.

»Must send us information on the main currency pairs

In this sense, one of the first things we have to comment on is that a good signal provider, at a minimum, must send us alerts that offer us information about the 6 main currencies, in this case, we refer to the euro, dollar, The pound, the yen, the Swiss franc, and the Canadian dollar.
Of course, the data you provide us will be related to the pairs that make up all these currencies. Although we can also find systems that offer us information about other minorities, but as we have said, at a minimum, we must know these 6.

»Trading tools to operate better

Likewise, signal providers must also provide us with a large number of tools so that we can learn more about the Forex market.
We refer, for example, to technical analysis above all, which will help us to develop our own strategies to be able to operate in this market.
These analyzes are always prepared by professionals and study, mainly, the assets that we have available to invest.

»Different Forex signals reception channels

They must also make available to us different ways through which they will send us the Forex signals, the usual thing is that we can acquire them through the platform's website, or by a text message and even through our email.
In addition, it is recommended that the signal system we choose sends us a large number of alerts throughout the day, in order to have a wide range of possibilities.

»Free account and customer service

Other aspects that we must take into account to choose a good signal provider is whether we have the option of receiving, for a limited time, alerts for free or the profitability of the signals they emit to us.
Similarly, a final aspect that we must emphasize is that a good signal system must also have excellent customer service, which is available to us 24 hours a day and that we can contact them at through an email, a phone number, or a live chat, for greater immediacy.
Well, having said all this, in our last section we are going to tell you which are the best services currently on the market. That is, the most suitable Forex signal platforms to be able to work with them and carry out good operations. In this case, we will talk about ForexPro Signals, 365 Signals and Binary Signals.

Forex Signals Reddit: conclusion

To be able to invest properly in the Forex market, it is convenient that we get a signal system that provides us with all the necessary information about this market. It must be remembered that Forex is a very volatile market and therefore, many movements tend to occur quickly.
Asset prices can change in a matter of seconds, hence the importance of having a system that helps us analyze the market and thus know, what is the right time for us to start operating.
Therefore, although there are currently many signal systems that can offer us good services, the three that we have mentioned above are the ones that are best valued by users, which is why they are the best signal providers that we can choose to carry out. our investments.
Most of these alerts are quite profitable and in addition, these systems usually emit a large number of signals per day with full guarantees. For all this, SignalsForexPro, Signals365, or SignalsBinary are presented as fundamental tools so that we can obtain a greater number of benefits when we carry out our operations in the currency market.
submitted by kayakero to makemoneyforexreddit [link] [comments]

2.5 years and 145 backtested trades later

I have a habit of backtesting every strategy I find as long as it makes sense. I find it fun, and even if the strategy ends up being underperforming, it gives me a good excuse to gain valuable chart experience that would normally take years to gather. After I backtest something, I compare it to my current methodology, and usually conclude that mine is better either because it has a better performance or the new method requires too much time to manage (Spoiler: until now, I like this better)
During the last two days, I have worked on backtesting ParallaxFx strategy, as it seemed promising and it seemed to fit my personality (a lazy fuck who will happily halve his yearly return if it means he can spend 10% less time in front of the screens). My backtesting is preliminary, and I didn't delve very deep in the data gathering. I usually track all sort of stuff, but for this first pass, I sticked to the main indicators of performance over a restricted sample size of markets.
Before I share my results with you, I always feel the need to make a preface that I know most people will ignore.
Strategy
I am not going to go into the strategy in this thread. If you haven't read the series of threads by the guy who shared it, go here.
As suggested by my mentioned personality type, I went with the passive management options of ParallaxFx's strategy. After a valid setup forms, I place two orders of half my risk. I add or remove 1 pip from each level to account for spread.
Sample
I tested this strategy over the seven major currency pairs: AUDUSD, USDCAD, NZDUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, EURUSD, USDCHF. The time period started on January 1th 2018 and ended on July 1th 2020, so a 2.5 years backtest. I tested over the D1 timeframe, and I plan on testing other timeframes.
My "protocol" for backtesting is that, if I like what I see during this phase, I will move to the second phase where I'll backtest over 5 years and 28 currency pairs.
Units of measure
I used R multiples to track my performance. If you don't know what they are, I'm too sleepy to explain right now. This article explains what they are. The gist is that the results you'll see do not take into consideration compounding and they normalize volatility (something pips don't do, and why pips are in my opinion a terrible unit of measure for performance) as well as percentage risk (you can attach variable risk profiles on your R values to optimize position sizing in order to maximize returns and minimize drawdowns, but I won't get into that).
Results
I am not going to link the spreadsheet directly, because it is in my GDrive folder and that would allow you to see my personal information. I will attach screenshots of both the results and the list of trades. In the latter, I have included the day of entry for each trade, so if you're up to the task, you can cross-reference all the trades I have placed to make sure I am not making things up.
Overall results: R Curve and Segmented performance.
List of trades: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Something to note: I treated every half position as an individual trade for the sake of simplicity. It should not mess with the results, but it simply means you will see huge streaks of wins and losses. This does not matter because I'm half risk in each of them, so a winstreak of 6 trades is just a winstreak of 3 trades.
For reference:
Thoughts
Nice. I'll keep testing. As of now it is vastly better than my current strategy.
submitted by Vanguer to Forex [link] [comments]

Profitable Forex Strategy Reddit | 3 Easy Forex Strategies Easy For MT4

Profitable Forex Strategy Reddit | 3 Easy Forex Strategies Easy For MT4

The need for a trading strategy in Forex market

https://preview.redd.it/r6u8stdmeaw51.jpg?width=1320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b0292502d6e68f5c220af5a5851aeb8061b395b
Almost all trading manuals talk about the need to have your own trading strategy. First of all, the process of creating your trading scheme allows you to perfectly understand trading and exclude from it any eventuality that hides additional risk.
Profitable forex strategy: it is a type of instruction for the trader, which helps to follow a clearly verified algorithm and safeguard his deposit from emotional errors and consequences of the unpredictability of the Forex currency market.
Thanks to her, you will always know the answer to the question: how to act in certain market conditions. You have the conditions of opening a transaction, the conditions of its closing, likewise, you do not guess if it is time or not. You do what the trading strategy tells you. This does not mean that it cannot be changed. A healthy trading scheme in the forex market must be constantly adjusted, it must comply with the realities of current market trends, but there must be no unfounded arguments in it.
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

Profitable Forex Strategy Reddit

Types of trading strategies
The forms of a trading strategy can combine a variety of methods. However, several of the most commonly used options can be highlighted.
  • Trading strategy based on various complementary technical indicators
  • Trading strategy using Bollinger Bands
  • Moving Average Strategy
  • Technical figures and patterns
  • Trading with Fibonacci levels
  • Candlestick trading strategy
  • Trend trading strategy
  • Flat trading strategy
  • Scalping
  • Fundamental analysis as the basis of the strategy

Three most profitable Forex strategies

Important! These strategies are the basis for building your own trading system. Indicator settings and recommended pending order levels are for consultation only. If you do not get a satisfactory outcome in the test result or in a live account, that does not mean that the problem is the strategy. It is enough to choose individual parameters of indicators under a separate asset and under the current market situation.

1. “Bali” scalping strategy

This strategy is one of the most popular, at least its description can be found on many websites. However, the recommendations will be different. According to the author's idea, "Bali" refers to scalping tactics, as it facilitates a fairly short stop loss (SL) and take profit (TP). However, the recommended time frame is high, because the signals appear not very often. The authors recommend using the H1 interval and the EUR / USD currency pair.
Indicators used:
  • Linear Weighted Moving Average. Period 48 (red line).
https://preview.redd.it/9mhs67mxeaw51.jpg?width=461&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=913d428edd4cab0a3237e7039829a76dd587f1f5
The weighted linear moving average here acts as an additional filter. Due to the fact that LWMA gives more weight to the values ​​of the last periods, the indicator in the long periods practically excludes delays. In some cases, LWMA can give a signal beforehand, but in this strategy only the moving position relative to price is important. Bearish LWMA is a buy signal, sell bullish.
  • Trend Envelopes_v2. Period 2 (orange and blue lines).
https://preview.redd.it/8bap0s41faw51.jpg?width=627&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6236ad06765280bbfd655fa1fb4153b28aaaf56
The indicator is also based on the moving average, but the formula is slightly different for the calculation. Its marking is more precise (the impact of price noise has been eliminated). It allows you to identify the twists of the trend compared to the usual mobile with a slight anticipation. Trend Envelopes has an interesting property: the color of the line and its new location changes when the price penetrates its old trend line, a kind of signal.
  • DSS of momentum. The configuration in the screenshot below.
https://preview.redd.it/9ch27cj4faw51.jpg?width=630&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00558bbd90378009bef33b7c96c77f884b912667
The indicator is placed in a separate window below the chart. This is an oscillator whose task is to determine the pivot points of the trend. And it does so much faster than standard oscillators. It has two lines: the signal is dotted, the additional line is solid, but the receiver has 2 kinds of colors (orange and green).
  • Important! Note that the indicators for the “Bali” strategy are chosen in such a way as to ultimately give an early signal. This gives the trader time to confirm the signal and check the fundamentals.
MA is one of the basics on MT4, the other two indicators can be found in the archive for free here. To add them to the platform, click on MT4: "File / Open data directory". In the folder that opens, follow the following path: MQL4 / Indicators. Copy the flags to the folder and restart the platform.
Also Read: Make Money With Trading
Conditions to open a long position:
  • Price penetrates the orange Trend Envelopes line from the bottom up. At the same time in the same candle there is a change of the orange line that falls to a growing celestial.
  • The candle is above LWMA. Once the above condition has been met, we wait for the candle to appear above the moving one. It is important that it closes above the LWMA red line. It is mandatory to have a Skyline Trend Envelopes on a signal candle.
  • The additional DSS of momentum line on the signal candle is green and is above the dotted line of the signal (that is, it crosses or crosses it).
We open a trade at the close of the signal candle. The recommended stop level is 20-25 points in 4-digit quotes, take profit at 40-50 points.
https://preview.redd.it/t48d55s8faw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e93863745e74dec536178539817225767cbeb1c
The arrow indicates a signal candle where a Trend Envelopes color change occurred. Note (purple ovals) that the blue line is below the orange line and goes upwards (in other cases the signal should be ignored). In the signal candle, the green DSS of momentum line is above the dotted line.
Conditions to open a short position:
  • Price penetrates the Trend Envelopes sky line from top to bottom. At the same time in the same candle there is a change from the increasing celestial line to the falling orange.
  • The candle is below LWMA. Once the above condition has been met, we wait for the candle to appear below the mobile. It is important that it closes below the LWMA red line. It is mandatory to have an orange Trend Envelopes line on a signal candle.
  • The additional DSS of momentum line on the signal candle is orange and is below the dotted line of the signal (i.e. crosses or crosses it).
https://preview.redd.it/6uixkl1dfaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd53442c633e80c1e55da72cd5ffe9cda2e85b8a
Some examples where a transaction cannot be opened:
  1. In the screenshot below the signal candle closed at the moving level (red line), it was practically below it.
https://preview.redd.it/2o1wpocgfaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=58d3286bf2884b5f0dfdaa0a62b68d2d50cdabf8
  1. In the screenshot below the signal candle is DSS below its signal line. Also, the celestial line is horizontal and not ascending.
https://preview.redd.it/1nfi1etjfaw51.jpg?width=801&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ff9fcbc10a485c5102ef7a135de47332827caf54
The signals are relatively rare, a signal can be expected for several days. In half the cases, it is better to control the transaction and close in advance, without waiting for profit taking. We do not operate at the time of flat. Try this strategy directly in the browser and see the result.
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

2. “Va-Bank” candle strategy

This profitable Forex strategy is weekly and can be used on different currency pairs. It is based on the spring principle of price movement, what went up quickly, sooner or later must fall. To trade you will only need a schedule on any platform and W1 time frame (although the daily interval can be used).
You should estimate the size of the candle bodies of different currency pairs ( AUDCAD , AUDJPY , AUDUSD , EURGBP , EURJPY , GBPUSD , CHFJPY , NZDCHF , EURAUD , AUDCHF , CADCHF , EURUSD , EURCAD , GBPCHF ) and choose the largest distance from the opening to the close of the candle in the framework of the week. In this to open a transaction at the beginning of the following week.
Conditions to open a long position:
  • The bearish candle, which signifies last week's movement, has a relatively large body.
Open a long position early next week. Make sure to place a stop loss at 100-140 points and a take profit at 50-70 points. When it is midweek, close the order if it has not yet been closed at take profit or stop loss. After that, wait again for the beginning of the week and repeat the procedure, in any case do not open operations at the end of the current week.
https://preview.redd.it/vuihnqspfaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7641e9d7701911cc255c4f0c8a53e1660c35c9fe
On this chart it is clearly seen that after each large bearish candle there is necessarily a bullish candle (although smaller). The only question is what period to take where it makes sense to compare the relative length of the candles. Here everything is individual for each currency pair. Note that a rising candle was observed followed by a few small bearish candles. But when it comes to minimizing risks, it is best not to open a long response position, as the relatively small decline from the previous week may continue.
Conditions to open a short position:
  • The bullish candle, which signifies last week's movement, has a relatively large body.
We open a short position early next week.
https://preview.redd.it/tv4zmf5ufaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61cd1dcfc4aebfa6f80343b6c51f7a6e46358602
The red arrows point to the candles that had a large body around the previous bullish candles. Almost all signals turned out to be profitable, except for the transactions indicated by a blue arrow. The shortcomings of the strategy are rare signs, albeit with a high probability of profit. The best thing is that it can be used in several pairs at the same time.
This strategy has an interesting modification based on similar logic. Investors with little capital opt for intraday strategies, as their money is insufficient to exert radical pressure on the market. Therefore, if there is a strong move on the weekly chart, this may indicate a cluster of large strong traders. In other words, if there are three weekly candles in one direction, it is most likely the fourth. Here you also have to take into account the psychological factor, 4 candles is equal to one month, and those who "push" the market in one direction, within a month will begin to set profits.
Strategy principle:
  • A "three candles" pattern (ascending and descending) formed on the weekly chart.
  • It is preferable that each subsequent candle was larger than the previous one. Doji is not taken into account (disembodied candles).
  • Stop is placed at the closing level of the first candle of the constructed formation. Take profit at 50-100% of the last candle, but it is often better to manually close the trade.
An example of this type of formation in the screenshot below.
https://preview.redd.it/iu7cwa7xfaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9195d24b72d2bda5394614380e9e5bc167f108a5
Of the 5 patterns, 4 were effective. Lack of strategy, the pattern can be expected 2-3 months. But when launching a multi-currency strategy this expectation is justified. Consider swaps!
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

3. Parabolic Profit Based on Moving Average

This strategy is universal and is usually given as an example for novice traders. It uses classic EMA (Exponential Moving Average) indicators for MT4 and Parabolic SAR, which acts as a confirmatory indicator.
The strategy is trend. Most sources suggest using it in "minutes", but price noise reduces its efficiency. It is better to use M15-M30 intervals. Currency pairs - Any, but you may need to adjust the indicator settings.
Indicators used:
  • EMA with periods 5, 25 and 50. EMA (5) in red, EMA (25) and EMA (50) in yellow. Apply to Close (closing price).
https://preview.redd.it/ly7ju8o3gaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61dee5b0d994d09a375e01e2b9afe188dd2ee0ed
  • Parabolic SAR, parameters remain unchanged (color correct at your discretion).
https://preview.redd.it/sonpv1m8gaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=823e9ce5d279d3a98ef072694766a112a3ece775
Conditions to open a long position:
  • Red EMA (5) crosses the yellows from bottom to top.
  • Parabolic SAR is located under the sails.
Conditions to open a short position:
  • Red EMA (5) crosses the yellows from top to bottom.
  • Parabolic SAR is located above the candles.
The transaction can be opened on the same candle where the mobile crossover occurred. Stop loss at the local minimum, take profit at 20-25 points. But with the manual management of transactions you can extract great benefits. For example, close at the time of the transition from EMA (5) to a horizontal position (change of the angle of inclination of the growth to flat).
https://preview.redd.it/4un92jlegaw51.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=406a700c00722349622d031e20d0858e4196d18b
This screen shows that all three signals (two long and one short) were effective. It would be possible to enter the market on the candle by following the signal (in order to accurately verify the direction of the trend), but you would then miss the right time to enter. It is up to you to decide whether it is worth the risk. For one-hour intervals, these parameters hardly work, so be sure to check the performance of the indicators for each period of time in a minimum span of three years.
And now that you know the theory, a few words about how to put these strategies into practice.
Ready? Then let's get started!

From the theory to the practice

Step 1. Open demo account It's free, requires no deposit, takes up to 15 minutes, and no verification required. On the main page of your broker there is for sures a button "Register", click and follow the instructions. An account can also be opened from other menus (for example, from the top menu, from the commercial conditions of the account, etc.).
Step 2. Familiarize yourself with the functionality of the Personal Area. It won't take long. It is at the most user friendly and intuitive. You just need to understand the instruments of the platform and understand how the trades are opened.
Step 3. Launch the trading platform. The Personal Area has the platform incorporated, but it is impossible to add templates. Hence, the "Bali" and "Parabolic Profit" strategies can only be executed on MT4.

Characteristics of an effective Forex strategy Reddit

And finally, let's see what makes a profitable Forex strategy effective. What properties should it have? Perhaps three of the most important characteristics can be pointed out.
  • The minimum number of lag indicators. The smaller they are, the greater the forecast accuracy.
  • Easy. Understanding your strategy is more important than your saturation with complex elements, formulas, and schematics.
  • Uniqueness. Any trading strategy must be "tailored" to your trading style, your character, your circumstances, and so on.
It is very important to develop your own trading strategy, but it is necessary to test a large number of already available and proven strategies. On the Forex blog you will find trading strategies available for download. Before using a live account, test your chosen strategy on the demo account on the MetaTrader trading platform.
Conclusion. To successfully trade the Forex currency market, create your own trading strategy. Learn what's new, learn out-of-the-box trading schemes, and improve your individual action plan in the market. Only in this case, the trading results will satisfy you to the fullest. Success, dear readers!
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Join the community for more articles on trading and making money on the Forex and Stock market.
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Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, if you click and make a purchase I may receive a commission - This has NO extra cost for you.
submitted by kayakero to makemoneyforexreddit [link] [comments]

Day #2 of my Forex Journey

Real quick before I get into my next steps of my FX Journey, id like to say thank you to all the people who commented on my last post! All of the tips I got were really eye-opening and introduced me to different parts of FX trading that I didn't even know existed. So thank you so much, and I hope to get more interesting feedback from you guys in the future! Also Im going to probably change my writing frequency from daily to biweekly. I think writing about every little trade is not going to be as beneficial to me as writing about my overall progress at certain points throughout the week.
I started this trading day out by learning up on order flow. A whole bunch of you guys suggested really interesting youtubers to watch, and I started with Mr. pip's series on order flow. After I finished up watching a few of his videos, I started to tweak my trading plan so that I could get in some chart time. I changed currency pair from EUUSD to the AUD/USD, the time frame from the 4 hour to the 1 hour, and my indicators from RSI, Stochastic, 2 SMAs and ADX to ATR, RSI, and Ichimoku Kinko Hyo. I also added a little fundamental analysis in my trading plan because I think that I am being far too reliant on my indicators. I planned to check the economic calendar and determine the general trend of the currency pairs that are strongly correlated to the AUD/USD before I began my chart analysis. In addition to all of my analysis, I tried to practice using the techniques I learned in Mr. Pip's videos and analyze the order flow of the chart. Even if my analysis of order flow is wrong, as long as I am getting practice I am learning.
Eventhough I planned to use today to back-test indicators and find a solid new plan, I did not have enough time. I ended up getting on my demo account really late in the day, and started to force myself to enter a trade. Destructive habits like this could lead into some massive issues when I eventually get into live trading. To combat this harmful attitude specifically, I will restrict myself to trading on certain parts of the day (for example session overlaps, news releases, and earlier in the day). Despite this mistake I still continued with my trading strategy. I calculated all the currency correlations for AUS/USD using the past weeks economic data, and set my indicators in place. After checking the overall trend of the most strongly correlated pairs (Positive: EUUSD, GPB/USD, Negative: USD/CAD, USD/JPY) I started to analyze the order flow. All the correlated currencies, except for EUUSD, indicated that the AUD/USD would fall, while my order flow analysis indicated the opposite. Seeing as though I am extremely new to order flow, I dismissed this analysis, and ended up forcing a trade on the AUD/USD going short when my indicators seemed to line up correctly. I learned from last time that I should not alter or close my trade purely based on emotion, and to just wait till the market hits my stop loss or take profit. I included a trailing stop loss of 60 pips this time, but I have no evidence to base that number range on. The trade is currently open and I am down about 30 pips.
Although I am not labeling this trade as a loser yet, I can definitely see a lot of holes in my trading strategy. The most obvious mistake in my eyes right now is my use of indicators. Currently all my trades are purely based on what my indicators say, and since I do not have any back-tested data to support the credibility of my indicators, it feels a lot like strategic gambling. Another issue is that I feel far too reliant on indicators alone. I think that if I can find ways to include various types of analysis efficiently and evenly in my trading plan I will become a much more skillful and well-rounded trader. In order to combat these two issues I will begin forming various types of trading strategies this weekend and back-test them all extensively. I also plan on researching more on price action, order flow, and Naked Forex.
Once again any and all feedback is welcome. I am just beginning Forex, but it had been a huge passion of mine and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.
submitted by Aman-1127 to Forex [link] [comments]

Reddit Forex Scalping: 4 Strategies To Make Money Trading Forex For Newbies

Reddit Forex Scalping: 4 Strategies To Make Money Trading Forex For Newbies

4 Forex and Stocks Scalping Strategies Reddit

We take a look at scalping trading strategies, as well as some useful indicators.
https://preview.redd.it/rb33l4c42nw51.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c225b90045dcd566f5a85e09cf51d887a1b69ed7

What does scalping mean?

Scalping is a type of trading strategy designed to profit from small price changes since the benefits of these transactions are obtained quickly and once an operation has become profitable. All forms of trading require discipline, but because the number of trades is so large, and the profits from each trade are so small, a scalper must rigorously stick to their trading system, to avoid large losses that could eliminate dozens. successful operations.
The scalper traders: they will take small profits to take advantage of the gains as they appear. The goal is a successful trading strategy by means of a large number of profitable trades, rather than a few successful trades with large profits.
The scalping of the idea of a better risk exposure as the current time each operation is quite short, which reduces the risk of an adverse event that causes a big move. Furthermore, it is considered that smaller movements are easier to achieve than larger movements and that smaller movements are more frequent than larger ones.
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

The best scalping strategies

  1. Stochastic Oscillator Strategy
  2. Moving average strategy
  3. Parabolic SAR Indicator Strategy
  4. RSI (Relative Strength Index) Strategy

Reddit Forex Scalping Strategies:

1- Scalping trading using the stochastic oscillator

Scalping can be achieved by using the stochastic oscillator. The term stochastic refers to the current price point relative to its range over a recent period of time. When comparing the price of a security with its recent range, a stochastic tries to provide potential changes. The scalping using said oscillator aims to capture the movements of a market trend, ie, one that moves up or down accordingly. Prices tend to close near the extremes of the recent range before a change occurs, as in the example seen below:
https://preview.redd.it/7wy3ixui2nw51.png?width=1397&format=png&auto=webp&s=91f50d685dd4841015c51322cee9fb90701aad33
the chart above, for Brent over a three minute period, we can see that the price rises even higher, and the lows in the stochastic (marked with arrows) provide entry points for long trades, when the black line of% K is crosses over with the red dotted line of% D. The operation is exited when the stochastic reaches the maximum value of its range, above 80, when a bearish convergence appears, when the line of% K crosses below with% D.
Rather, short positions would be used in a downtrend market, as in the example below. This time, instead of 'buying dips', we are 'selling raises'. Therefore, we will look for a bearish convergence in the direction of the trend, as highlighted below:
https://preview.redd.it/y3qqvejs2nw51.png?width=1398&format=png&auto=webp&s=627f3ded47e901c1f9ea97d5416caeea49b9dc3f

2- Scalping using the moving average

Another method is to use moving averages, usually with two relatively short-term and one longer-term to indicate the trend.
In the examples below, on a three-minute chart of the EUR / USD pair , we are using 5- and 20-period moving averages in the short term, and a further 200-period moving averages in the long term. In the first chart, the longer-term moving average is rising, so we expect the five-period moving average to cross above the 20-period moving average, and then we take positions in the direction of the trend. These are marked with an arrow.
https://preview.redd.it/22jquy1z2nw51.png?width=1499&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed4f724384b86f95dff584c596e25652f23f240d
In the second example, the long-term moving average is declining, so we look for short positions when the price crosses below the 5-period moving average, which has already crossed below the 20-period moving average.
https://preview.redd.it/0tl7mky23nw51.png?width=1496&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca7b44138901537185d9e0dbd639a799407ced08
It is important to remember that these trades are trending and that we are not trying to find and capture every move. As in any scalping strategy, it is essential to have good risk management with stops, which is vital to avoid large losses that could eliminate many small gains quickly.
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

3- Scalping with the use of the parabolic SAR indicator

The Parabolic SAR is an indicator that highlights the direction in which the market is moving and also tries to provide entry and exit points. SAR is the acronym for ' stop and reversal ', which means stop and revocation. The indicator is a series of points placed above or below the price bars. One point below the price is bullish and one point above it is bearish.
A change in the position of the points suggests that there is going to be a change in trend. The chart below shows the DAX on a five minute chart; You can open short trades when the price moves below the SAR points and long when the price moves above them. As you can see, some trends are quite widespread and at other times a trader will encounter many trades that generate losses.
https://preview.redd.it/35uo837g3nw51.png?width=1498&format=png&auto=webp&s=f020a461c6ff1f8d49fab381da0713b1de75dbf7

4- Scalping using the RSI

Lastly, investors can use an RSI strategy to find entry points that go with the prevailing trend. In the first example, the price is rising steadily, with three higher overall moving averages.
Downs in the trend are to be bought, so when the RSI drops to 30 and then moves above this line, a possible entry point is created.
https://preview.redd.it/fkk1df2k3nw51.png?width=1499&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e9b4c7b1af0d0732793ddf5dc462aeaa7321dc9
Conversely, when the RSI moves to 70 and then begins to decline within the downtrend, an opportunity is created to 'sell the rally', as we have seen in the example below.
https://preview.redd.it/dlq4ge7p3nw51.png?width=1497&format=png&auto=webp&s=10eb4baf8bd92a4e0e33905464859b73871a6201
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE

What do you have to know before starting scalping strategies Reddit?

The scalping requires the trader has an iron discipline, but also very demanding as far as time is concerned. Although long-term times and smaller sizes allow investors to move away from their platforms, given that there are few possible entries and can be controlled remotely, scalping requires the investor's full attention.
Possible entry points can appear and disappear very quickly and therefore a trader must be very vigilant about his platform. For individuals who have a day job or other activities, scalping is not necessarily an ideal strategy. On the other hand, long-term operations with higher profit objectives are a more suitable option.
It is difficult to execute a successful scalping strategy. One of the main reasons is that many operations need to be performed over time. Some research in this regard usually shows that more frequent investors only lose money faster, and have a negative capital curve. Instead, most investors are more successful and reduce their time commitments to trading, and even reduce stress by using long-term strategies and avoiding scalping strategies.
The scalping requires quick responses to market movements and the ability to forgo an operation if the exact moment has passed. 'Chase' trades, along with a lack of stop-loss discipline, are the key reasons why scalpers are often unsuccessful. The idea of ​​only being in the market for a short period of time sounds appealing, but the chances of being stopped out on a sudden move with a quick correction are high.
Trading is an activity that rewards patience and discipline. Although those who are successful with scalping do demonstrate these qualities, they are a small number. Most investors do better with a long-term view, smaller position sizes, and a less frenetic pace of activity.
>>> Forex Signals With Unbeatable Performance: Verified Forex Results And 5° Rated On Investing.com |Free Forex Signals Trial: CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR FREE
submitted by kayakero to makemoneyforexreddit [link] [comments]

Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part 3/3

Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part 3/3
Welcome to the third and final part of this chapter.
Thank you all for the 100s of comments and upvotes - maybe this post will take us above 1,000 for this topic!
Keep any feedback or questions coming in the replies below.
Before you read this note, please start with Part I and then Part II so it hangs together and makes sense.
Part III
  • Squeezes and other risks
  • Market positioning
  • Bet correlation
  • Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits

Squeezes and other risks

We are going to cover three common risks that traders face: events; squeezes, asymmetric bets.

Events

Economic releases can cause large short-term volatility. The most famous is Non Farm Payrolls, which is the most widely watched measure of US employment levels and affects the price of many instruments.On an NFP announcement currencies like EURUSD might jump (or drop) 100 pips no problem.
This is fine and there are trading strategies that one may employ around this but the key thing is to be aware of these releases.You can find economic calendars all over the internet - including on this site - and you need only check if there are any major releases each day or week.
For example, if you are trading off some intraday chart and scalping a few pips here and there it would be highly sensible to go into a known data release flat as it is pure coin-toss and not the reason for your trading. It only takes five minutes each day to plan for the day ahead so do not get caught out by this. Many retail traders get stopped out on such events when price volatility is at its peak.

Squeezes

Short squeezes bring a lot of danger and perhaps some opportunity.
The story of VW and Porsche is the best short squeeze ever. Throughout these articles we've used FX examples wherever possible but in this one instance the concept (which is also highly relevant in FX) is best illustrated with an historical lesson from a different asset class.
A short squeeze is when a participant ends up in a short position they are forced to cover. Especially when the rest of the market knows that this participant can be bullied into stopping out at terrible levels, provided the market can briefly drive the price into their pain zone.
​
There's a reason for the car, don't worry
Hedge funds had been shorting VW stock. However the amount of VW stock available to buy in the open market was actually quite limited. The local government owned a chunk and Porsche itself had bought and locked away around 30%. Neither of these would sell to the hedge-funds so a good amount of the stock was un-buyable at any price.
If you sell or short a stock you must be prepared to buy it back to go flat at some point.
To cut a long story short, Porsche bought a lot of call options on VW stock. These options gave them the right to purchase VW stock from banks at slightly above market price.
Eventually the banks who had sold these options realised there was no VW stock to go out and buy since the German government wouldn’t sell its allocation and Porsche wouldn’t either. If Porsche called in the options the banks were in trouble.
Porsche called in the options which forced the shorts to buy stock - at whatever price they could get it.
The price squeezed higher as those that were short got massively squeezed and stopped out. For one brief moment in 2008, VW was the world’s most valuable company. Shorts were burned hard.
​
Incredible event
Porsche apparently made $11.5 billion on the trade. The BBC described Porsche as “a hedge fund with a carmaker attached.”
If this all seems exotic then know that the same thing happens in FX all the time. If everyone in the market is talking about a key level in EURUSD being 1.2050 then you can bet the market will try to push through 1.2050 just to take out any short stops at that level. Whether it then rallies higher or fails and trades back lower is a different matter entirely.
This brings us on to the matter of crowded trades. We will look at positioning in more detail in the next section. Crowded trades are dangerous for PNL. If everyone believes EURUSD is going down and has already sold EURUSD then you run the risk of a short squeeze.
For additional selling to take place you need a very good reason for people to add to their position whereas a move in the other direction could force mass buying to cover their shorts.
A trading mentor when I worked at the investment bank once advised me:
Always think about which move would cause the maximum people the maximum pain. That move is precisely what you should be watching out for at all times.

Asymmetric losses

Also known as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. This risk has caught out many a retail trader. Sometimes it is referred to as a "negative skew" strategy.
Ideally what you are looking for is asymmetric risk trade set-ups: that is where the downside is clearly defined and smaller than the upside. What you want to avoid is the opposite.
A famous example of this going wrong was the Swiss National Bank de-peg in 2012.
The Swiss National Bank had said they would defend the price of EURCHF so that it did not go below 1.2. Many people believed it could never go below 1.2 due to this. Many retail traders therefore opted for a strategy that some describe as ‘picking up pennies in front of a steam-roller’.
They would would buy EURCHF above the peg level and hope for a tiny rally of several pips before selling them back and keep doing this repeatedly. Often they were highly leveraged at 100:1 so that they could amplify the profit of the tiny 5-10 pip rally.
Then this happened.
​
Something that changed FX markets forever
The SNB suddenly did the unthinkable. They stopped defending the price. CHF jumped and so EURCHF (the number of CHF per 1 EUR) dropped to new lows very fast. Clearly, this trade had horrific risk : reward asymmetry: you risked 30% to make 0.05%.
Other strategies like naively selling options have the same result. You win a small amount of money each day and then spectacularly blow up at some point down the line.

Market positioning

We have talked about short squeezes. But how do you know what the market position is? And should you care?
Let’s start with the first. You should definitely care.
Let’s imagine the entire market is exceptionally long EURUSD and positioning reaches extreme levels. This makes EURUSD very vulnerable.
To keep the price going higher EURUSD needs to attract fresh buy orders. If everyone is already long and has no room to add, what can incentivise people to keep buying? The news flow might be good. They may believe EURUSD goes higher. But they have already bought and have their maximum position on.
On the flip side, if there’s an unexpected event and EURUSD gaps lower you will have the entire market trying to exit the position at the same time. Like a herd of cows running through a single doorway. Messy.
We are going to look at this in more detail in a later chapter, where we discuss ‘carry’ trades. For now this TRYJPY chart might provide some idea of what a rush to the exits of a crowded position looks like.
​
A carry trade position clear-out in action
Knowing if the market is currently at extreme levels of long or short can therefore be helpful.
The CFTC makes available a weekly report, which details the overall positions of speculative traders “Non Commercial Traders” in some of the major futures products. This includes futures tied to deliverable FX pairs such as EURUSD as well as products such as gold. The report is called “CFTC Commitments of Traders” ("COT").
This is a great benchmark. It is far more representative of the overall market than the proprietary ones offered by retail brokers as it covers a far larger cross-section of the institutional market.
Generally market participants will not pay a lot of attention to commercial hedgers, which are also detailed in the report. This data is worth tracking but these folks are simply hedging real-world transactions rather than speculating so their activity is far less revealing and far more noisy.
You can find the data online for free and download it directly here.
​
Raw format is kinda hard to work with
​
However, many websites will chart this for you free of charge and you may find it more convenient to look at it that way. Just google “CFTC positioning charts”.
​
But you can easily get visualisations
You can visually spot extreme positioning. It is extremely powerful.
Bear in mind the reports come out Friday afternoon US time and the report is a snapshot up to the prior Tuesday. That means it is a lagged report - by the time it is released it is a few days out of date. For longer term trades where you hold positions for weeks this is of course still pretty helpful information.
As well as the absolute level (is the speculative market net long or short) you can also use this to pick up on changes in positioning.
For example if bad news comes out how much does the net short increase? If good news comes out, the market may remain net short but how much did they buy back?
A lot of traders ask themselves “Does the market have this trade on?” The positioning data is a good method for answering this. It provides a good finger on the pulse of the wider market sentiment and activity.
For example you might say: “There was lots of noise about the good employment numbers in the US. However, there wasn’t actually a lot of position change on the back of it. Maybe everyone who wants to buy already has. What would happen now if bad news came out?”
In general traders will be wary of entering a crowded position because it will be hard to attract additional buyers or sellers and there could be an aggressive exit.
If you want to enter a trade that is showing extreme levels of positioning you must think carefully about this dynamic.
​

Bet correlation

Retail traders often drastically underestimate how correlated their bets are.
Through bitter experience, I have learned that a mistake in position correlation is the root of some of the most serious problems in trading. If you have eight highly correlated positions, then you are really trading one position that is eight times as large.
Bruce Kovner of hedge fund, Caxton Associates
For example, if you are trading a bunch of pairs against the USD you will end up with a simply huge USD exposure. A single USD-trigger can ruin all your bets. Your ideal scenario — and it isn’t always possible — would be to have a highly diversified portfolio of bets that do not move in tandem.
Look at this chart. Inverted USD index (DXY) is green. AUDUSD is orange. EURUSD is blue.
​
Chart from TradingView
So the whole thing is just one big USD trade! If you are long AUDUSD, long EURUSD, and short DXY you have three anti USD bets that are all likely to work or fail together.
The more diversified your portfolio of bets are, the more risk you can take on each.
There’s a really good video, explaining the benefits of diversification from Ray Dalio.
A systematic fund with access to an investable universe of 10,000 instruments has more opportunity to make a better risk-adjusted return than a trader who only focuses on three symbols. Diversification really is the closest thing to a free lunch in finance.
But let’s be pragmatic and realistic. Human retail traders don’t have capacity to run even one hundred bets at a time. More realistic would be an average of 2-3 trades on simultaneously. So what can be done?
For example:
  • You might diversify across time horizons by having a mix of short-term and long-term trades.
  • You might diversify across asset classes - trading some FX but also crypto and equities.
  • You might diversify your trade generation approach so you are not relying on the same indicators or drivers on each trade.
  • You might diversify your exposure to the market regime by having some trades that assume a trend will continue (momentum) and some that assume we will be range-bound (carry).
And so on. Basically you want to scan your portfolio of trades and make sure you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. If some trades underperform others will perform - assuming the bets are not correlated - and that way you can ensure your overall portfolio takes less risk per unit of return.
The key thing is to start thinking about a portfolio of bets and what each new trade offers to your existing portfolio of risk. Will it diversify or amplify a current exposure?

Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits

One common mistake is to get bored and restless and put on crap trades. This just means trades in which you have low conviction.
It is perfectly fine not to trade. If you feel like you do not understand the market at a particular point, simply choose not to trade.
Flat is a position.
Do not waste your bullets on rubbish trades. Only enter a trade when you have carefully considered it from all angles and feel good about the risk. This will make it far easier to hold onto the trade if it moves against you at any point. You actually believe in it.
Equally, you need to set monthly limits. A standard limit might be a 10% account balance stop per month. At that point you close all your positions immediately and stop trading till next month.
​
Be strict with yourself and walk away
Let’s assume you started the year with $100k and made 5% in January so enter Feb with $105k balance. Your stop is therefore 10% of $105k or $10.5k . If your account balance dips to $94.5k ($105k-$10.5k) then you stop yourself out and don’t resume trading till March the first.
Having monthly calendar breaks is nice for another reason. Say you made a load of money in January. You don’t want to start February feeling you are up 5% or it is too tempting to avoid trading all month and protect the existing win. Each month and each year should feel like a clean slate and an independent period.
Everyone has trading slumps. It is perfectly normal. It will definitely happen to you at some stage. The trick is to take a break and refocus. Conserve your capital by not trading a lot whilst you are on a losing streak. This period will be much harder for you emotionally and you’ll end up making suboptimal decisions. An enforced break will help you see the bigger picture.
Put in place a process before you start trading and then it’ll be easy to follow and will feel much less emotional. Remember: the market doesn’t care if you win or lose, it is nothing personal.
When your head has cooled and you feel calm you return the next month and begin the task of building back your account balance.

That's a wrap on risk management

Thanks for taking time to read this three-part chapter on risk management. I hope you enjoyed it. Do comment in the replies if you have any questions or feedback.
Remember: the most important part of trading is not making money. It is not losing money. Always start with that principle. I hope these three notes have provided some food for thought on how you might approach risk management and are of practical use to you when trading. Avoiding mistakes is not a sexy tagline but it is an effective and reliable way to improve results.
Next up I will be writing about an exciting topic I think many traders should look at rather differently: news trading. Please follow on here to receive notifications and the broad outline is below.
News Trading Part I
  • Introduction
  • Why use the economic calendar
  • Reading the economic calendar
  • Knowing what's priced in
  • Surveys
  • Interest rates
  • First order thinking vs second order thinking
News Trading Part II
  • Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases
  • Data surprise index
  • Using recent events to predict future reactions
  • Buy the rumour, sell the fact
  • The mysterious 'position trim' effect
  • Reversals
  • Some key FX releases
***
​
Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
submitted by getmrmarket to Forex [link] [comments]

H1 Backtest of ParallaxFX's BBStoch system

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:

And now for the fun. Results!

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):
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.
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:
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.
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):
Looking at the data for these rules, test results are:
I'll be sure to let everyone know how it goes!

Other Technical Details

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.

Insanely detailed spreadsheet notes

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

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:

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!

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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