Around this time of year, we often review the past year and also look forward to the next. We look at achievements and goals and at ways to become a better trader in 2020.
Change is the only constant
There are many ways to step up my trading game but for me, 3 themes stand out. In the past, these 3 things have resulted in the biggest positive change in my own trading.
As we are moving into the new year, I wanted to share these with you.
Read More
10 min readLast week, I tweeted what I see as my trade entry process. This was the tweet:
For every trade, I structure my process from 1 to 6. Each step isn’t possible without the previous one. Anytime, certain price action can invalidate the entire setup and make me abandon it.
1. Analysis
2. Directional bias
3. Trade plan
4. Entry filters
5. Entry criteria
6. Trade— (@smartfxlearning) January 4, 2019
Since then, I got so many questions that I wanted to take a moment to write in more detail how I use this process to make better trading decisions.
6 min readIf you ask me how much pips I made last month, I will tell you I don’t know.
But I will know my R-multiple of last month: a 6.1R profit. This R number often results in confused looks. What does R stand for?
In order to figure this out, we need to take a step back and look at our performance and its relationship with risk.
When you say that you made a 50 pip profit, that only tells me part of the story. The key piece of information that is missing here is how much you risked to make this profit. After all, a 50 pip profit is a good result if you had a 25 pip stop loss but if your stop loss was 200 pips, you risked a lot to get a relatively small reward.
7 min readImagine the following scenario: you’re starting the year, completely motivated. This is going to be YOUR trading year! This is the year where you will make it happen.
When you look at your trading, a few things need to be fixed, though. You know you should start a trading journal. You need to stop revenge trading. Cutting losses is still hard to do. And really, your trade management is pretty subjective so your trading plan needs some work.
You need some solid trading habits but more importantly, you need to look at ways to stick to those newly created habits. Everyone who has ever tried to lose weight, stop smoking or exercise knows this all too well:
It’s easy to start a habit but harder to stick to it
7 min readThis article is part of a series. Here are the other parts:
Welcome to the fifth part of our MetaTrader4 Expert Advisor course! If you haven’t done so, please have a look at the previous instalments.
[includeme file=”wp-content/post-includes/expertadvisorvault.php”]
We’ve been doing pretty well with our expert advisor. We created a fully functioning EA that can make buy and sell orders, and also can trail our stops. However, up until now, we’ve always used a fixed stop loss of 50 pips.
That might often be ok but what if you want a dynamic stop loss? In order to better reflect the market dynamics, we could use a volatility indicator such as ATR (Average True Range) to determine our stop-loss.
When we use dynamic stop loss distances, we still want to keep our risk per trade the same. We do this using dynamic position sizing. In other words, we will change the lot size per trade to reflect our desire to use a 1% stop loss. Let’s see how we can add this to our Wall-E expert advisor!
9 min readHi traders! 👋 Last week was a solid trading week and we’ve got some nice results from the setups I published. It feels like the market has come back alive this week! With a total of 9 trades, I could end the week with a 6.59R profit. Moreover, the best feeling ever is to see my Trade Advisor students make real profits too, well done! 👊
This is my performance overview for August:
This brings the running total for August on a 15.98R profit, with still a few trading days to go. After a couple of months with more moderate profits, it seems that the market is back with us! This goes to show that regardless of summer months, I just trade my plan and that’s it. Imagine skipping August just because of the summer months and missing out on these very nice profits!
5 min read👋 Hi traders! After another week of trading, it’s a wrap! It was quite a challenging week with a trade in USDNOK not working out but a good trade in AUDCHF that resulted in a 2R profit. However, we still managed to come out on top and end the week with a profit. 💪
As we prepare for the new trading week, I want to share a number of setups that are part of the Trade Advisor program. The students actually got 12 setups and this is a selection of 5 of those setups. I hope you find them useful!
If you want to learn everything about the strategy, including how to place stop loss and take profits and how to manage trades, check out the program (which currently has a one-week free trial)! Have a good trading week everyone!
7 min read👋 Hi traders! After last week, we’re back to reviewing our trades and planning for the upcoming week. How has trading been for you in the past 5 days?
As we roll into June, the Trade Advisor students again had a pretty nice trading week. I closed the week with a +4.89R profit and this makes me end the month of May with a nice +8.17R profit. Let’s go over the trades I took right now in the trade review section!
5 min readHi traders, what’s up! 👋 After a semi-holiday week in Kyoto, ⛩ I’m back in Tokyo and ready to rock the charts again! 🔥
This week, the Trade Advisor students have received 16 (!) setups and some of them are real beauties! Many of them are on the 4H charts, but there are trading opportunities on the 1H and daily as well, so there’s something for everyone!
In order to show how the Trade Advisor students and I trade, I wanted to share a few of those setups. Feel free to use these reversal setups as inspiration on what to trade next week 😊 But enough talk, let’s get started!
7 min readHi there, traders! Last week was a bit slower than usual. Friday was basically a day off due to Good Friday holiday and most of the setups played out on the 4H and daily timeframes.
This made for a more relaxing trading week and even though the number of setups that materialized was a bit less, we were still able to find some trading opportunities to get a decent enough result.
Last week, I had three winning trades and a few smaller losses. Due to my habit of cutting losses fast, I still ended the week positively with a 2.38R profit.