Sometimes you’re simply out of step with the market. It could be your strategy just isn’t suited to current conditions (even though you are executing with iron-willed discipline). Or it could be caused by something more personal: you might be a bit...
You might know I’m not a massive fan of technical indicators… (I’m talking about things like Stochastic Indicators, MACD, RSI and all those other exotic sounding tools.) If you’ve been following my stuff for a while you’ve probably...
There’s a not-so-secret secret to achieving smooth growth to your trading account that I’d like to tell you about. Well, there’s more than one ‘secret,’ actually. But let’s take things one step at a time. So, for today, imagine a...
It can be a real pain to carefully record the details of every single trade you take. But keeping accurate records, and referring back to them frequently, is hands-down the fastest way I know to improve your performance. If you capture a record of all your trading...
“If I’d only exited at hard target I’d have made twice as much on this trade!” [Two hours later…] “If I’d only trailed a stop on this trade I’d have trebled my profit. The exit at hard target has cost me dearly on this...
Imagine… you’ve learned to swing a golf club. You can strike the ball pretty good. 7 times out of 10 it even goes in the approximate direction you wanted. ‘Great stuff,’ you tell yourself. ‘Time to pack my bags and join the professionals...
It’s easy to ‘marry’ an opinion. The trouble is it blinkers you to any other possibility but the one you foresee happening. With trading, you might analyse the markets yourself or you might invest in the outlook of a market commentator. And at a...
Trading is a very personal endeavour. What suits one person perfectly might torment and irritate another because it doesn’t fit their trading ‘personality’. But when you can chop bits from one system and slot them straight into another there’s...
Our natural response to risk and uncertainty is excellent at keeping you away from harm in many real-world situations. It is what has kept the human race alive for millennia. But it’s not so good when it comes to working with risk as a tool to make money, like...
You might know I’m not a massive fan of technical indicators… (I’m talking about things like Stochastic Indicators, MACD, RSI and all those other exotic sounding tools.) If you’ve been following my stuff for a while you’ve probably...
You know, there’s a lot you can achieve by observing the natural world. And I’m not sure if I’ve been overdoing the BBC4 documentaries recently but it’s really been on my mind. I watched an engineering firm in Africa put a super-efficient...
There are LOTS of new traders in the markets at the moment. It’s a knock-on effect of people working from home or being furloughed from their jobs. So I’ve been nosing around some online trading communities. I’ve been trying to get a feel for what...
In an ideal world the market moves nice and smooth. It sets off strong in one direction (up or down, we’re not fussy) and we wait for a pause. We look for a little pullback. And then we enter the trade. This is the Continuation signal we’ve been examining...
An email arrives from a worried reader… He’d been watching an online trading video where it told him – shock! – that financial markets were being manipulated. That sometimes, when the price went up, it shouldn’t really be going up. And...
I have never seen anything like it in my life… In fact, I don’t think anyone else can claim to have seen it either! Last night, as the May 2020 Crude Oil Futures contract approached expiry, the price went NEGATIVE for the first time ever. At tea time here in the UK...
I’m not going to turn this week’s email into yet another “what to do in the face of Covid-19” missive. I’m sure your inbox is crammed full of that kind of stuff already. Mine certainly is! What I’m going to suggest instead is that...
As traders we’re taught to perform in an almost robotic way. We each have our system for approaching the markets and here are many different systems. But is such a ‘mechanical’ way of doing things really best? In 99% of cases I think it is. But I...
Let me tell you about ‘scaled exits’. There is nothing new about scaled exits. You’ll read about the old masters of trading scaling out of their trades, they were doing it a hundred years ago or more. And scaling has always been a permanent fixture...
Calling day traders: I have something very interesting for you today. It’s a very interesting tool developed by one of my favourite traders: Jason Alexander. You probably already know Jason as the creator of Money Line, Renko Trader, Forex Fightback and AutoFX amongst...
Let me remind you of the 7 Habits of Underperforming Traders: They don’t respect the market They trade for accuracy instead of consistency They have unrealistic expectations They give up too soon They overtrade They don’t manage risk properly They are not...
I first set off trying to find my own way through the trading jungle, just like you probably have. I bought the books, followed the ‘gurus’, set about looking for the Holy Grail (you know, the one system to rule them all!) But it was only when I stepped back and took...
Let me tell you a bit about Richard Dennis… If you’ve not heard of him before Dennis was one of the guys behind the infamous ‘Turtle Traders’ experiment. He had a bet with his partner William Eckhardt that traders were made, not born, and he...
Let’s face it – it’s so tempting to find amazing entry points for trades… But how much time do you spend considering your management of open positions? The management of your trades is where you’ll almost always find (or lose) the...
How do you learn to be a really good trader? A typical experience might be to learn a trading strategy, apply it to a demo account (or paper trade it) and then take it live once some virtual profits have been seen. And that’s a perfectly sensible way to go about...
