Over the last couple of years I’ve been working on a number of trading systems and now trade forex based on some of the patterns I discovered myself.
I’m currently trying to simplify these patterns so other people can follow them. They work, there’s not doubt about it, I trade them every day – it’s just that I want people to be able to follow them without the need for whizzy software.
I’m getting there and am hoping to get some testers on the case pretty soon.
How to create your own forex trading system
Developing your own trading systems can be a rewarding process, especially when you go from an idea to a test and then on to live trading and find that it works exactly as it should do.
There are many ways you can create your own system and you don’t always need to have programming or coding knowledge.
Here’s a selection of the best tools:
Ninja Trader. My favourite weapon of choice is Ninja Trader. The software is absolutely free and you can grab free end-of-day data for stock markets to test out your ideas. For more advanced or intraday stuff, you may need to purchase extra historical data (I’ve got all forex market data going back to 1991) and a live data feed.
I previously reviewed Gary Ford’s book on system development, which is highly recommended. This uses Ninja Trader as its reference point throughout.
Wealth Lab. A good piece of software with a few more add-ons available than Ninja. However given the cost oat $799, it’s not that much better than Ninja Trader which is free.
Tradesignal.com. A neat little online trading program that allows you to create and test your own trading systems on various markets. From around £40 per month, it’s user-friendly and won’t break the bank.
IG Index. The spread betting firm, IG index make use of the charting functions from http://www.prorealtime.com/en/ for their advanced charting. You can create your own alerts and indicators as well as testing them using the ‘assisted creation’ mode. It’s pretty good considering you can get it all free – provided you make a couple of trades a month.
Meta Trader: The ubiquitous, free forex broker platform allows you to create all manner of custom indicators and robots, and test them yourself. The only draw back is that you do need coding skills to be able to do it.
Hope this helps.
Remember to test your strategies before putting live money on them. I’ve been there and bought the T-shirt with that mistake.
