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 on the PGA tour’ What…? Don’t you think it’d be a bit […]...
A question arrives from a TN reader: ‘Aren’t you contradicting yourself when you’re dissing off the peg “forex systems” at the very same time you’re promoting the use of them?’ It’s a fair point and one that probably needs a bit of explanation. My outlook can be stated like this: -> System = closed-book, inflexible […]...
Our lives are ruled by cycles. The annual cycle of the Earth circling around the Sun… The cycle of the Moon… The monthly cycle of your salary landing in your bank – hooray! And then watching it go whizzing out again as the cycle of direct debits and standing orders kick in – boo! The […]...
Remember Nav Sarao… The otherwise unassuming 36 year old trader operating from his parent’s house in the London suburbs who was scooped up and arrested back in 2015? They blamed him for single-handedly causing the 2010 ‘flash crash’ in the US equities markets which wiped £570 billion from the value of US companies inside 5 […]...
You see them all the time these days in stocks and shares. It’s not unusual to see a market sell-off insanely only to bounce back moments later. They even have their own special name: flash crashes. It’s easy to blame the big players – investment banks and the like – for ganging up on us […]...
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 specific moment in time it might make perfect sense. The logic […]...
Did you know Liverpool had one of the first futures exchanges in the world? You probably knew that import and export was a big part of the city’s success in the nineteenth century. And yes, sadly, the slave trade played a big part too. But I had no idea of the history of futures trading […]...
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 no need to reinvent the wheel. In fact, there’s no reason why you can’t build your […]...
I was flicking through an old trading journal of mine the other day. It’s a bit tattered around the edges but those pages contain absolute pearls of wisdom. Now don’t worry, I’m not blowing my own trumpet here. These notes were from when I was still trying to figure things out. I’d been reading all […]...
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 we need to when trading from […]...
An email arrives from a particularly peeved trader. Two sentences he wrote say it all… (1)‘ It’s almost magical the way I can see several promising trades but choose only to trade the two that stop me out, while the others usually go on to win.’ Now doesn’t that sound like a familiar story? If you’ve […]...
Autumn 2006. It was a Friday. Rumours were flying… there were big stop orders sitting 32 ticks below the current T-Bond price and the big players were going to go after them. All I had to do was jump in and get involved too. It made sense on the chart and I could smell the […]...
Have you ever done the infamous ‘Spreadsheet Millionaire’ exercise? It’s where you layout a foolproof master plan that proves just how quickly you’re going to trade your way to a million. All by averaging ‘just’ a 2% daily return. Because how hard can it be? That’s only, like, one winning trade a day. Sounds easy, […]...
You might run candlesticks as your day-to-day default chart, but when you’re doing your bigger-picture analysis you might look at line charts and bar charts too. They can all help bring additional bits and pieces to your attention: patterns or price features you might not always spot so easily when running your regular candlesticks. So […]...
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 noticed I lean more towards pure ‘Price Action’ when it comes to technical analysis. And that means […]...
