Trading Setups

[Guest AbDXB1345]

HI All

Just want to give a quick shout out to @Caseynotes and @TrendFollower, after some suggestions on reading materials and research I have managed to develop a trading strategy that seems to be working for me on a higher probability level than what I was doing before. I am still very much trading on Demo but am confident enough to start my "migration" to the real world!

I thought a good topic to discuss (and I tried to find a thread with this info already) is a discussion around the trading desk setups that some of our more experienced traders are using. This is purely from a beginners perspective as I appreciate the setup and costs can be as unlimited as one likes.

I am currently trading on the IG online platform, I really like it due to its simplicity but it obviously has a number of limitations too. The real items I would like to discuss here is the hardware setups that traders are using or find an absolute must.

1. Laptop vs desktop
2. If Laptop/desktop, what brand or model
3. Additional screens
4. Printer
5. White board 
6. etc

As I mentioned above I am currently trading using the IG online platform and it works well, save that it can be jumpy if my laptop starts to catch a speed wobble (HP so nothing fancy). Also if I start operating multiple screens, would I need to open multiple windows of the trading platform and would this work? These are the questions I am currently having.

Cheers to all!

[Caseynotes]

@AbDXB1345, best of luck. Just to add without repetition.

Laptop or desktop doesn't really matter so long as you have enough memory to run as many charts as you need. I use 2 screens simply because if looking at small time frame charts you don't want to miss anything, not such an issue if using 4 hr and over. If using multiple screens you can drag the page across to double the work space or have multiple work spaces on multiple screens.

Plan and strategy is important but not as important as having a measuring tool to evaluate if they are working or not, so a spreadsheet that calculates win/loss ratio and risk/reward ratio is a must, so that after 50 demo trades my strategy has a 50% win rate and a R/R of 1:2.3, any plot above the red line on the graph is a profitable strategy.

 

MT4 does all this for you automatically which is a useful feature.

Always start with the smallest bet size available (often less on MT4 than the web based platform) and work up if successful, most people start using the maximum and work down because of lack of success initially and a rapidly disappearing account.

 

[Guest AbDXB1345]

Thanks @TrendFollower and @Caseynotes

I have a trading strategy in place that is proving to be good for me in the demo, it relies on momentum and diverging moving averages. I'm never looking for the 20% profits, more so looking for consistency and the ability to reach a target daily/weekly $ profit rate.

Thanks again for all your advice on the forum

[Caseynotes]

That's alright @AbDXB1345,  but having daily/weekly targets doesn't work and only encourages drift away from the plan and strategy trying to meet them, let the strategy play out in it's own time.

Not sure what you mean by 'not looking for 20% profits'? A 50% win rate means of the 50 trades 25 were winners and 25 were losers, that win rate will mean the strategy is still profitable so long as the reward is at least 1.5 x the amount risked over all 50 trades. The risk is the amount of your stop loss, the amount you are willing to lose if the trade goes wrong, the reward is the amount of profit on the winning trades.