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Perhaps slightly going off topic but sort of makes me wonder why the obsession with Forex. Whenever you hear the word trading, Forex always comes up but to me, not that any market can be divided into best for beginner traders but surely Forex is not what you should be looking at to start with.

Yeah I get you on your last point. The question was perhaps too simple. Your distinction between stock markets and commodities over longer time frames e.g. weeks+ I assume is because at that scale a trending method perhaps wouldn't work because there isn't so much upward bias but over shorter times they behave more alike. For instance i'd feel more confident shorting a Forex market more frequently than a stock market because I always feel like you're fighting against the flow (overall) when shorting stocks.

Probably both 😀 Interesting split in opinions here. There's so much variation in the markets that probably all opinions are valid some of the time.

Ok thanks I think that comes as a relief to me as I've been watching one market in particular for some time and at least within that time i feel I am"getting to know" how it behaves. Trends I can make some sense of although when the trend ends your bit like now what.. So I would imagine being able to adapt to the conditions is beneficial but that might require multiple strategies then.

Hi all, I often hear people say the markets are all the same and so if they feel that way their strategy must work equally well on all of them. However, when I look at the markets I don't think stock markets behave the same as Forex for example. I look at Forex and can't make heads or tails of what's going on but I see more structure and repeated patterns in the stock markets. Is this all in my head and I'm just interpreting what I'm seeing or are they truly different and therefore different strategies are required.

The funny thing is though that this could be a sensible risk, stop distance depending on the market and your time frame of trading. Certainly if you were trading over weeks then a stop in the several hundreds to a thousand doesn't seem ridiculous if you use a multiple of the ATR or a long term MA. But for every trade.. The psychology would be hard to deal with I think.

Thanks for your opinion. It was funny because I posted that message and then got to a paragraph in Van k tharps book last night where he discusses this very scenario. Or at least what he says is a naive notion of just risking 1% of an account as a money management tool and not to confuse this with position sizing.

Hi all, just wondering what you should be thinking when sizing a position. Say you have a relatively large account relative to your position size choice e.g. if you had £100k and you said you'd only risk 1% per trade then 1% is £1000. If you chose a position size of 50p, 1000/0.5 =2000 then that's a stop potentially at -2000 points from your entry level. This is assuming there's is no logical place to put the stop, you're just risking 1%. Now I haven't done this but I would suspect at least on stock markets you'd require a pretty serious price drop for this to be hit, e.g. FTSE would need to fall about 30%. I know it happens but it is a fairly rare event. Over thing that wouldn't make sense is where to put your profit target as to achieve 1R+ would be tough or would take a long time for the market to move 2000 points so you'd have to be satisfied with much less than 1R winners I suspect. Then it would come down to taking profit each time at much less than 1R. Does any of this makes any sense. Would depend how many less than 1R winners you had Vs how often there stop would be hit. I guess you could look historically at how often to see that kind of drop. I know last year was one for most markets.

Ah ok so there is a time limit really thanks for that, important point.

Great thanks

Does this essentially mean that a SB will not expire or be closed automatically purely for to date restrictions? Thanks

Also sorry if my profit target was hit it would equate to 1.76R, might be a big if.

I'm essentially looking to get into long positions over days with the low being somewhere near the bottom of the Bollinger band set to 20 days, 2 SD. I'm using the 1hr chart to enter so require multiple goes and hence my R is the total of those attempts. That's fine so long as I know that my profit target is realistic and might be close to be the top of the upper band and from recent history when the market hits the bottom it will often then go to the top or at least from how the market had been behaving recently it doesn't seem unreasonable. Assume the stop does not follow up at this stage or at least to break even for this trade (entry attempt) which could be 1R but doesn't mean much given the potential accruing loss of multiple entry attempts (eg 6 attempts would be 6R).

And there in lies the rub. I like some idea of where I'm headed hence having a profit target but it kind of rules out those times where if you d just had a stop loss you might have done better

It also raises the question for me of this idea that your risk 1-2% of your account per "trade". But what that doesn't say is if you don't get into a position having risked 1-2% then what. So what you thought was happening isn't or it could be it is it's just you're timing is off. The idea of abandoning it because you already lost 1-2% I struggle with because there's a good chance you turn your back and it happens while you're not looking. This very much suggests that I know what the market will do I just don't know when which is a huge assumption of course.

Yeah thanks, just to clarify I mean it's 1% per trade but really the risk is a multiples of this. E.g I took 8 trades to get into a position so my risk might be 8R but the profit target is 16R 16-8 = 8R profit. Ha all assuming it reaches the target which as you say is probably a big ask. Testing is hard, especially if you're doing or manually, the discipline required is crazy Andy of you're trades last days of could take months to have any idea of expectantly.

Hi all, I was wondering whether of you have a certain confidence that a market will reach a certain price level but the price is currently falling, can you use this price level or take profit level as a basis for how much you can afford to risk? For example if I think the market will move £400 higher in the not too distance future and each time i try to get into a long position I risk £25-£50 (1-2% of my account) then I could consider that in order for this idea to fail and i lose money I would need 16 trades with a risk of £25 to get back to break even assuming the price reaches the level I expect. Is there any logic in this? Obviously the main issue is if I need too many trades to get into the position then there might not be enough movement left to make a profit.

Hi guru, indices only close at weekends so I would need to know where I was putting all my orders well in advance and that's not what I wanted to do. It's ok it was a bad idea anyway

I think I'm one of those people trying to be clever and think of some new way to trade the markets and your simple system works better. Point proved it might be overly simplistic to you but I wondered if your R/R ratio and method of moving the stop is actually as good as any other method? Our similar to what you'd do in reality?

Hi all, excuse my nievety on the subject but given that a lot of buy and hold investments are index tracking. Would it be so bad to open a long futures position at the start of every month on an index and close it at the end of each month and repeat. It's not intelligent but given stock markets tend to close up more than they close down wouldn't you end up on top? Also your adding leverage into the mix to amplify the capital you can play with compared to investing where it may have less of an impact.

Just come across all your posts THT, very insightful thanks. If nothing else for me it's showed me I'm out of my depth and don't yet understand markets. Perhaps this will encourage me to actually learn from others and not to think I know what I'm doing as clearly I don't. The fact you have such tight stops amazes me but goes to show is possible when you read the markets correctly. Trading is a mad world from the outside looking in.

Thanks a lot, Trading view is essentially a rival to IG I assume? I came across this recently and wondered what others thought. https://tradologics.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA3NX_BRDQARIsALA3fIKAbmNi7azE8xuKL-LjAKgqCT-2HJl-c1Kgnu_lm3XXd-UNhfncuXgaAl_fEALw_wcB

Ok thanks, I'm guessing there are tutorials on how to code with it? Just need the time to learn. I wonder if you could pay someone to do it for you.. Perhaps that exists already.

Hi all, has anyone got any advice on how to back test a strategy automatically? Doing it manually backward or in present is pretty tedious in finding and I wonder if it wouldn't be so hard to automate it via one of the platforms. I've done some macro and script writing before but not in any major programming languages so something not too hardcore would be good. Thanks

Hi all, Anyone know why when you try to place orders late at night the minimum distance from the market you can place the order can be 300 points? Am I supposed to just stay up all night waiting for this to drop! Aloe off moves can start in the early hours so how can you get in on that.. Thanks for the advice.