Quote from: stochastic on February 28, 2012, 06:23:51 PM

so many people on here have been using the EMA crossover and yet the guru already changed his strategy. Next time before trading, people should do their own backtesting and not choose a trading strategy based on a few trades of an anonymous person.

I will say one more thing about this. I absolutely agree with your conclusion. I stand by the advice I gave one month ago. Nowhere in this advice do I suggest anything but owning up to your financial decisions.

If you have been blindly following the system without going through the below steps, shame on you, you missed the whole point of this thread and you are robbing yourself of a chance at successful trading. Furthermore, you never learned the most important lessons of trading - consistency, confidence, discipline. Why are you trusting some random person on the internet with your finances? If you really cared about consistent profit and winning in the financial markets, you would put in the work necessary to trust your edge. Stop outsourcing your decision making and take responsibility for the money that you worked hard to earn.

I reiterate; what is more important: making a few hundred dollars trading a system you learned on the internet or developing the discipline to be a wise steward of whatever money is entrusted to you?

Quote from: Goomboo on January 21, 2012, 05:00:06 AM

Here is my tangible advice on how you can learn to be a trader:

1. Develop a system
--Learn about technical analysis until you have a conceptual framework of when to participate in market action
--When will you enter the markets?
--How much money will you risk per trade? Is this scalable and dynamic?
--When will you exit the markets? Both profitable exit and unprofitable exit.
--What hours of the day will you trade?

2. Backtest the system
--You must acquire or create some method of exploring if your system worked in the past.
--My suggestion is a demo feed connected to NinjaTrader and MB Trading. When you open a chart in NinjaTrader, you can click the arrow keys to move a candle onto and off the chart allowing you to see the price action as though it is happening live.
--Drag a chart of historical prices one candle at a time, recording your trades as though you actually were taking them in a spreadsheet. Chart your profit and loss. Analyze, scrutinize, and try to disprove your edge.
--I suggest you do this for 200-400 trades across as much data as you can get your hands on.

3. Forward test the system
--Once you have confidence that your strategy worked in the past, you must ensure that it works in the future.
--Open a demo account and trade fake money for at least two months to prove that your edge still exists

4. Live trade the system
--Start with tiny amounts of money and adhere to your system perfectly. The amount of capital at risk should be so small that if you lost it all, you wouldn't be financially disadvantaged.
--If you can continue to make profit for at least 30-50 more trades, you should be able to gradually add more and more capital to your system.

Of course this isn't easy and more than likely the majority of people won't do it. My purpose in saying this is just to let you know that this is what it takes if you wish to have a sustainable edge in the market.