We thought that this International Traders Conference was a good occasion to release a new edition of our "There are No secrets" special series of tips!
Here come the first 3 tips, by Walter Peters, guest speaker of this year's conference, Alberto Malini and Goçalo Moreira, attendees.
"How I Ran to the Exit for More Profits"
by Walter Peters, speaker of the ITC 2012 and Founder of FXJake
Most traders are not profitable. I certainly was not when I first started trading. It took me years to get to consistent profits. The big leap, for me, was learning how to manage exits. Exit strategies are nearly forgotten by most novice traders. This is unfortunate, because a simple, powerful exit strategy applied to *any* trading system can mean profits.
Don't believe this? Try it out yourself. Flip a coin for your entry strategy and apply a 3 to 1 exit strategy. For example, a 3 to 1 exit might risk 50 pips to make 150 pips. Try this on a demo account to demonstrate the power of a simple, powerful exit strategy. Try it over at least 20 trades.
Now think about this: if you spent more time thinking about your exits, would your trading become more consistently profitable?
"Reach your goal and put in the safe"
by Alberto Malini, attendee of the ITC 2012This is one of my trading "secrets", the "stop trading rule". I implemented it in 2008 on one of my accounts that had a weekly goal of 50 pips. At that time I was not happy with the too high volatility of the account, I had to do something, so I decided to stop live trading for the week and switch the account to demo once I met or surpass the weekly goal.
It was not easy to implement the rule for several reasons but had a good impact to stabilize the fluctuations of the account and helped to improve the average weekly retutn up to 75 pips.
“Trendlines are more than support and resistance tools”
by Gonçalo Moreira, Forex Advisor at FXstreet.comWonder why the market tends to meander most of the time? Did you notice how bursts of volatility tend to happen across several markets simultaneously? These are expressions of what we call “the market pulse”. I use confluences between technical levels to remain ahead of these turnarounds in prices. For example, by extending trendlines to the future and see where these trendlines cross each other. This bisection corresponds to a point in time and may mark the timing for a market turn. Check if trendlines crosses in several markets are clustered around the same moment in time. The more markets, the higher the probability of a pivotal turn to happen that day. Don’t take the price level of the cross into consideration, just the time.
When a market covers too much ground in a short time and an objective target is too close, it may start meandering, correcting and moving sideways. Similar to when you arrive too early to a date, what do you do? You go for a walk, but not too far so you don’t get late, right? Time has to be part of our trading and this is just a first step to start taking it more seriously.
