Hello everyone. I've noticed a lot of us here are quite secretive about how we trade, especially when we comment on a fellow trader's post. We're quick to tell them what they're doing isn't the "right way" and they should go to babypips or YouTube. There's plenty of strategies we say but never really tell them what is working for us. There's a few others that are open to share their experience and thought processes when considering a valid trade. I have been quite open myself. But I'm always met with the same "well I see what you did is quite solid but what lead you to deem this trade valid for you? "
The answer is quite simple, I have a few things that I consider which are easy rules to follow. I realized that the simpler you make it, the easier it is for you to trade and move on with your day.
I highlight a few "valid" zones and go about my day. I've got an app that alerts me when price enters the zone on my watchlist. This is because I don't just rely on forex trading money, I doubt it would be wise to unless you're trading a 80% win rate strategy. Sometimes opportunities are there and we exploit them accordingly but sometimes we are either distracted by life issues and decide to not go into the markets stressed out or opportunities just aren't there or they are but your golden rules aren't quite met.
My rules are pretty simple, one of the prime golden rules is, "the risk is supposed to be very minimal to the reward I want to yield from that specific trade". i.e I can risk -50 pips for a +150 and more pips gain. My usual target starts at 1:2 but my most satisfying trade would be a 1:3 and above. This way I can lose 6/10 trades and still be profitable.
I make sure to keep my charts clean and simple so to understand what price does without the interference of indicators all over my charts. Not to say if you use indicators for confluence is a complete no-no. Each trader has their own style and I would be a narcissistic asshole if I assumed my way is superior than anybody else's.
NB: I'm doing this for anybody who has a vague or no idea of supply and demand. Everything here has made me profitable or at least break even but doesn't guarantee the same for you. This is just a scratch on the surface so do all you can for due diligence when it comes to understanding this topic with more depth and clear comprehension.
Supply and Demand valid zones properties; what to me makes me think "oh this zone has the potential to make me money, let me put it on my watchlist"? Mind when I say watchlist, not trade it. These are different in this sense.
👉With any zone, you're supposed to watch how price enters the zone, if there's a strong push in the opposite direction or whatever price action you're observing...only then does the zone becomes valid. YOU TRADE THE REACTION, NOT THE EXPECTATION Some setups just fail and that's okay because you didn't gamble. ✍
!!!IMPORTANT SUBJECT TO LEARN BEFORE YOU START SUPPLY AND DEMAND!!!
FTR. Failure to Return.(Please read on these if you haven't. They are extremely important in SnD). Mostly occur after an impulse move from a turning point. See attached examples: RBR(rally base rally)/DBD(drop base drop). They comprise of an initial move to a certain direction, a single candle in the opposite direction and followed by 2 or more strong candles in the initial direction. The opposite candle is your FTR(This is your zone) The first time price comes back(FTB) to a zone with an FTR has high possibilities to be a strong zone.
How to identify high quality zones according to my approach:

Engulfing zones; This is a personal favorite. For less errors I identify the best opportunities using the daily and 4H chart.

On the example given, I chose the GBPNZD trade idea I shared here a month ago I believe. A double bottom is easily identified, with the final push well defined Bullish Engulfing candle. To further solidify it are the strong wicks to show strong rejection and failure to close lower than the left shoulder. How we draw our zone is highlight the whole candle just before the Engulfing Candle. That's your zone. After drawing it, you also pay attention to the price that is right where the engulfing starts. You then set a price alert on your preferred app because usually price won't get there immediately. This is the second most important part of trading, PATIENCE. If you can be disciplined enough to not leave a limit order, or place a market order just because you trust your analysis...you've won half the battle because we're not market predictors, we're students. And we trade the reaction.
On the given example, price had already reached the zone of interest. Price action observed was, there was a rejection that drove it out of the zone, this is the reaction we want. Soon as price returns(retests)...this is your time to fill or kill moment, going to a 4H or 1H to make minimum risk trades. (See GBPNZD Example 1&2)

Liquidity Run; This approach looks very similar to the Engulfing zones. The difference is, price makes a few rejections on a higher timeframe level(Resistance or support). This gives the novice trader an idea that we've established a strong support or resistance, leading to them either selling or buying given the opportunity. Price then breaks that level trapping the support and resistance trader. At this point, breakout traders have stop orders below or above these levels to anticipate a breakout at major levels with stops just below the levels. Now that the market has enough traders trapped, it goes for the stop losses above or below support and resistance levels after taking them out, price comes back into the level to take out breakout traders' stop losses. This is where it has gathered enough liquidity to move it's desired direction.

The given example on the NZDJPY shows a strong level established twice. With the Bearish Engulfing movement, price leaves a supply zone...that's where we come in. We go to smaller timeframes for a well defined entry with our stops above the recent High targeting the next demand zone.
The second screenshot illustrates how high the reward of this approach is as well. Due diligence is required for this kind of approach because it's not uncommon but usually easily misinterpreted, which is why it's important it's on higher timeframes.
You can back test and establish your own rules on this but the RSI in this case was used for confluence. It showed a strong divergence which made it an even easier trade to take.
...and last but definitely not least,

Double Bottom/Top. (I've used double bottoms on examples because these are the only trades I shared here so we'll talk about double bottoms. Same but opposite rules apply on double tops).

The first most important rule here is when you look to your left, price should have made a Low, High and a Lower Low. This way, the last leg(shoulder) should be lower than the first. Some call this "Hidden Zones". When drawing the zones, the top border of the zone is supposed to be on the tip of the Low and covering the Lower Low. **The top border is usually the entry point.
On the first given example I shared this week, NZDCAD. After identifying the structure, you start to look for zones that could further verify the structure for confluence. Since this was identified on the 4H, when you zoom out to the daily chart...there's a very well defined demand zone (RBR). By now you should know how strong these kind of zones are especially if found on higher timeframes. That will now be your kill zone. You'll draw another zone within the bigger zone, if price doesn't close below it...you've got a trade. You'll put your stop losses outside the initial zone to avoid wicks(liquidity runs/stop hunts)
On the second image you'll see how price closed within the zone and rallied upwards towards your targets.
The second example is CHFJPY; although looking lower, there isn't a rally base rally that further solidifies our bias...price still respected the zone. Sometimes we just aren't going to get perfect setups but it is up to us to make calculated risks. In this case, risk is very minimal considering the potential profit.
The third example (EURNZD) was featured because sometimes you just can't always get perfect price action within your desired zone. Which is why it's important to wait for price to close before actually taking a trade. Even if you entered prematurely and were taken out of the trade, the rules are still respected hence a re entry would still yield you more than what you would have lost although revenge trading is wrong.
I hope you guys learnt something new and understand the thought process that leads to deciding which setups to trade from prepared supply and demand trade ideas. It's important to do your own research and back testing that matches your own trading style. I'm more of a swing trader hence I find my zones using the Daily and 4H chart. Keeping it simple and trading the reaction to your watched zone is the most important part about trading any strategy.
Important Note: The trade ideas on this post are trades shared on this sub ever since my being active only because I don't want to share ideas that I may have carefully picked to make my trading approach a blind pick from the millions on the internet. All these were shared here.
Here's a link to the trade ideas analyzed for this post specifically
Questions are welcome on the comments section. Thank you for reading till here.

Hello, just want to share my experience trading forex this week. So I had about $55 in my trading account and started trading GBPJPY on Monday. Won 3 out of 4 trades. But the big wins came from the XAUUSD dump this week in which I took a lot of trades and I got lucky. Felt surreal when my account reached $350 and should’ve probably stopped. But still decided to enter trades and that’s where things got pretty bad. I still have an open trade as of writing and my equity is down. XAUUSD is a beast! Been trading for almost a year now but not regularly and I only trade small amounts. This is the 1st time I made such gain and I’m not sure if I can do this again.
Here’s a screenshot: https://i.postimg.cc/ZY37hRJX/6-F33601-E-C36-A-4702-A31-B-49986022-D6-F6.jpg
Lesson learned:

Stop staring at the chart after entering a trade. Most of my loss happened because I closed the trade during a reversal. Had I waited and stuck to my plan, I would’ve TP’d most of them.
You don’t have to enter a trade all the damn time. (Bad case of FOMO in my part)
Set your goal and don’t be too greedy
Don’t trade on Fridays (had backtested this already but FOMO)

**UPDATE: Been getting DMs asking about my strategy. I use price action and I don’t use any indicators. I draw 1-2 trend lines based from previous strong support and resistance. I want a clean chart as it’s easier for me. I also did 5 years worth of backtesting. My biggest issue, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, are sticking to my trading plan (stop looking at the chart all the time after entering a trade, and closing too soon due to reversals), and discipline (don’t FOMO and setting my goals).
I still don’t consider myself as a “trader” per se, so please do your own backtesting. I was also looking for the “best strategy” when I was starting out, until I realize that your results would largely depend on your attitude vs your strategy.

Its a bit lengthy and I tried to condense it as much as I can. So take everything at a high level as each subject is has a lot more depth but fundamentally if you distill it down its just taking simple things and applying your experience using them to add nuance and better deploy them.
There are exceptions to everything that you will learn with experience or have already learned. If you know something extra or something to add to it to implement it better or more accurately. Then great! However, my intention of this post is just a high level overview. Trading can be far too nuanced to go into in this post and would take forever to type up every exception (not to mention the traders individual personality). If you take the general information as a starting point, hopefully you will learn the edge cases long the way and learn how to use the more effectively if you end up using them. I apologize in advice for any errors or typos.
Introduction After reflecting on my fun (cough) trading journey that was more akin to rolling around on broken glass and wondering if brown glass will help me predict market direction better than green glass. Buying a $100 indicator at 2 am when I was acting a fool, looking at it and going at and going "This is a piece of lagging crap, I miss out on a large part of the fundamental move and never using it for even one trade". All while struggling with massive over trading and bad habits because I would get bored watching a single well placed trade on fold for the day. Also, I wanted to get rich quick.
On top all of that I had a terminal Stage 4 case of FOMO on every time the price would move up and then down then back up. Just think about all those extra pips I could have trading both directions as it moves across the chart! I can just sell right when it goes down, then buy right before it goes up again. Its so easy right? Well, turns out it was not as easy as I thought and I lost a fair chunk of change and hit my head against the wall a lot until it clicked. Which is how I came up with a mixed bag of things that I now call "Trade the Trade" which helped support how I wanted to trade so I can still trade intra day price action like a rabid money without throwing away all my bananas.
Why Make This Post? - Core Topic of Discussion I wish to share a concept I came up with that helped me become a reliable trader. Support the weakness of how I like to trade. Also, explaining what I do helps reinforce my understanding of the information I share as I have to put words to it and not just use internalized processes. I came up with a method that helped me get my head straight when trading intra day.
I call it "Trade the Trade" as I am making mini trades inside of a trade setup I make from analysis on a higher timeframe that would take multiple days to unfold or longer. I will share information, principles, techniques I used and learned from others I talked to on the internet (mixed bag of folks from armatures to professionals, and random internet people) that helped me form a trading style that worked for me. Even people who are not good at trading can say something that might make it click in your head so I would absorbed all the information I could get.I will share the details of how I approach the methodology and the tools in my trading belt that I picked up by filtering through many tools, indicators strategies and witchcraft. Hopefully you read something that ends up helping you be a better trader. I learned a lot from people who make community posts so I wanted to give back now that I got my ducks in a row.
General Trading Advice If your struggling finding your own trading style, fixing weakness's in it, getting started, being reliably profitable or have no framework to build yourself higher with, hopefully you can use the below advice to help provide some direction or clarity to moving forward to be a better trader.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do not throw a million things on your chart from the get go or over analyzing what the market is doing while trying to learn the basics. Tons of stuff on your chart can actually slow your learning by distracting your focus on all your bells and whistles and not the price action.
PRICE ACTION. Learn how to read price action. Not just the common formations, but larger groups of bars that form the market structure. Those formations carry more weight the higher the time frame they form on. If struggle to understand what is going on or what your looking at, move to a higher time frame.
INDICATORS. If you do use them you should try to understand how every indicator you use calculates its values. Many indicators are lagging indicators, understanding how it calculates the values can help you learn how to identify the market structure before the indicator would trigger a signal . This will help you understand why the signal is a lagged signal. If you understand that you can easily learn to look at the price action right before the signal and learn to watch for that price action on top of it almost trigging a signal so you can get in at a better position and assume less downside risk. I recommend using no more than 1-2 indicators for simplicity, but your free to use as many as you think you think you need or works for your strategy/trading style.
PSYCOLOGY. First, FOMO is real, don't feed the beast. When you trade you should always have an entry and exit. If you miss your entry do not chase it, wait for a new entry. At its core trading is gambling and your looking for an edge against the house (the other market participants). With that in mind, treat as such. Do not risk more than you can afford to lose. If you are afraid to lose it will negatively effect your trade decisions. Finally, be honest with your self and bad trading happens. No one is going to play trade cop and keep you in line, that's your job.
TRADE DECISION MARKING: Before you enter any trade you should have an entry and exit area. As you learn price action you will get better entries and better exits. Use a larger zone and stop loss at the start while learning. Then you can tighten it up as you gain experience. If you do not have a area you wish to exit, or you are entering because "the markets looking like its gonna go up". Do not enter the trade. Have a reason for everything you do, if you cannot logically explain why then you probably should not be doing it.
ROBOTS/ALGOS: Loved by some, hated by many who lost it all to one, and surrounded by scams on the internet. If you make your own, find a legit one that works and paid for it or lost it all on a crappy one, more power to ya. I do not use robots because I do not like having a robot in control of my money. There is too many edge cases for me to be ok with it.However, the best piece of advice about algos was that the guy had a algo/robot for each market condition (trending/ranging) and would make personalized versions of each for currency pairs as each one has its own personality and can make the same type of movement along side another currency pair but the price action can look way different or the move can be lagged or leading. So whenever he does his own analysis and he sees a trend, he turns the trend trading robot on. If the trend stops, and it starts to range he turns the range trading robot on. He uses robots to trade the market types that he is bad at trading. For example, I suck at trend trading because I just suck at sitting on my hands and letting my trade do its thing.

Trade the Trade - The Methodology

Base Principles These are the base principles I use behind "Trade the Trade". Its called that because you are technically trading inside your larger high time frame trade as it hopefully goes as you have analyzed with the trade setup. It allows you to scratch that intraday trading itch, while not being blind to the bigger market at play. It can help make sense of why the price respects, rejects or flat out ignores support/resistance/pivots.

Trade Setup: Find a trade setup using high level time frames (daily, 4hr, or 1hr time frames). The trade setup will be used as a base for starting to figure out a bias for the markets direction for that day.
Indicator Data: Check any indicators you use (I use Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index) for any useful information on higher timeframes.
Support Resistance: See if any support/resistance/pivot points are in currently being tested/resisted by the price. Also check for any that are within reach so they might become in play through out the day throughout the day (which can influence your bias at least until the price reaches it if it was already moving that direction from previous days/weeks price action).
Currency Strength/Weakness: I use the TradeVision currency strength/weakness dashboard to see if the strength/weakness supports the narrative of my trade and as an early indicator when to keep a closer eye for signs of the price reversing.Without the tool, the same concept can be someone accomplished with fundamentals and checking for higher level trends and checking cross currency pairs for trends as well to indicate strength/weakness, ranging (and where it is in that range) or try to get some general bias from a higher level chart that may help you out. However, it wont help you intra day unless your monitoring the currency's index or a bunch of charts related to the currency.
Watch For Trading Opportunities: Personally I make a mental short list and alerts on TradingView of currency pairs that are close to key levels and so I get a notification if it reaches there so I can check it out. I am not against trading both directions, I just try to trade my bias before the market tries to commit to a direction. Then if I get out of that trade I will scalp against the trend of the day and hold trades longer that are with it.Then when you see a opportunity assume the directional bias you made up earlier (unless the market solidly confirms with price action the direction while waiting for an entry) by trying to look for additional confirmation via indicators, price action on support/resistances etc on the low level time frame or higher level ones like hourly/4hr as the day goes on when the price reaches key areas or makes new market structures to get a good spot to enter a trade in the direction of your bias.Then enter your trade and use the market structures to determine how much of a stop you need. Once your in the trade just monitor it and watch the price action/indicators/tools you use to see if its at risk of going against you. If you really believe the market wont reach your TP and looks like its going to turn against you, then close the trade. Don't just hold on to it for principle and let it draw down on principle or the hope it does not hit your stop loss.
Trade Duration Hold your trades as long or little as you want that fits your personality and trading style/trade analysis. Personally I do not hold trades past the end of the day (I do in some cases when a strong trend folds) and I do not hold trades over the weekends. My TP targets are always places I think it can reach within the day. Typically I try to be flat before I sleep and trade intra day price movements only. Just depends on the higher level outlook, I have to get in at really good prices for me to want to hold a trade and it has to be going strong. Then I will set a slightly aggressive stop on it before I leave. I do know several people that swing trade and hold trades for a long period of time. That is just not a trading style that works for me.

Enhance Your Success Rate Below is information I picked up over the years that helped me enhance my success rate with not only guessing intra day market bias (even if it has not broken into the trend for the day yet (aka pre London open when the end of Asia likes to act funny sometimes), but also with trading price action intra day.
People always say "When you enter a trade have an entry and exits. I am of the belief that most people do not have problem with the entry, its the exit. They either hold too long, or don't hold long enough. With the below tools, drawings, or instruments, hopefully you can increase your individual probability of a successful trade.
**P.S.*\* Your mileage will vary depending on your ability to correctly draw, implement and interpret the below items. They take time and practice to implement with a high degree of proficiency. If you have any questions about how to do that with anything listed, comment below and I will reply as I can. I don't want to answer the same question a million times in a pm.
Tools and Methods Used This is just a high level overview of what I use. Each one of the actions I could go way more in-depth on but I would be here for a week typing something up of I did that. So take the information as a base level understanding of how I use the method or tool. There is always nuance and edge cases that you learn from experience.

Fundamentals
- I keep a general high level Macro outlook for currencies. I dont get too deep into Fundamentals and just keep an eye out for news. If I am already in a trade I will hold it if its far enough away from my entry. However, I wont enter right before/during news as it can invalidate your setup.
Price Action
- I started with the basics of learning the standard price action formations/patterns and candles. You can find tons of free info on that online, google is your friend. Then I stared at charts and said "why did the price do that or do this etc" then after a while I started to understand what's happening without having to think about it and I can see the market structure without having to look as closely as I did in the past.
- After many many hours of staring at 5 min charts for 15 hours a day 5 days a week I learned how to look at 5 min charts and be like "Oh that's a hammer on the 15 min etc. If you keep track of time you can do the same for hourly candles as well and you will start to see market structure naturally. However I typically trade in a two chart panel window so I have a 15 min and 5 min chart up when trading intra day so I dont have to think too hard about it.
Support/Resistance Lines
- Draw support resistance lines on Daily/4hr timeframes. I prefer to use body of the candle instead of the wick for support/resistance.
- You can find support/resistance liquidity levels through out the day as well and trade those if the price retraces back through levels its already been through that same day.
- It would be a bit length to explain exactly the best place to draw them. If your unsure there is plenty of free resources on the internet. Just try to use your head and look for price levels where the price was "Supported" or it "Resisted" that price level then slap a line on it. Draw as few or as many lines as you feel helps you and your style. I tend to lean on the side of fewer. I typically do about 6 lines main support/resistances (3 of each).
Fibonacci Extensions
- Draw two Fibonacci Extensions. One on the daily timeframe, and then one on the 4hr time frame. Then you can trade the Fibonacci levels and use them for TP targets or entry zones if price action respects the level. Also you can use it along with support/resistance and pivots if they happen to line up or are very close.
- I cannot really figure out how to put it into words how to draw a Fib if you dont know how. I will have to make a picture to demonstrate it. If your interested post below and I will draw one up and post a link. Probably the easiest way to understand. Just keep in mind the Fib you draw on the 4hr time frame will be inside the daily timeframe one.
Currency Strength/Weakness
- The TradeVision2020 dashboard that I use just helps me keep a tab on the current market post plus any swing strength/momentum a currency might have on higher time frames. Helps me look for shifts in the market or confirmation that the bias it already has in momentum is continuing. I have found that often currencies when they get really/weak or strong might continue for several days or even longer like a full week or more. We recently had what felt like 1 week or so of flat out Yen weakness which was making some things wonky. All it does is allow me to look at the dashboard instead of a million other charts.
Indicators
- I use two that work well for my intra day style. The Stochastic RSI is just like a RSI but its faster. The second is the Relative Vigor Index which I use to detect swings in momentum and divergences in bullish/bearish momentum. I have used many others in the past, but as I have grown and got better as a trader I have found making my analysis simpler has improved my trading.I dont like the whole idea of have 43 different indicators on 32 different time frames light up a dashboard to be green for me to enter a trade. With how I do it now, I have a clear understanding of what I expect to happen and why. That way when it does happen I understand the move and dont get freaked out if the market moves funny after I am in the trade.

Conclusion
I use the above tools/indicators/resources/philosophy's to trade intra day price action that sometimes ends up as noise in the grand scheme of the markets movement.use that method until the price action for the day proves the bias assumption wrong. Also you can couple that with things like Stoch RSI + Relative Vigor Index to find divergences which can increase the probability of your targeted guesses.

Trade Example from Yesterday This is an example of a trade I took today and why I took it. I used the following core areas to make my trade decision.

Fundamental Bias: I already had a bullish fundamental outlook on EUUSD with expecting the markets to price in future similes due a higher an higher chance of Biden winning on paper as the election closed in and a "Blue wave" coming which would lead to a weaker dollar. Also, the Euro Zone is getting hammered with COVID pretty hard plus Brexit drama so I had a strong Euro bias.NOTE: As frame of reference, all the other pairs I trade I traded as if they were ranging and trade a range. Markets are messed up right now.
Currency Strength/Weakness: I use a tool that gives me a currency strength/weakness dashboard called TradeVision2020. Helps me track individual currency strength/weakness intra day. Took me about a month to get used to it, but helps me keep track of intra day strength/weakness that can add a bias to trade direction as the day unfolds. Like "Will this run have a 2nd or 3rd push higher" or "I should look to TP at the first sign of weakness in the push" type bias data. You still got to use your brain and figure out the best decision. It wont make choices for you, its only a guide.NOTE: I am not trying to adverse the tool (if providing the code is against sub rules let me know), its just a tool I use every day that helps me with directional bias calls. I am sharing the coupon code that was given to me when I found out about the tool in the TradingView forex chatroom and the guy gave me the code to use when I signed up. I dont want someone to read the name and want to try it out then overpay for no reason. The coupon will give you 40% off. Coupon Code: 3F7A0T5T
Higher Timeframe Analysis: Detected some early signs of Bearish Divergence on the 1hr chart using a on a higher time frame using a Stochastic RSI. Then I saw more confirmation on 5 min charts using Relative Vigor Index to help time my entry mid session.
Pivot Points: I treat pivot points like support/resistance and trade them as such using price action to give me some idea how its being treated by the market. Pretty straight forward.

It may seem like a lot of stuff to process on the fly while trying to figure out live price action but, for the fundamental bias for a pair should already baked in your mindset for any currency pair you trade. For the currency strength/weakness I stare at the dashboard 12-15 hours a day so I am always trying to keep a pulse on what's going or shifts so that's not really a factor when I want to enter as I would not look to enter if I felt the market was shifting against me. Then the higher timeframe analysis had already happened when I woke up, so it was a game of "Stare at the 5 min chart until the price does something interesting"
Trade Example: Today , I went long EUUSD long bias when I first looked at the chart after waking up around 9-10pm Eastern. Fortunately, the first large drop had already happened so I had a easy baseline price movement to work with. I then used tool for currency strength/weakness monitoring, Pivot Points, and bearish divergence detected using Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index.
I first noticed Bearish Divergence on the 1hr time frame using the Stochastic RSI and got confirmation intra day on the 5 min time frame with the Relative Vigor Index. I ended up buying the second mini dip around midnight Eastern because it was already dancing along the pivot point that the price had been dancing along since the big drop below the pivot point and dipped below it and then shortly closed back above it. I put a stop loss below the first large dip. With a TP goal of the middle point pivot line
Then I waited for confirmation or invalidation of my trade. I ended up getting confirmation with Bearish Divergence from the second large dip so I tightened up my stop to below that smaller drip and waited for the London open. Not only was it not a lower low, I could see the divergence with the Relative Vigor Index.
It then ran into London and kept going with tons of momentum. Blew past my TP target so I let it run to see where the momentum stopped. Ended up TP'ing at the Pivot Point support/resistance above the middle pivot line.
Random Note: The Asian session has its own unique price action characteristics that happen regularly enough that you can easily trade them when they happen with high degrees of success. It takes time to learn them all and confidently trade them as its happening. If you trade Asia you should learn to recognize them as they can fake you out if you do not understand what's going on.

TL;DR At the end of the day there is no magic solution that just works. You have to find out what works for you and then what people say works for them. Test it out and see if it works for you or if you can adapt it to work for you. If it does not work or your just not interested then ignore it.
At the end of the day, you have to use your brain to make correct trading decisions. Blindly following indicators may work sometimes in certain market conditions, but trading with information you don't understand can burn you just as easily as help you. Its like playing with fire. So, get out there and grind it out. It will either click or it wont. Not everyone has the mindset or is capable of changing to be a successful trader. Trading is gambling, you do all this work to get a edge on the house. Trading without the edge or an edge you understand how to use will only leave your broker happy in the end.

When I first started trading, I used to add all indicators on my chart. MACD, RSI, super trend, ATR, ichimoku cloud, Bollinger Bands, everything!
My chart was pretty messy. I understood nothing and my analysis was pretty much just a gamble.
Nothing worked.
DISCLOSURE- I've written this article on another sub reddit, if you've already read it, you make skip this one and come back tomorrow.
Then I learned price action trading. And things started to change. It seemed difficult and unreliable at first.
There's a saying in my country. "Bhav Bhagwan Che" it means "Price Is GOD".
That holds true in the market.
Amos Every indicator you see is based on price. RSI uses open/close price and so does moving average. MACD uses price.
Price is what matters the most.
Everything depends on the price, and then the indicators send a signal.
Price Action trading is trading based on Candlestick patterns and support and resistance. You don't use any indicators (SMA sometimes), use plot trend lines and support and resistance zones, maybe Fibs or Pivot points.
It is not 100% successful, but the win rate is quite high if you know how to analyse it correctly.
How To Learn Price Action Trading?
YouTube channels- 1. Trading with Rayner Teo. 2. Adam Khoo. 3. The Chart Guys. 4. The Trading Channel (and some other channels including regional ones).
Books- 1. Technical Analysis Explained. 2. The trader's book of volume. 3. Trading price action trends. 4. Trading price action reversals. 5. Trading price actions ranges. 6. Naked forex. 7. Technical analysis of the financial markets.
I think this is enough information to help you get started.
Price Action trading includes a few parts.

Candlestick patterns You'll have to be able to spot a bullish engulfing or a bearish engulfing pattern. Or a doji or a morning star.
Chart Patterns. The flag, wedge, channels or triangles. These are often quite helpful in chart analysis without using indicators.
Support or Resistance. I've seen people draw 15 lines of support and resistance, this just makes your chart messy and you don't know where the price will take a support.

You can also you the demand and supply zone concept if you're more comfortable with that.

Volume. There's a quote "Boule precedes price". Volume analysis is a bit hard, but it's totally worth learning. Divergence is also a great concept.
Multiple time frames. To confirm a trend or find the long term support or resistance, you can use a higher time frame. Plus, it is more reliable and divergence is way stronger on it.

You can conclude everything to make a powerful system. Like if there's a divergence (price up volume down) and there's a major resistance on some upper level and a double top is formed,
That's a very reliable strategy to go short. Combinations of various systems work very good imo.
Does this mean that indicators are useless?
No, I use moving averages and RSI quite frequently. Using price action and confirming it through indicators gives me a higher win rate.
"Bhav Bhagwan Che".
-Vikrant C.

FOREX Strategies

What are FOREX Strategies?
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You may have noticed that most of people confuse the terminology and refer to FOREX Strategies in the wrong way. There are methodologies, systems, strategies, and techniques. The most effective methodology is Price Language (Trend Tracking). Combined with a correct reading of mass psychology presented by the charts.
We know that in the Stock Markets there are thousands of strategies. FOREX, like the rest of the markets, presents you with the opportunity to apply similar strategies to win consistently. Taking advantage of repetitive psychological patterns.
First, the Price Language methodology has created great fortunes in FOREX, and the next fortune may be yours. But this methodology must be implemented within a framework of advanced concepts of Markets. Without forgetting the basics. And working hard day by day.
Second, a strategy is a set of parameters and techniques that together give you the advantage to act in any situation. Thus for example in war, generals have attack strategies and counterattack strategies.
FOREX strategies alike are entry strategies and exit strategies. All beginners should know these FOREX strategies for beginners. That way you will get a general idea of the game and understand that trading is a war against the Market and its Specialists. Only applying FOREX strategies revealed by the same Specialists and using their own techniques,
... you can survive in this war.
Do not fall into the trap of the many "systems" and "methods" that are offered on the internet about operating in the FOREX Market. They just don't work in the long run. They are strategies based on indicators for the most part. Using rigid parameters. That if they can work and give profitability during a certain period of time, they will always reach a breaking point when the market changes its dynamics.
Instead, take advantage of your precious time and learn the Language of Price or Price Action.
The Language methodology will allow you to adapt to each new phase of the Market. If you combine this knowledge with the appropriate psychological concepts, you can live comfortably from speculation in FOREX.

Forex Trading Strategies Reddit - Basic FOREX Strategies

You have two basic FOREX strategies, one entry, and one exit. Both follow a general strategy that helps you capitalize on the collective behaviors of the Market. That is, of the total of participating speculators.
This behavior causes the formation of cycles that repeat over and over again. Driven by the basic emotions (uncertainty, greed, and panic) of the speculators involved that can be taken advantage of with the aforementioned FOREX strategies. Specialists identify these emotions in the order flow and capitalize on these events every hour, every day, and every month.
Basic FOREX Strategies - The Price Cycle
These repetitive cycles consist of 4 phases:

Accumulation
Upward trend
Distribution
Downward trend

https://preview.redd.it/6dvk2w0pduv51.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=a3ab65ca4eab6d20174b3327b862d8b59dcc13b7
The two trends can be easily identified by their notorious breakdown. And the two areas of uncertainty (accumulation and distribution), due to their notorious range trajectories.
This general behavior determines the core of our FOREX strategies.
You buy when the price of a pair has broken and has come out of one of its congestion formations (accumulation or distribution). You implement one of the Forex strategies, in this case, the entry one.
The multi-time technique will help you find the point of least risk when entering your initial buy or sell order. In the same way and using the same strategy but this time to close your position, the multiple timing technique will also show you how to close your operation obtaining the highest possible profit.
The most consistent way to extract profits in the market is by trading the start of trends within a cycle . Once confirmed by their respective breaks from the areas of uncertainty. This is the mother of all FOREX strategies . And in a market that operates 24 hours, we have more frequent cycles and therefore more opportunities.

Forex Trading Strategies Reddit - Advanced Forex Strategies

There are many advanced FOREX strategies that are generally used by professional speculators working for large financial firms.
Among these firms are banks, Investment Fund managers and Hedge Fund managers. The latter is an investment modality similar to Investment Funds, with the difference that Hedge Funds use more complex investment strategies. Its operations are more oriented to aggressive speculations in the short and medium-term.
Among the most common strategies is hedging (hedging), carry trade, automated systems based on quantum mathematics. And a large number of combinations between the different option strategies.

The Carry Trade

The central idea of Carry Trade is to buy a pair in which the base currency has a considerably higher interest rate than the quoted currency. To earn the difference in rates regardless of whether the price of the pair rises or falls.
Suppose we buy a $ 100,000 lot of AUDJPY, which according to the rates on the chart would turn out to be the ideal instrument in this example to use the Forex carry trade strategy.
As our capital is in US dollars we have to assume for our example, the following quotes necessary to perform the place calculations:
AUD / JPY = 80.00 USD / JPY = 85.00
What happens internally in your broker is this.

By placing as collateral $ 1,000 of your $ 50,000 of capital (assumed for this example), deposited in your account, you have access to $ 100,000 virtual (this is what is known as leverage); that is, you put in $ 1,000 and your broker lends you 99,000.
With those $ 100,000 virtual dollars, your broker borrows on your behalf ¥ 8,500,000 Japanese yen (85 × 100,000) at 0.1% annual interest from a Japanese bank.
With those ¥ 8,500,000 Japanese yen, your broker buys A $ 106,250 Australian dollars (8,500,000 / 80) and deposits it in an Australian bank where it receives 4.5% annual interest on your behalf.
One year later (and regardless of the profit or loss generated by the pair's movement), your profit will be the difference between the AUD rate and the JPY rate, that is:

Profit = (AUD rate) - (JPY rate) - (costs of the 2 currency exchanges) Profit = (4.5%) - (0.1%) - (0.1% to 1%)
The great advantage of carry trade FOREX strategies is that this percentage profit is applied to the $ 100,000 of the standard lot; the broker transfers all of the profit to you, even if you only contributed $ 1,000. On the other hand, if you carry out the inverse of this operation, this benefit of the Forex carry trade becomes a cost (swap), and you assume it completely.
Remember that FOREX carry trade strategies are recommended for pairs with considerable interest rate differences, such as the one we have just seen in our example.
These FOREX strategies should also not be used in isolation. The idea is that through technical analysis you identify when would be the ideal time to enter the market using your carry trade Forex strategy and multiply your profits considerably.

What FOREX Strategies Do Hedge Funds Use?

The FOREX strategies used by large fund managers do not constitute an advantage in terms of percentage results for them, nor do they constitute a competitive disadvantage for you.
The vast majority of them fail because of their big egos. In fact, there was a firm made up of great financial geniuses, including 2 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who developed a strategy based on quantum mathematical calculations.
With an initial base capital of about 3 billion dollars, and after 3 successful years obtaining annual returns of over 40%, the firm Long-Term Capital Management, begins its fourth year with losses. To counteract these losses the geniuses decide to multiply the initial capital several times, while the losses continued.
The year closed with the bankruptcy of the fund, and with a total accumulated loss of 1 trillion dollars, due to the great leverage used. And all for not admitting that the FOREX Strategies of Long Term Capital Management were not in line with the dynamics of the Market.
There are an overwhelming number of opportunities in the stock markets to make money interpreting the Language of Price.
You don't need to use complex "advanced" strategies that have been created to handle hundreds or billions of dollars.
The reasons for using these FOREX strategies are very different from what a "retail trader" pursues with his small speculation business.
As you can see, you should not worry about wanting to integrate any of these advanced strategies into your arsenal. They are only beneficial for managing hundreds or billions of dollars, where the return parameters are very different when you handle small amounts of capital.
Do not worry about collecting hundreds of free FOREX strategies that circulate on the internet, that great accumulation of mediocre information will only serve to confuse you and waste your valuable time.
Spend that time learning Price Action,
… And you will always be one step behind the Specialists, identifying each new Market condition, and anticipating the vast majority of reversals of all prices.
Ironically, the most successful fund managers indicate that their most profitable trades are those based on the basic trend-following strategies of the Price Language. The same ones that you will learn in this Free Course.
Dedicate yourself to perfecting them and believe me you won't need anything else. As long as you have good risk management, taking into consideration the following points ...

Styles of Investments in FOREX

The Investment FOREX long term is not recommended for small investors like you and me. If we take into account the term investing literally as large investors do who buy a financial product today to sell it years later.
We both have a better niche in the short and medium-term.
You may have noticed that the big multi-year trends in the Forex Market do exist. But minor swings within a big trend are usually very wide.
These minor movements allow us to easily double and triple the annual return of the big general trend, motivating most traders to speculate in the short and medium-term.
These minor oscillations or trends that occur within the large multi-year trends owe their occurrence mainly to two reasons.
First, the FOREX Market presents 3 sessions a day each in different cities of the world with different time zones (Asia, Europe, and America). This causes more frequent trend changes than in the rest of the stock markets.
Second, the purpose for which it was created also plays a role. The modern Foreign Exchange Market, since its inception in 1972, was conceived by the global financial system as a tool for speculation. To obtain benefits in the short and medium-term (from several days to 1 year).
These two points are basically the reasons why we observe the immense speed with which the FOREX market changes trends.
For example, for those who live in America, in the early morning (Europe) the EURUSD pair may be on the rise, in the morning or afternoon (America) it may be down, and then finally at night (Asia) it may return to the rise.

Define your Own Style for your FOREX Investments

One of the first decisions you will have to make is to choose your style as a trader or investor.
There are 4 types of well-defined styles.
Most professional traders tend to have multiple styles, although they always identify with one primary style for their FOREX investments. Study the characteristics of the 4 main styles to make your investments in FOREX :
1. Long Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per month to their investments in Forex. The period of an open position ranges from 1 year to 5 years.
2. Medium Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per week to their investments in Forex. The period of an open position ranges from 1 month to 1 year.
3. Short Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time, or who already has a certain time operating in the long and medium-term, showing constant profits, and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per day to your investments in FOREX. The period of an open position ranges from 1 day to 1 month.
4. Intraday : recommended only for people with a fairly solid earnings record in the short term, and with a capital greater than $ 50,000. As we have noted, this option constitutes a full-time job.
People who start investing in FOREX , should start executing short-term (weeks) and medium-term (months) transactions only, and not pay attention to intraday oscillations (day trading).
If you are interested in being an intraday speculator, I recommend that you first exhaust at least a year doing operations in the short and medium-term to assimilate the correct strategies and to develop the necessary mentality to carry out this work.
The second option would be to participate in some kind of intensive training.
I remind you that self-educating is almost impossible in speculation. You are likely to accumulate a lot of knowledge by reading books and attending courses. But you will probably never learn to make money with all the incomplete "systems" circulating on the internet.

Mistakes to Avoid When Looking for Your Style

Many people who are new to FOREX investments make the mistake of combining these styles, which is a key to failure.
I recommend that if you are not getting the results you expected by adopting one of these styles, do not try to change it. The problem sure is not in the style, but in your strategies or in your psychology.
A successful investor is able to make a profit in any longer trading time than he is used to. I explain. If you are already a profitable operator in the short term, it is very likely that you will also be profitable in the medium and long term,
… As long as you can interpret the Language of Price or Price Action.
In the opposite case, the same would not happen. If you were a medium-term trader, you would need time to adjust to the intraday. The reality is that long, medium and short term traders have very similar personalities. The intraday trader is completely different.

The Myth of the Intraday in Investments in FOREX

If you are already successful in the short, medium and long term, you will notice that the sacrifice and the hours necessary in front of the computer to operate intraday is much greater. The intraday style will be useful to increase your account if it is less than USD $ 100,000 in a very short time in exchange for 8 to 12 hours a day of hard work but ...
You must first develop the necessary skills to operate the intraday.
The ideal is to combine all the styles to get more out of the Market and carry out more effective transactions and have a diversification in your investments in FOREX.
There are intraday traders that are very successful, but the reality is that there are very few in the world that make a profit year after year. If you want to become an intraday, you just have to prepare yourself properly through intensive training.
Otherwise, I recommend that you don't even think about educating yourself to adopt the intraday style. It is not necessary to go against a probability of failure greater than 99%. Unless
... your ego is greater than your common sense.
The main reason why this style of investments in FOREX is not recommended for the vast majority of us "retail investors" (the official term "retail traders"), is the high operational cost.
The real commissions in this market range between $ 2.0 and $ 2.50 for each lot of 100,000 virtual units. This means that a complete operation (opening and closing) is approximately $ 5.00, for each standard lot traded ($ 100,000 virtual).
Another fundamental reason is the advent of robotic traders (HFT = High-Frequency Trading), which tend to manipulate the market in the shorter intraday swings. Please do not confuse HFTs with automated systems that we find daily on the internet, and that can be purchased for a few hundred dollars and often for free on FOREX forums / groups.
These HFTs to which I refer, they are effective. They cost millions of dollars and have been developed by the large Wall Street financial firms to manage their investments in FOREX.
The reality of the intraday trader is that you execute orders for large lots at the same time, to profit from the smallest movements in the market. It is an activity based on reflexes. The slightest oversight or distraction can turn into a catastrophe for your FOREX investments.
I recommend that you start investing in FOREX using slow time periods such as H4 or Daily. For some reason, all Goldman Sachs intraday FOREX investments are made with algorithms.

Finally…

To choose your style as a trader and manage your investments in FOREX, first determine what your degree of experience is, analyze the points mentioned below and the rest you will discover when you execute your first operations.
The points that will affect your decision are:

Capital
Time available each day
Level of Experience
Personality

Discovering your style is a search process. For some it will be a long way to find the right time frame that matches their personality. Don't be put off by the falls. After all, those who continue the path despite the falls are the ones who reach the destination.
And I hope you are one of those who get up over and over again. The next lesson will boost your confidence when you discover the main reason that moves currencies ...

Fundamental Analysis in Forex Trading Reddit

The fundamental analysis in Forex is used mostly by long-term investors. Players as we saw in the styles of operators, start a negotiation today, to close it years later.
I always emphasize the importance that the mass media give to this type of analysis to distract the great mass of participants.
It is all part of a great mass psychological manipulation. For centuries the ignorance of the masses has been organized before the great movements begin.
The important news are the macroeconomic reports published by the Central Banks and other government agencies destined for this work. All reports are made up. 99% of them are corrected months later.
These events are tools to justify fundamental analysis and price cleaning movements. Any silly headline does the job. With this, it is possible to absorb most of the existing liquidity, before the new trend phase is projected.

Reaction!

Except in rare situations, the result of an economic report of the fundamental analysis is generally already assimilated in the graph. In most cases, there are financial institutions that already have access to this information and are organizing and carrying out their operations in advance.
The phrase buy the rumor and sell the news is a very old adage on Wall Street. And its meaning contains what we have just explained. For the investor who can interpret the Language of Price, fundamental analysis is of little importance. Well, in general, their disclosure does not indicate that you have to take any action in your open trades , as long as your entry strategy provides you with a good support cushion.
This reality of fundamental analysis causes a lot of confusion for investors who lack in-depth knowledge of the forex market.

Macroeconomic Data

The data published in these events is irrelevant. Both for speculators and for the people in general. They are false. They lack reliability.
The price can go up or down with the same result of the data. The main ones are:
- Interest Rates - GDP (gross domestic product) - CPI (inflation) - ISM (manufacturing index) - NFP (payroll) - Double Deficits (deficit = fiscal + balance of payments)
If you are initiated, I recommend you avoid operating near these events. It is only a matter of having the time pending. Use the economic calendar for Fundamental Analysis of Forex Factory.
There is a probabilistic advantage in operating these fundamental analysis events. But it takes preparation, experience, and practice. They represent a way of diversifying in the general operation of a speculator.

The Uncertainty of Fundamental Analysis

On many occasions after the disclosure of an economic report, the price movement of the currency pair that is going to be affected tends to move in the opposite direction to the logic of the report.
I show you an example of a fundamental analysis report. Imagine that the EUR / USD pair is trading at 1.2500, and the FED (US Federal Reserve) issues a statement announcing that it has just raised inter-bank interest rates from 0.25 points to 0.75 points. Very positive news for the US dollar that logically implies an appreciation of the currency and consequently an instantaneous collapse of the EUR / USD pair (up the dollar and down the euro)
However, minutes after the release of said fundamental analysis report, the pair after effectively collapsing to 1.2400, returns and returns to its levels prior to the report (1.2500). This situation is very common , but it is not so easy to identify it when it is occurring, but after the damage is done.
Traps like these devour the accounts of beginners who approach the market with little experience, with weak strategies, and especially with very little experience.
That is why I reiterate that you forget the fundamental analysis for now. Just keep in mind when operating, that there is no publication scheduled nearby. Just check the economic calendar for the day and forget about the numbers. Let the economists mess around with the data.

FOREX Market Correlation

The Forex market correlation exists between pairs with similar "base" currencies and not always under the same circumstances. The correlation in the Forex market that is most followed and that has the greatest impact on fundamental analysis is that of the US dollar (USD).
The USD is the most traded monetary unit with a volume greater than 80% with respect to the rest of the currencies. This fact determines why their correlation is the most important, the most followed, and perhaps the only one worth following in the fundamental macro analysis.
The 7 major pairs are usually in sync . These 7 pairs all include the USD and present a fundamental analysis correlation almost 75% of the time. Influencing the rest of the currency pairs.

Advantages of the FOREX Market Correlation

In the fundamental analysis the most basic FOREX correlation is the following. When the USD appreciates, the USD / CAD, USD / CHF, and USD / JPY pairs tend to go up in price. This indicates that the Canadian dollar (CAD), the Swiss franc (CHF), and the Japanese yen (JPY) are losing value against the USD.
We must bear in mind that this correlation does not occur 100% of the time. In fact, the JPY generally tends to move in the opposite direction , since in recent decades this currency has been used as a source of financing to invest in other financial instruments.
On the other side is the FOREX market correlation that generates a movement almost in unison in the other 4 major pairs EUR / USD, GBP / USD, AUD / USD, and NZD / USD. These tend to fall in price, homologous the appreciation of the USD. But not always.
In this case the fundamental analysis correlation works most of the time, between 65 and 85% of the time. Small differences are noted in the extent that each of these pairs experiences.
There is also a correlation in the secondary FOREX market, where the pairs of all currencies that do not include the USD participate, but I recommend you not to waste time on them for now. There are more important things about the Language of Price to know first.

FOREX Commodity Correlation

In this part I will explain to you in a basic way the Correlation Commodities - FOREX of the fundamental analysis.
There are three currencies that have a direct correlation with commodities. They are usually called: "COMDOLLS" which is short for "Commodities Dollars" (Commodities Dollars), since all three obey the dollar denomination. These are:
- The New Zealand Dollar (NZD) - The Australian Dollar (AUD) - The Canadian Dollar (CAD)
These three currencies make up the group of the 8 largest together with the euro, the pound, the yen, the franc and the US dollar. Together, they merge to produce the major pairs traded in the FOREX Foreign Exchange Market.
The FOREX Commodity Correlation has an affinity in most cases greater than 75%. And each of them has its different raw material of correlation. You will notice that the NZD and the AUD are two currencies that act practically in unison. Both present minimal discrepancies in their fluctuations in the short, medium and long term.
This is mainly because their economies are very similar and their economic and fiscal policies are too. Their main production items also show great similarities, despite the fact that the Australian economy is much larger than the New Zealand economy.
The raw materials that follow the movement of the AUD are mainly gold and copper. If you put the history of these three quotes during the last decade of the year 2,000 together on the same chart, you will notice a very similar upward movement between the three quotes. Pure correlation of fundamental analysis.
This strong correlation with commodities in the metals area for the AUD has provided Australia with an economic advantage enviable over the other major powers that have seen their currencies devalue sharply against the AUD. At the same time, they experience a constant decrease in the purchasing power of their citizens.
The NZD maintains a correlation with raw materials related to agriculture and livestock, mainly including milk and its derivatives. It is one of the countries that dominates the world export of these economic items, and also has important exports of metals , although in smaller quantities than Australia.
Finally, you have a correlation with raw materials in the energy area. For historical reasons the CAD, which is not the largest oil producer in the world, but an important supplier to the largest consumer that is the US, has seen its currency oscillate in line with oil prices.
To make long-term investments in the Foreign Exchange Market, it is necessary to take into consideration at least one Commodity Correlation - FOREX in your fundamental analysis.

Forex Technical Analysis Reddit

The technical analysis is the methodology that interprets the movements of the price. Specialists look for liquidity to fund their business. The repetition of the strategies used by the specialists in their work generate repetitive patterns.
If you were an analyst, you would develop the visual ability to identify such patterns on a graph. If you were a programmer you would quantify them mathematically using complex formulas.
And if you could learn to interpret the Language of Price, you would have the ability to anticipate 90% of all movements that occur on a chart. And in this business, anticipating is what will make you money.
Market prices are reflected and framed on a horizontal time axis and a vertical price axis. Prices go up or down according to the aggressiveness of the participating operators. In an efficient or balanced market these oscillations should be imperceptible.
But in reality this is not the case, since the Market works thanks to the digital printing of hundreds of billions of units of paper money systematically distributed by the Central Banks through the banking system. These resources serve as a tool to manipulate 100% of the movements that occur in the FOREX Market.
Are you looking for Technical Indicators? All technical indicators were created from the 70's. How do you think that for more than 200 years the speculators of the past accumulated great wealth?
With the Language of Price. The best timing is given by the price itself. Indicator-generated entry signals usually occur at the wrong time.
The basis of technical analysis is human psychology. Unfortunately, human beings are not perfect and are loaded with emotions that dominate their behavior in similar situations, creating repetitive and highly predictable behavior when it occurs in masses.
The study of technical analysis through indicators and subjective training, originates and shapes the collective thinking on which all the traps that specialists execute every day to maintain their business are designed. If the majority won, the Market would cease to exist.
Although you already know that the patterns are not generated by the masses , but the repetitive behavior of the Specialists in the face of the action response of the masses. It is very easy for speculaists, because they can see everyone's orders in their books.
And they also exert a great influence on the decisions of the masses through the mass media. It is what I call the war between the Egg and the Stone , if you hit me you win and if I hit you also you win.

The Deception of Modern Technical Analysis

Through the centuries thousands of people have been able to extract great benefits from the financial markets by applying the basic strategies of technical analysis and the psychology of the Price Language.
More than 200 years ago when the markets began to operate officially, fundamental analysis predominated, which was only used by large financial institutions. As this analysis tool began to become popular, these institutions began to apply the strategies of technical analysis.
In recent decades and with the massification of internet technology, technical analysis has begun to be handled by anyone who has a computer with internet access. The same financial institutions, which have been present for more than a century and as a result of this overcrowding , establish a strategy to confuse and misinform about the true strategies of technical analysis.
This has been accomplished in the following manner. Currently there are hundreds, if not thousands of technical indicators that have been developed by so-called "gurus" of technical analysis and that sell their magic indicators packed in a "system" or "method" that usually cost thousands of dollars, or simply with the publication of a book with which they generate large profits. Double benefit.
The aim is to confuse the initiates in speculation and create the collective mentality that will originate the same behaviors over and over again. About 95% of these new entrants completely lose all the capital they invest in their early stages as investors.
Leaving them with a negative experience and creating the idea and the image that financial markets are an exclusive area for geniuses with high academic levels and that only they can produce returns in the markets year after year.
The initiate, having lost all his original capital, turns to these “gurus” for help and teachings. You spend more capital on the products they offer you and the cycle repeats itself . Obviously, the vast majority do not relapse and completely forget to re-engage in the stock markets.
I hope you have not been a victim of this drama.
Now I will show you the simplicity of a FOREX technical analysis , without the need to resort to any indicator as a tool to determine an effective entry or exit strategy when planning your operations.

The Price Cycle

Previously you studied in the FOREX strategies lesson, that the typical price cycle when it is reflected in a graph, presents four very specific phases and very easy to identify if you perform a technical analysis with common sense . These are:

Accumulation
Bullish trend
Distribution
Bearish trend

Remember also that the most effective way to constantly extract profits in the markets is by taking advantage of phases 2 and 4 (the trends). Combined with a correct reading of the collective behavior of the masses of speculators interpreting the Language of Price.
You will be surprised by the simplicity with which thousands of people around the world and over the centuries have accumulated large sums of money by drawing a few simple lines and applying responsible risk management with their capital.

How to Identify Trends?

Being able to determine the trend phases within the price cycle is the essence of technical analysis since it is these two phases that provide you with the probabilistic advantage you need to operate in the markets and obtain constant returns.
In the most plain and simple language, in the world of technical analysis, there are only two types of formations: trends and ranges.
The trends, in turn, can be bullish if they go up, or bearish if they go down. The ranges, on the other hand, can be accumulation if they are at the beginning of the cycle, or distribution if they are in the high part of the cycle. As I had indicated in the topic of FOREX strategies when describing the price cycle.
This sounds more like a play on words, but I will show you the practical definition to simplify your life and then you will apply these definitions on the graph so that everything makes more sense to you.

Bullish trend: a succession of major highs and major lows
Bearish trend: a succession of minor highs and minor lows
Floor Range: equal highs and varied lows
Ceiling Range: equal minimums and varied maximums

https://preview.redd.it/vvmsshf0guv51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=c321679a7dcc03f7184778be86379ef442fddf91
Some key points from the graph:

The start of this big uptrend was detected when the last high (thick green line) of the previous downtrend was broken to the upside, ending the succession of lower highs, while exiting the lateral floor formation.
The succession of major lows in the uptrend (thin blue lines)
The succession of major highs in the uptrend (thin green lines)
The end of the uptrend was detected when the last low (thick blue line) of the uptrend was broken to the downside, ending the succession of higher lows, while exiting the lateral ceiling formation.

A tool that will help you sharpen your technical eye and identify trends on the chart is the Currency Scanner. This application is very effective and will provide you with a much-needed boost in your operations to identify reliable trends. At first, we are not sure how reliable a trend is. You will receive great help to find opportunities with the Currency Scanner .

The Common Sense, The Less Common of Senses

The central idea of technical analysis consists in determining the price situation of a market, that is, in which phase of the pattern of its cycle it is currently conjugated with the collective thinking of the masses and the possible traps that the market would have prepared to remove. the capital at stake by the public.
To carry out a precise technical analysis, you will use the support and resistance lines, which can be static (horizontal) or dynamic (projecting an angle with respect to the horizontal axis).
Your common sense prevails here.
If you show a 10-year-old a chart, they will be able to tell you if the price is going up or down. You will most likely have no idea how to draw the lines, but you will be able to establish the general trend. Simply using your common sense.
By introducing indicators and other gadgets , the simplicity and effectiveness of the technical analysis created by your common sense evaporates.
The following graph conceptually shows you all the possible situations in which you could draw these lines to carry out your technical analysis of the place. You can clearly observe a downtrend delimited by its dynamic trend line and an uptrend on the right side with its respective dynamic delimitation.
https://preview.redd.it/5iehg0r6guv51.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=84c265a5d35da7ea970792c4bf40fe20b33bd8bd

Forex Charts Analysis

I want to remind you that the formations or patterns that develop on the charts (triangles, wedges, pennants, boxes, etc.) only work to execute trades that have initially been confirmed by the static support and resistance lines and to read the collective thinking of the masses.
Chart formations work, but you must know the Language of Price to determine when the Specialists will exploit a chartist figure, or when they will allow it to run. In fact, you will learn with the Language that you can operate a chart figure in any direction.
Much of the "mentalization" that the masses receive is to believe that the figures are made to be respected. Which is an inefficient way of working. Simply because you could wait days or months for a perfect chart figure to occur in order to perform a reliable trade. When in fact there are dozens every day.

Japanese Candles

Of all the tools you have to carry out technical analysis, perhaps the best known and most popular is the Japanese technique of candles (candlesticks).
Candles are mainly used to identify reversal points on the chart without resorting to confirmation of horizontal trend lines and only using a previous bar or candle breaks.
Its correct use is subject to a multi-time analysis (multiple temporalities) and a general evaluation of the context proposed by the market in general at the time of each scenario.
Later I will show you all the important details to take into account so that you use Japanese candles in a simple and very effective way.
Do not forget ... Trading in your beginnings based on formations (chartism) and candlestick patterns conjugated with hundreds of tools and technical indicators, constitutes the perfect path to your failure. Before using any strategy or technique I recommend you focus on learning the Price Language, which includes 3 basic things:

The Price: structure and dynamics
Market sentiment: relative strength, external shocks, etc.
Psychology: flexible mindset and risk acceptance

After you acquire this solid foundation, I guarantee that you will be able to trade any trading system that exists, any strategy, technique or chart figure in a profitable and consistent manner.
Specialists make money every day at the expense of the collective behavior caused by the use of these strategies and techniques. With which you will only manage to lose your capital and your time by putting the cart in front of the horse.
People who do the opposite, at best become,
... Philosophers of Speculation, or indocile Robot Assistants or Expert Advisors.
To make money in any market condition, range or trend, you must use the technical analysis based on the Price Language and combine it with a correct psychological reading of the price. This knowledge can only be acquired through proper education and lots of supervised practice. Like any other career in life.
I hope you've found this guide helpful!

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please do your own research or you will certainly lose money. I'm not a statistician, data scientist, well-seasoned trader, or anything else that would qualify me to make statements such as the below with any weight behind them. Take them for the incoherent ramblings that they are.
TL;DR at the bottom for those not interested in the details.
This is a bit of a novel, sorry about that. It was mostly for getting my own thoughts organized, but if even one person reads the whole thing I will feel incredibly accomplished.

Background

For those of you not familiar, please see the various threads on this trading system here. I can't take credit for this system, all glory goes to ParallaxFX!
I wanted to see how effective this system was at H1 for a couple of reasons: 1) My current broker is TD Ameritrade - their Forex minimum is a mini lot, and I don't feel comfortable enough yet with the risk to trade mini lots on the higher timeframes(i.e. wider pip swings) that ParallaxFX's system uses, so I wanted to see if I could scale it down. 2) I'm fairly impatient, so I don't like to wait days and days with my capital tied up just to see if a trade is going to win or lose.
This does mean it requires more active attention since you are checking for setups once an hour instead of once a day or every 4-6 hours, but the upside is that you trade more often this way so you end up winning or losing faster and moving onto the next trade. Spread does eat more of the trade this way, but I'll cover this in my data below - it ends up not being a problem.
I looked at data from 6/11 to 7/3 on all pairs with a reasonable spread(pairs listed at bottom above the TL;DR). So this represents about 3-4 weeks' worth of trading. I used mark(mid) price charts. Spreadsheet link is below for anyone that's interested.

System Details

I'm pretty much using ParallaxFX's system textbook, but since there are a few options in his writeups, I'll include all the discretionary points here:

I'm using the stop entry version - so I wait for the price to trade beyond the confirmation candle(in the direction of my trade) before entering. I don't have any data to support this decision, but I've always preferred this method over retracement-limit entries. Maybe I just like the feeling of a higher winrate even though there can be greater R:R using a limit entry. Variety is the spice of life.
I put my stop loss right at the opposite edge of the confirmation candle. NOT at the edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. I'll get into this more below - not enough trades are saved to justify the wider stops. (Wider stop means less $ per pip won, assuming you still only risk 1%).
All my profit/loss statistics are based on a 1% risk per trade. Because 1 is real easy to multiply.
There are definitely some questionable trades in here, but I tried to make it as mechanical as possible for evaluation purposes. They do fit the definitions of the system, which is why I included them. You could probably improve the winrate by being more discretionary about your trades by looking at support/resistance or other techniques.
I didn't use MBB much for either entering trades, or as support/resistance indicators. Again, trying to be pretty mechanical here just for data collection purposes. Plus, we all make bad trading decisions now and then, so let's call it even.
As stated in the title, this is for H1 only. These results may very well not play out for other time frames - who knows, it may not even work on H1 starting this Monday. Forex is an unpredictable place.
I collected data to show efficacy of taking profit at three different levels: -61.8%, -100% and -161.8% fib levels described in the system using the passive trade management method(set it and forget it). I'll have more below about moving up stops and taking off portions of a position.

And now for the fun. Results!

Total Trades: 241
Raw Winrates:
- TP at -61.8%: 177 out of 241: 73.44%
- TP at -100%: 156 out of 241: 64.73%
- TP at -161.8%: 121 out of 241: 50.20%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
- TP at -61.8%: 5.22%
- TP at -100%: 23.55%
- TP at -161.8%: 29.14%

As you can see, a higher target ended up with higher profit despite a much lower winrate. This is partially just how things work out with profit targets in general, but there's an additional point to consider in our case: the spread. Since we are trading on a lower timeframe, there is less overall price movement and thus the spread takes up a much larger percentage of the trade than it would if you were trading H4, Daily or Weekly charts. You can see exactly how much it accounts for each trade in my spreadsheet if you're interested. TDA does not have the best spreads, so you could probably improve these results with another broker.
EDIT: I grabbed typical spreads from other brokers, and turns out while TDA is pretty competitive on majors, their minors/crosses are awful! IG beats them by 20-40% and Oanda beats them 30-60%! Using IG spreads for calculations increased profits considerably (another 5% on top) and Oanda spreads increased profits massively (another 15%!). Definitely going to be considering another broker than TDA for this strategy. Plus that'll allow me to trade micro-lots, so I can be more granular(and thus accurate) with my position sizing and compounding.

A Note on Spread

As you can see in the data, there were scenarios where the spread was 80% of the overall size of the trade(the size of the confirmation candle that you draw your fibonacci retracements over), which would obviously cut heavily into your profits.
Removing any trades where the spread is more than 50% of the trade width improved profits slightly without removing many trades, but this is almost certainly just coincidence on a small sample size. Going below 40% and even down to 30% starts to cut out a lot of trades for the less-common pairs, but doesn't actually change overall profits at all(~1% either way).
However, digging all the way down to 25% starts to really make some movement. Profit at the -161.8% TP level jumps up to 37.94% if you filter out anything with a spread that is more than 25% of the trade width! And this even keeps the sample size fairly large at 187 total trades.
You can get your profits all the way up to 48.43% at the -161.8% TP level if you filter all the way down to only trades where spread is less than 15% of the trade width, however your sample size gets much smaller at that point(108 trades) so I'm not sure I would trust that as being accurate in the long term.
Overall based on this data, I'm going to only take trades where the spread is less than 25% of the trade width. This may bias my trades more towards the majors, which would mean a lot more correlated trades as well(more on correlation below), but I think it is a reasonable precaution regardless.

Time of Day

Time of day had an interesting effect on trades. In a totally predictable fashion, a vast majority of setups occurred during the London and New York sessions: 5am-12pm Eastern. However, there was one outlier where there were many setups on the 11PM bar - and the winrate was about the same as the big hours in the London session. No idea why this hour in particular - anyone have any insight? That's smack in the middle of the Tokyo/Sydney overlap, not at the open or close of either.
On many of the hour slices I have a feeling I'm just dealing with small number statistics here since I didn't have a lot of data when breaking it down by individual hours. But here it is anyway - for all TP levels, these three things showed up(all in Eastern time):

7pm-4am: Fewer setups, but winrate high.
5am-6am: Lots of setups, but but winrate low.
12pm-3pm Medium number of setups, but winrate low.

I don't have any reason to think these timeframes would maintain this behavior over the long term. They're almost certainly meaningless. EDIT: When you de-dup highly correlated trades, the number of trades in these timeframes really drops, so from this data there is no reason to think these timeframes would be any different than any others in terms of winrate.
That being said, these time frames work out for me pretty well because I typically sleep 12am-7am Eastern time. So I automatically avoid the 5am-6am timeframe, and I'm awake for the majority of this system's setups.

Moving stops up to breakeven

This section goes against everything I know and have ever heard about trade management. Please someone find something wrong with my data. I'd love for someone to check my formulas, but I realize that's a pretty insane time commitment to ask of a bunch of strangers.
Anyways. What I found was that for these trades moving stops up...basically at all...actually reduced the overall profitability.
One of the data points I collected while charting was where the price retraced back to after hitting a certain milestone. i.e. once the price hit the -61.8% profit level, how far back did it retrace before hitting the -100% profit level(if at all)? And same goes for the -100% profit level - how far back did it retrace before hitting the -161.8% profit level(if at all)?
Well, some complex excel formulas later and here's what the results appear to be. Emphasis on appears because I honestly don't believe it. I must have done something wrong here, but I've gone over it a hundred times and I can't find anything out of place.

Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
- Winrate: 46.4%
- Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 5.36%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
- Winrate: 65.97%
- Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): -1.01% (yes, a net loss)

Now, you might think exactly what I did when looking at these numbers: oof, the spread killed us there right? Because even when you move your SL to 0%, you still end up paying the spread, so it's not truly "breakeven". And because we are trading on a lower timeframe, the spread can be pretty hefty right?
Well even when I manually modified the data so that the spread wasn't subtracted(i.e. "Breakeven" was truly +/- 0), things don't look a whole lot better, and still way worse than the passive trade management method of leaving your stops in place and letting it run. And that isn't even a realistic scenario because to adjust out the spread you'd have to move your stoploss inside the candle edge by at least the spread amount, meaning it would almost certainly be triggered more often than in the data I collected(which was purely based on the fib levels and mark price). Regardless, here are the numbers for that scenario:

Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
- Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 46.4%
- Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 17.97%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
- Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 65.97%
- Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 11.60%

From a literal standpoint, what I see behind this behavior is that 44 of the 69 breakeven trades(65%!) ended up being profitable to -100% after retracing deeply(but not to the original SL level), which greatly helped offset the purely losing trades better than the partial profit taken at -61.8%. And 36 went all the way back to -161.8% after a deep retracement without hitting the original SL. Anyone have any insight into this? Is this a problem with just not enough data? It seems like enough trades that a pattern should emerge, but again I'm no expert.
I also briefly looked at moving stops to other lower levels (78.6%, 61.8%, 50%, 38.2%, 23.6%), but that didn't improve things any. No hard data to share as I only took a quick look - and I still might have done something wrong overall.
The data is there to infer other strategies if anyone would like to dig in deep(more explanation on the spreadsheet below). I didn't do other combinations because the formulas got pretty complicated and I had already answered all the questions I was looking to answer.

2-Candle vs Confirmation Candle Stops

Another interesting point is that the original system has the SL level(for stop entries) just at the outer edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. Out of pure laziness, I set up my stops just based on the confirmation candle. And as it turns out, that is much a much better way to go about it.
Of the 60 purely losing trades, only 9 of them(15%) would go on to be winners with stops on the 2-candle formation. Certainly not enough to justify the extra loss and/or reduced profits you are exposing yourself to in every single other trade by setting a wider SL.
Oddly, in every single scenario where the wider stop did save the trade, it ended up going all the way to the -161.8% profit level. Still, not nearly worth it.

Correlated Trades

As I've said many times now, I'm really not qualified to be doing an analysis like this. This section in particular.
Looking at shared currency among the pairs traded, 74 of the trades are correlated. Quite a large group, but it makes sense considering the sort of moves we're looking for with this system.
This means you are opening yourself up to more risk if you were to trade on every signal since you are technically trading with the same underlying sentiment on each different pair. For example, GBP/USD and AUD/USD moving together almost certainly means it's due to USD moving both pairs, rather than GBP and AUD both moving the same size and direction coincidentally at the same time. So if you were to trade both signals, you would very likely win or lose both trades - meaning you are actually risking double what you'd normally risk(unless you halve both positions which can be a good option, and is discussed in ParallaxFX's posts and in various other places that go over pair correlation. I won't go into detail about those strategies here).
Interestingly though, 17 of those apparently correlated trades ended up with different wins/losses.
Also, looking only at trades that were correlated, winrate is 83%/70%/55% (for the three TP levels).
Does this give some indication that the same signal on multiple pairs means the signal is stronger? That there's some strong underlying sentiment driving it? Or is it just a matter of too small a sample size? The winrate isn't really much higher than the overall winrates, so that makes me doubt it is statistically significant.
One more funny tidbit: EUCAD netted the lowest overall winrate: 30% to even the -61.8% TP level on 10 trades. Seems like that is just a coincidence and not enough data, but dang that's a sucky losing streak.
EDIT: WOW I spent some time removing correlated trades manually and it changed the results quite a bit. Some thoughts on this below the results. These numbers also include the other "What I will trade" filters. I added a new worksheet to my data to show what I ended up picking.

Total Trades: 75
Raw Winrates:
- TP at -61.8%: 84.00%
- TP at -100%: 73.33%
- TP at -161.8%: 60.00%
- Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 53.33%
- Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 53.33% (yes, oddly the exact same winrate. but different trades/profits)
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
- TP at -61.8%: 18.13%
- TP at -100%: 26.20%
- TP at -161.8%: 34.01%
- Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 19.20%
- Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 17.29%

To do this, I removed correlated trades - typically by choosing those whose spread had a lower % of the trade width since that's objective and something I can see ahead of time. Obviously I'd like to only keep the winning trades, but I won't know that during the trade. This did reduce the overall sample size down to a level that I wouldn't otherwise consider to be big enough, but since the results are generally consistent with the overall dataset, I'm not going to worry about it too much.
I may also use more discretionary methods(support/resistance, quality of indecision/confirmation candles, news/sentiment for the pairs involved, etc) to filter out correlated trades in the future. But as I've said before I'm going for a pretty mechanical system.
This brought the 3 TP levels and even the breakeven strategies much closer together in overall profit. It muted the profit from the high R:R strategies and boosted the profit from the low R:R strategies. This tells me pair correlation was skewing my data quite a bit, so I'm glad I dug in a little deeper. Fortunately my original conclusion to use the -161.8 TP level with static stops is still the winner by a good bit, so it doesn't end up changing my actions.
There were a few times where MANY (6-8) correlated pairs all came up at the same time, so it'd be a crapshoot to an extent. And the data showed this - often then won/lost together, but sometimes they did not. As an arbitrary rule, the more correlations, the more trades I did end up taking(and thus risking). For example if there were 3-5 correlations, I might take the 2 "best" trades given my criteria above. 5+ setups and I might take the best 3 trades, even if the pairs are somewhat correlated.
I have no true data to back this up, but to illustrate using one example: if AUD/JPY, AUD/USD, CAD/JPY, USD/CAD all set up at the same time (as they did, along with a few other pairs on 6/19/20 9:00 AM), can you really say that those are all the same underlying movement? There are correlations between the different correlations, and trying to filter for that seems rough. Although maybe this is a known thing, I'm still pretty green to Forex - someone please enlighten me if so! I might have to look into this more statistically, but it would be pretty complex to analyze quantitatively, so for now I'm going with my gut and just taking a few of the "best" trades out of the handful.
Overall, I'm really glad I went further on this. The boosting of the B/E strategies makes me trust my calculations on those more since they aren't so far from the passive management like they were with the raw data, and that really had me wondering what I did wrong.

What I will trade

Putting all this together, I am going to attempt to trade the following(demo for a bit to make sure I have the hang of it, then for keeps):

"System Details" I described above.
TP at -161.8%
Static SL at opposite side of confirmation candle - I won't move stops up to breakeven.
Trade only 7am-11am and 4pm-11pm signals.
Nothing where spread is more than 25% of trade width.

Looking at the data for these rules, test results are:

Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%

I'll be sure to let everyone know how it goes!

Other Technical Details

ATR is only slightly elevated in this date range from historical levels, so this should fairly closely represent reality even after the COVID volatility leaves the scalpers sad and alone.
The sample size is much too small for anything really meaningful when you slice by hour or pair. I wasn't particularly looking to test a specific pair here - just the system overall as if you were going to trade it on all pairs with a reasonable spread.

Raw Data

Here's the spreadsheet for anyone that'd like it. (EDIT: Updated some of the setups from the last few days that have fully played out now. I also noticed a few typos, but nothing major that would change the overall outcomes. Regardless, I am currently reviewing every trade to ensure they are accurate.UPDATE: Finally all done. Very few corrections, no change to results.)
I have some explanatory notes below to help everyone else understand the spiraled labyrinth of a mind that put the spreadsheet together.

I'm on the East Coast in the US, so the timestamps are Eastern time.
Time stamp is from the confirmation candle, not the indecision candle. So 7am would mean the indecision candle was 6:00-6:59 and the confirmation candle is 7:00-7:59 and you'd put in your order at 8:00.
I found a couple AM/PM typos as I was reviewing the data, so let me know if a trade doesn't make sense and I'll correct it.

Insanely detailed spreadsheet notes

For you real nerds out there. Here's an explanation of what each column means:

Pair - duh
Date/Time - Eastern time, confirmation candle as stated above
Win to -61.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -61.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -100%? - whether the trade made it to the -100% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -161.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -161.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -61.8% and -100% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -61.8%, but before hitting -100%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -61.8% to -100%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -100% and -161.8% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -100%, but before hitting -161.8%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -100% to -161.8%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Trade Width(Pips) - the size of the confirmation candle, and thus the "width" of your trade on which to determine position size, draw fib levels, etc.
Loser saved by 2 candle stop? - for all losing trades, whether or not the 2-candle stop loss would have saved the trade and how far it ended up getting if so. "No" means it didn't save it, N/A means it wasn't a losing trade so it's not relevant.
Spread(ThinkorSwim) - these are typical spreads for these pairs on ToS.
Spread % of Width - How big is the spread compared to the trade width? Not used in any calculations, but interesting nonetheless.
True Risk(Trade Width + Spread) - I set my SL at the opposite side of the confirmation candle knowing that I'm actually exposing myself to slightly more risk because of the spread(stop order = market order when submitted, so you pay the spread). So this tells you how many pips you are actually risking despite the Trade Width. I prefer this over setting the stop inside from the edge of the candle because some pairs have a wide spread that would mess with the system overall. But also many, many of these trades retraced very nearly to the edge of the confirmation candle, before ending up nicely profitable. If you keep your risk per trade at 1%, you're talking a true risk of, at most, 1.25% (in worst-case scenarios with the spread being 25% of the trade width as I am going with above).
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -61.8% - not going to go into huge detail, see the spreadsheet for calculations if you want. But, in a nutshell, if the trade was a win to 61.8%, it returns a positive # based on 61.8% of the trade width, minus the spread. Otherwise, it returns the True Risk as a negative. Both normalized to the 1% risk you started with.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100% - same as the last, but 100% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -161.8% - same as the last, but 161.8% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100%, and move SL to breakeven at 61.8% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then full TP at 100%.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread take off half of position at -61.8%, move SL to breakeven, TP 100% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you took of half the position and moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then TP the remaining half at 100%.
Overall Growth(-161.8% TP, 1% Risk) - pretty straightforward. Assuming you risked 1% on each trade, what the overall growth level would be chronologically(spreadsheet is sorted by date).

Pairs

AUD/CAD
AUD/CHF
AUD/JPY
AUD/NZD
AUD/USD
CAD/CHF
CAD/JPY
CHF/JPY
EUAUD
EUCAD
EUCHF
EUGBP
EUJPY
EUNZD
EUUSD
GBP/AUD
GBP/CAD
GBP/CHF
GBP/JPY
GBP/NZD
GBP/USD
NZD/CAD
NZD/CHF
NZD/JPY
NZD/USD
USD/CAD
USD/CHF
USD/JPY

TL;DR

Based on the reasonable rules I discovered in this backtest:

Date range: 6/11-7/3
Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%

Demo Trading Results

Since this post, I started demo trading this system assuming a 5k capital base and risking ~1% per trade. I've added the details to my spreadsheet for anyone interested. The results are pretty similar to the backtest when you consider real-life conditions/timing are a bit different. I missed some trades due to life(work, out of the house, etc), so that brought my total # of trades and thus overall profit down, but the winrate is nearly identical. I also closed a few trades early due to various reasons(not liking the price action, seeing support/resistance emerge, etc).
A quick note is that TD's paper trade system fills at the mid price for both stop and limit orders, so I had to subtract the spread from the raw trade values to get the true profit/loss amount for each trade.
I'm heading out of town next week, then after that it'll be time to take this sucker live!

86 Trades
- Date range: 7/9-7/30
- Winrate: 52.32%
- Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 20.73%
  - Starting Balance: $5,000
  - Ending Balance: $6,036.51

Live Trading Results

I started live-trading this system on 8/10, and almost immediately had a string of losses much longer than either my backtest or demo period. Murphy's law huh? Anyways, that has me spooked so I'm doing a longer backtest before I start risking more real money. It's going to take me a little while due to the volume of trades, but I'll likely make a new post once I feel comfortable with that and start live trading again.

How to trade Forex and be profitable

Hello and thank you for being here again!
In this article I want to show you how I structure my operations by trading in the currency market. If it can give you ideas or help you in your process, the objective of this post will be more than fulfilled. I will try to be as clear and direct as possible. I'll go point by point:
Index

1. How to trade
2. Intraday or swing trading in Forex?
3. Automatic or Manual Forex Trading
4. Is analysis the key to Forex trading?
5. Learn to create robust trading strategies
6. Best Forex Trading Strategies
- 6.1. Trading strategies with very simple entry and exit criteria
- 6.2. Systems with a not very high number of operations or trades
- 6.3. Strategies with a controlled return/risk
7. Establish connection and disconnection rules for your systems
8. Diversify in Forex
9. What currencies to trade on Forex
10. Why invest (only) in Forex
11. Steps to trade
12. How to start as a professional trader (without knowing how to program)

>>>Start trading with Plus500: open a free account

1. How to trade the Forex Market

Focusing on the basics and keeping it simple. Let me explain, you don't have to rely on hyper-complex strategies, use the software that PETA it and put it on the server next to your broker ... you don't have to be the best programmer, much less get dirty on the graphics of your platform to win money in Forex.
You need systems. The systems work. Results-oriented companies and work methods are systems-based. You should start applying and creating systems because they will allow you:

Know what you can expect (return and risk) in results.
Measure what you do .
Know when what you are applying is stopping working.

Yes, that sitting in front of the computer, looking and saying "I think EUR / USD is going to rise" is the most common thing, but the normal thing here is to lose money. You need winning strategies to start the fight.

2. Intraday or swing trading in Forex?

This question is an interesting question and I make a small indent if you are just starting out. Swing trading are operations that usually last several days and when we talk about intraday or day trading we refer to operations that are closed on the same day.
Well, which one then? Like everything in life, it depends (we are). You have to learn that there is no “best for all”. In my case I combine both operations because I dedicate myself full time to this, but if you are just starting out or are one of the people who get stressed out with trading, I recommend that you focus on swing trading.
As you consolidate here you can start to scale and seek to diversify by doing intraday. But again, this is just something that I recommend based on my own experience and from people I have known over the years.

3. Automatic or Manual Forex Trading

Not all automated Forex trading systems are a panacea, nor are all discretionary or manual systems bad. Stop looking at it like that, we're only talking about execution. This is precisely why I am opting for automated execution. We could talk at length about this and if you find it interesting I can dedicate an article just to it. But think that automation is just how strategy is carried out. Whether this is a winner or a loser is the basis of everything.
Automating a losing strategy does not make it a winner, it is only about applying strategies that are profitable and ensuring that they are executed in the best way (in manual we always cheat alone).

4. Is analysis the key to Forex trading?

Many people think that technical analysis is the key to beating the market and defend it to the last consequences. The same happens with those who think that the only way to make money in the foreign exchange market is through fundamental analysis.
So what really works? What really works and you can check. What good is it if you tell me that this or the other is the best method if you haven't even sat down to draw numbers. Many times it is not with what, but how. That is, they can be different valid methods if they are done well. But for this you need statistics of what you are doing.
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5. Learn to create robust trading strategies

Let's first see what a robust trading strategy is all about. As traders, we know what has happened in the past, but we don't know what will happen in the market tomorrow. That is why we need systems that are well adapted to changing market circumstances.
How can we know systems adapt well to alterations in the spread, prices ...? Simulating those alterations, something like simulating those conditions and seeing how they behave. There are different tests for this such as: Walk Forward test, Montecarlo, and Multimarket.
These tests give us an idea of how robust our created trading system is and give us a reference. Be careful, I said reference, not absolute truth. Then we will test them, our goal is to leave as little space as possible to chance.

6. Best Forex Trading Strategies

You may be wondering how you are going to manage to create profitable strategies and start with all this. Calm down, there are tools for this, but the important thing here is that you know that the strategies that tend to be more stable over time and give better results are:

6.1. Trading strategies with very simple entry and exit criteria

The opposite of what you may have been told. The simpler our Forex trading systems are, the more likely they will continue to work overtime. I have seen this myself and I know it first hand.
Also, which is more likely to stop working, a system based on six indicators or a system based on one or two? That six indicators continue to give results for years and years is not easy. Instead, only one or two are more so. Still, trading systems should always be supervised.

6.2. Systems with a not very high number of operations or trades

Sometimes when we become obsessed with being in the market constantly making gazillions of trades, we are giving our broker money and taking it out of our pocket. More is not better in trading, better is better. This is about getting the most money with the least risk, not giving it to your broker.

6.3. Strategies with a controlled return/risk

You see a strategy, you look at its profit in the last months and years and you are already thinking about connecting it. Error, always look at the return associated with the drawdown. The drawdown of your system is, in short, the maximum consecutive drop it has had. Because it is important? Because if that fall has occurred in the past, it can happen again (and bigger, believe me). Now you may be thinking, what if this happens to me?
Next, I will explain it to you, but first an example of a system that meets all these characteristics (so you can see that it is simpler than it seems:
https://preview.redd.it/cozy880jl9v51.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e14a68538372be8e7ae109d86cd7d132d60fa07
Here more statistics:
https://preview.redd.it/hh5m7saml9v51.jpg?width=997&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f1597e3b05350d6fca1ea68ef18004f4340e6a1a

7. Establish connection and disconnection rules for your systems

All methods of trading sound great. The problem is when they start to lose. Some tell you that you have to continue, that the system is the system… But what if the system is stopping working? After all, we live in a changing world and our money is not infinite.
The reality is that many people do not know how to determine when the system is failing or when this happens because they are applying it incorrectly. If you execute the strategies in an automated way you are already saving this, then what you need is a rule to deactivate your strategies at a certain point. To do this, it is enough to monitor them with platforms such as Bluefox or Myfxbook to know what the performance of each is.

8. Diversify in Forex

If we deactivate a Rubén strategy, we stop trading. Not if you activate another that has been doing it well. It is not about you running a Forex trading system or two, it is about having different systems: the best in real and a demo base created that you can include in your real account when you deactivate one because their performance has dropped.
You can diversify by you I frame (temporality time) on assets (currencies) or types of systems (trend, mean reversion ...).
The objective of diversifying is to seek a more stable return, many people do for this is to introduce many systems without more, if you do this you will achieve the opposite, you will be increasing the risk.

9. What currencies to trade on Forex

I recommend that you focus on the majors or major currency pairs, especially if your broker has a high spread, as it is usually lower on these. One of the advantages of automating is that you can scale your trading and do it in different currencies, diversifying as I said before. These are the assets that I have traded in recent months:
https://preview.redd.it/4myzmwlxl9v51.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=7635d085d2b434e3d3da0420937c245b6cd21339
It starts with being profitable with a few (one or three assets) and as you evolve you can grow your portfolio.

10. Why invest (only) in Forex

I will not be the one to tell you that you should invest in Forex and not in another market. Each one belongs to his father and mother and has its good and not so good things. Of course, one thing is clear, wherever you do it, remember the power of specialization. There are traders who focus on one or two assets and they are profitable. In the end, that's what it's all about, isn't it?
This operation can be extrapolated to different assets such as raw materials, indices and cryptocurrencies. Yes, cryptocurrencies too. In fact, my operations are mainly based on currencies and cryptocurrencies (85% in the first group and 15% in the second). But I have to say that cryptocurrency trading has given me a pleasant surprise this year.
Again, if you are starting, do not do it with many assets or you will saturate yourself. Start step by step and diversify as you evolve. Jack of all trades, master of none.

11. Steps to trade Forex Reddit

If you've gotten this far, it may not be entirely clear to you how the hell I trade, then I'm going to summarize it in steps:

I create statistically profitable trading strategies and verify through tests that they are robust.
I put them on a demo account to make sure they work perfectly.
Once they meet the requirements that I demand of them, I pass them to real.
In real account, I manage my systems connecting and disconnecting them according to their performance (always under objective criteria).

12. How to start trading Forex Reddit as a professional trader (without knowing how to program)

But Rubén, I haven't studied computer science and I'm not particularly good at math. Don't worry if you don't know how to program, it is possible to do all this using tools that will do it for you. For years I have programmed my own systems myself and that's fine, but now I'm concentrating on managing them and getting the most out of them. Do not think that this is the robot that will make you earn millions of euros while you drink the gin and tonic on the beach.
We will read soon with new posts about trading, Forex, cryptocurrencies, platforms ...
Good luck!
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Part III - My 10 Minutes/Day Trading Strategy
You can find Part II here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/h7m1jh/part_ii_10_minuteday_trading_strategy/
Okay I’ve thought about what to include in Part 3 and this is what I’ve landed on:
Some technical nuances and tricks that build on Parts I and II.
I was going to include entry and exit points in Part III but it would be waaaay too long if I did. So that will have to wait for Part 4 or 5. There’s some really good stuff in this post though, I promise. The stuff in this post will lay the foundation for the options you will have in terms of determining your entry and exit points.
Technical Nuances & Tricks:
In this section I want to discuss some techniques that are optional to use. I am going to keep this fairly simple and focus on 2 main topics: fibonacci and horizontal levels of support and resistance.
Horizontal Support and Resistance:

There are many ways of identifying support and resistance. I personally subscribe to the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) method when using this strategy.
When I identify a strategy setup (Off BB, Stochs overbought/oversold, indecision candle + setup candle) I will simply look to the left and see if there is any prior support or resistance that lines up with the technical strategy. I will also look for prior support or resistance levels to make sure they are not in the way of my target (will cover targets in the next subsection)
Support and Resistance are not always clear lines drawn in the sand. Usually they are areas. Areas of prior demand and/or prior oversupply in the market.
IF you want a mechanistic manner of identifying support and resistance then here’s an easy indicator: load up the Bill Williams Fractal Indicator and simply look for groupings of fractals near highs and lows of the market
KEEP AN EYE ON THE STOCHASTICS IN EACH OF THESE EXAMPLES

Some simple examples below:
https://preview.redd.it/6qm0kauhpz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=d25a7158314469d168ab6d73a9220adbd7e642e1

https://preview.redd.it/h9540sjkpz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=2674f1f0d5339529491984ec3a787f8e121b4d26

https://preview.redd.it/lp7n69empz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9fc1090b73f7396e820e413a76740cbc3f36c8e

Here is the same EURGBP D1 chart with the Fractal Indicator:

https://preview.redd.it/daqfijynpz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=122f41e16e8b2074ede595e7bcca2dc6292083b9

Fibonacci Application:

The way I apply fibonacci in my “normal” trading does require a lot of discretion. And it is this discretionary element that trips up a lot of traders and scares them off using fibonacci.
This strategy removes ANY DISCRETION involved in using fibonacci levels. This couldn’t be more in keeping with the entire K.I.S.S. philosophy of this trading strategy
We use Fibonacci in this strategy as an OPTIONAL tool. If you decide to use Fibonacci with this strategy, the best way of using it will be to have a mechanistic method for determining entry and exit points.

Fibonacci retracement levels can be used for limit entry orders and stop loss orders.
Fibonacci extension levels can be used for take profit orders
You can copy my fibonacci settings in the screenshot below. I use the following fibonacci % levels:

https://preview.redd.it/p4c2a7ep24651.png?width=2906&format=png&auto=webp&s=71dd141e527d0516e6f019a2c7abf8f9f4daa83c

It really is a stupidly simple way we will draw the fibs (note: it will be the SAME WAY on every single trade). We simply draw the fibs over the setup candle. ALWAYS draw the fibs in the direction that price is moving ie: from left to right. So if you have a bullish setup candle you draw your fibs from the LOW to the HIGH of the setup candle. If you have a bearish setup candle you will draw the fibs from the HIGH of the candle to the LOW of the candle. I will cover in a future post which levels we use for entry and exit, although many of you will be able to figure it out quickly. Examples below:

https://preview.redd.it/r1vqhq5tpz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=39732ceb5390eeef4d560600d7dd0a9a2364ac02

https://preview.redd.it/mbbnlh93qz451.png?width=2820&format=png&auto=webp&s=38c70327a2df4d20fbcd2de0bd8bc5c9cde4ed51
That’s a wrap for Part III.

Due to popular demand I've decided to bring this series back for a week 2 and I'll continue to release 3-5 trading ideas every Saturday. How do you guys feel about the name of this series? Would you like me to change the name to something like "Setup Saturdays" or are you guys cool with the current naming scheme?
So this week I wanted to be a lot more in depth in my analysis and setups since I didn't think I was super clear last week with my reasoning on some the setups. I want these posts to be as beginner friendly as possible because there's a lot more beginners in this Subreddit than I had realized. I want you to use this as an educational tool and not as a signal service as a result I'm going to give you possible trade setups and I want you to be the judge of whether you should enter once/if price gets to that point since I feel like that will benefit beginners in the long run. I got a couple questions about top down time frame analysis so that'll be a focus of today's post. Scroll down to NZDJPY if you really want an in-depth look at how I perform top down time frame analysis.
I'll include a picture of a chart and my TradingView chart so if you want to zoom in and out of the chart you'll have that ability to do so.
Quick Disclaimer: Some of the charts pricing might be off by a bit since I started working on this during the New York session on Friday. If any of the charts are impacted in a way that alters the setup I'll be sure to update the charts before I post this on Saturday. Just gotta hope that hope that Powell doesn't break the market or else I might have to redo this entire post.
AUDUSD:

AUDUSD Daily
TradingView Link For Daily: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/AUDUSD/Wb5K2bS8-AUDUSD-Daily-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Which way is the trend pointing? It looks like it's pointing up which we can see with the green trend line but how about we zoom in to the 4 hour char to see if that's actually the case.
Tip: When drawing a trend line, especially on the daily and higher time frames, remember to hit as many wicks as possible since they are relevant and not just some anomaly you can ignore.

AUDUSD 4 Hour
TradingView Link For 4 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/AUDUSD/aah8294z-AUDUSD-4-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: When we got close to where we are with price and we draw a Fibonacci Retracement from the point where price took off to the point where price peaked we can see that price came down to .5 Fibonacci level where it then started going up again. Coincidence? Possibly. As a result I believe that price could continue higher and it would be justified if it did. However, if we look at the trend lines we can see that price appears to have broke put of of our major trend line (Green) which means that price could fall to the downside if it's actually a breakout. Price then appears like it would then adhere to the new minor trend line (Red). There's also the possibility that this was just a fake breakout and price could go up and adhere to green trend line. I'm going to have a selling bias on this trade since price looks like it double topped at the highs of this year and it looks like we could see price fall. I'm leaning towards the drop of price due to the symmetrical triangle pattern created by the major and minor trend line and looks like price is going to get pushed down which we should get an idea of soon.
Tip: Every time price makes a large move and falls/rises after making a peak/valley always pull out the Fibonacci retracement tool to see if price will bounce from the .382, .5, or .618 levels as they are the most significant levels. This can tell you if you're going to likely get a trend continuation.

AUDUSD 1 Hour
TradingView Link For 1 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/AUDUSD/IHgrnfYs-AUDUSD-1-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: I drew out multiple different scenarios which I think can play out since like I said before we're not trying to predict a single movement but we're preparing to be reactive to an ideal condition which may be thrown at us. Remember that major trend line we drew in on the daily chart well it's going to play a large role here. This trend line has been in the making since March so we're not just going to brush it off. The trend line appears to have been broken and we seem to be sticking that minor trend line after the break of the symmetrical triangle pattern. After the break of the symmetrical triangle pattern price usually gets pushed heavily to one side and it looks like price is wanting to get pushed to the downside. As a result, I'm going to really keep on eyes on scenario the blue arrows display since I think it's the most probable. Looking at the scenario there are going to be two potentially good entry points for a sell. The first being when price goes up to retest the green trend line which would also serve as a bounce from our red trend line. Once we get that bounce we could enter in for a sell with a take profit hopefully somewhere around the .66 area. Another good entry would be when price breaks the zone of support of .68 and after it retests it. Wait for a confirmation candlestick pattern showing price will fall when retesting (i.e. railroad track, bullish engulfment candle, evening star, shooting star, etc.). Look for these candlestick patterns on the 15 minute chart. Once you got the confirmation take the sell and ride price down to the .66 zone. The other scenario that could occur is we could see price go back into the green trend line by breaking the red trend line (Orange Arrows). If this occurs we want to catch the retest bounce of the red trend line and ride price up to the high of the year which is at .702. At that point price could break the resistance at which point we could catch the retest of the zone and ride price up. Or it could go up to .702 create a triple top and fall. If you get a candlestick confirmation saying it'll fall then take a sell at the high of the year.
NZDUSD:
If there's something I really like in Forex it's definitely got to be harmonic patterns due to their high accuracy. NZDUSD just recently completed one of them and this is a really good indicator of what price is going to do.

NZDUSD Daily
TradingView Chart For Daily: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDUSD/zQpHzUcK-NZDUSD-Daily-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Yes, we have trend line that says that price is going up however I make exceptions for Harmonic patterns since they are accurate about 80%-90% of the time. The pattern you see above is know as a Bearish Bat Pattern. Like the name says it's an indicator that price is going to go Bearish so although the trend line is going up I'm going to have a bearish bias on this trade.

NZDUSD 4 Hour
TradingView Chart For 4 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDUSD/C29kpCyO-NZDUSD-4-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Not really much to add here just tossed on a Fibonacci retracement tool from where price took off to the peak just to check for any potential support from any of the major levels which we don't appear to have. We'll go a lot more in-depth on this pair on the 1 hour chart since that's where things get interesting.

NZDUSD 1 Hour
TradingView Link For 1 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDUSD/dKJatcM7-NZDUSD-1-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Looking at price we can see that since June 11th price has been trading in a boxed consolidation range. Again I drew out the possibilities I believe could be ideal for us. Remember that I said Harmonics work 80%-90%. Well that means that they fail 10%-20% of the time which is definitely not something we can neglect. We can see that there's a descending triangle which price is reaching the end of. This means that price is getting ready to move to one direction since big moves always come after consolidation. If it moves to upside wait for price to close above the the spot marked D then you can enter for a buy and ride price up to the .67525 zone where price could break to upside or bounce back down (Orange Arrow). Remember to wait for it to actually close above point D since it could create a triple top and drive price back down. It's the same procedure as AUDUSD here if it makes this move where if it breaks it then catch the retest and if it looks like it's wanting to fall down wait for a confirmation pattern. If it breaks the box to the downside and breaks the support zone then take a sell and ride price down to the trend line at which point you should close the trade as there's a chance price could move against you and it's best to secure profits while you can. Once at the trend line it could bounce and if it does you should be able to ride price up to that .67525 zone (Green Arrow). If price breaks the trend line then wait for the retest and you should be able to ride price down pretty far (Red Arrows). I think you should be able to ride it down to .5918 zone but you'll have to keep your on it.
EURNZD:

EURNZD Daily
TradingView Link For Daily: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/EURNZD/jzgmGcRe-EURNZD-Daily-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Well we got a pretty clear descending channel and price looks like it's at the top part of the channel currently so we're going to want to look for some optimal selling conditions due to the down trend.

EURNZD 4 Hour
TradingView Link For 4 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/EURNZD/YzOpvcH7-EURNZD-4-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Looking at the 4 hour chart we can see that there appears to be a symmetrical triangle coming to it's end meaning price is getting ready to get pushed to a side. I believe it'll break the triangle and fall to the downside so once you see it break it would be a good idea to take a sell and ride price down to that support zone at 1.7187. Price could also briefly break to the upside then bounce off the top of the channel and it does take a trade from the bounce and ride price down to the same support zone. At that point, I'll leave it up to you to determine how you think price will go and what you should be looking for. Consider it to be a little quiz if you want to think of it like that. You've got my charts so use them as a reference since I've already marked some crucial support/resistance zones which we should keep our on for the next couple weeks.

EURNZD 1 Hour
TradingView Link For 1 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/EURNZD/ICWvgEsg-EURNZD-1-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: There's nothing that special on the one hour chart that I have to point out since I think we pretty much got all the big stuff out of the way on our analysis of the 4 hour chart. Be sure to get a good sell in there since there are two potentially good setups which I've outlined for you. Also be sure to be careful and wait for the bounce of the channel if price goes that way since there's a chance price could break the channel and I don't want you to take a loss because you were impatient.
NZDJPY:
This pair is going to be really fun since we're going to be looking through a lot of time frames so if you really want to learn about a top down approach to analyzing time frames and trends then pay very close attention to how I break down this trade.

NZDJPY Monthly
TradingView Link For Monthly: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDJPY/jZh4F2Jv-NZDJPY-Monthly-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Yes, we're actually going to be looking at the monthly chart. I bet you guys don't do that very often. Looking at it we can see that price has been following a clear down trend line since late 2014. If you look at the wick of this month's candle you can see that it appears to have touched the trend line meaning we could see a good opportunity to catch a sell since it had just recently bounced off. Let's take a look at lower time frames to see if this continues to be true.

NZDJPY Weekly
TradingView Link For Weekly: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDJPY/dpvI29BB-NZDJPY-Weekly-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: When zooming into the weekly we can see that using the wicks of the candles we can actually draw a channel for the low portion that runs pretty much in parallel to the trend line we drew on the monthly chart. We can see that price clearly bounced from the trend line and I think this gives us good reason to believe in the coming weeks we could see the price drop. Also looking at the Bollinger Bands we can see that price also bounced from the top band which also supports a drop of price. Let's go into the daily to see if we can get a better idea.

NZDJPY Daily
TradingView Link For Daily: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDJPY/NbWLURkU-NZDJPY-Daily-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Looking at the daily time frame we can see that price is currently consolidated and remember big moves always come after consolidation. If you look closely however you can see that price looks like it's about to break the 200 day EMA (Orange line). If it breaks the EMA we could see price drop pretty far at an accelerated rate. Besides those couple observations there's not much else going on with the daily chart.

NZDJPY 4 Hour
TradingView Link For 4 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDJPY/d1kaogH5-NZDJPY-4-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Would you look at that, it looks like we got a descending triangle on the 4 hour chart which looks like it's coming to an end. Looking at price it looks like it's wanting to push to the downside. Once you get a break below the lows of the day of June 11th I think it would be a safe bet to take a sell trade and ride it down for 66.825 for this week. If it breaks the 66.825 support zone then I'll definitely take a sell and try to ride price down to the bottom of the channel which we drew on the weekly chart. There's also the possibility that price could take support at any of these support zones and then head back up to test the top of the channel. At which point I'll be looking to get into a sell at the top of the channel but I won't ride price up to the channel since at this current point in time I feel like there's a large amount of risk in that.

NZDJPY 1 Hour
TradingView Link For 1 Hour: https://www.tradingview.com/chart/NZDJPY/83b47mFS-NZDJPY-1-Hour-For-Reddit-Post-6-20-U-AD3133/
Analysis: Not much more to add here since I think by this point we got the entire story so I'm not going to say much more about the 1 hour chart since I think the analysis for the 4 hour chart also sums this up pretty well.
Well that was a lot of information to go through and I hope you found some value in this since it took me quite a few hours to put this together for you guys. Truth be told, I spent most of Friday working on this so I hope at least one person finds some value in which case I'll consider it a win.
So you guys tired of me yet or do you want me to continue this series for a week 3? It takes a lot of time and effort to put this together so I'll only do it if people want it or else I'll pretty much feel like I wasted my time. I might put together a little lesson on how to use the COT in order to catch some big reversal moves in the market since the COT pretty much tells you what the hedge funds are doing and you also want to trade with the hedge funds and institutions. It'll probably take a couple weeks since I'll have to compile some data together and wait for a setup before putting that out but I'll be working on it. Are there any other things you may want explained? Let me know and I'll try to find setups which contain the topic you may want more details on. I hope you have a great trading week!

I've had a rough week and it sounds like I'm not the only one. This week has wiped out my gains since July 1st, and I'm finding myself ever-so-slightly in the hole this month so far. I've made money every other month I've traded, so I'm not writing myself off as a failure, but nevertheless, I've done some digging to try and figure out what I'm struggling with. I hope the following observations about my own trading resonate with some of you and can help us all become better traders.
First off: Fundamental/technical analysis. Since I started with forex a few years ago, I've put 100% of my time and effort into studying technicals. I think many traders, myself included, are drawn to technical analysis because we fall into the trap of thinking "If I just figure out what combination of indicators/chart patterns/algorithms work for me, trading will be smooth sailing." Being able to take a formulaic approach is incredibly appealing because it's much easier to simply check off a list of criteria than it is to interpret more nuanced information. For me, I found success drawing supply and demand zones, using Bollinger Bands to visualize market structure, and confirming reversal patterns with stochastics to trade from one zone to the next. I even studied the math behind those indicators to make sure I fully understood how they worked so I could identify their limitations, and for the most part, the strategy made money. Nevertheless, if I had a dollar for every time I take what I think is a perfect setup, then the market takes me on a wacky-ass ride of unexpected "crazy bullshit" that stops me out, I wouldn't be trading for a living. After some introspection, my conclusion is that those moments are not "crazy bullshit", but rather are the results of factors that fall outside of the (actually very narrow) scope of technical analysis. This has been hard to accept, as I previously learned technical analysis was perfectly viable as a sole perspective. I was taught that the market can be predicted based on analyzing past behavior. It seems obvious now, but when I think about it, no combination of chart patterns or indicators can predict next week's unemployment figures, interest rates, or what announcements (or blunders) world leaders are going to make on the global stage. Technicals work, but they only work when the market is reacting to fundamental factors, and as soon as a new fundamental change comes along, every bit of technical analysis used until that point becomes obsolete. What I'm trying to say is, at the very least, I need to be able to understand when, why, and how the game is going to change if my technicals are going to serve me. As such, I need to stop shirking fundamental analysis. It's time I start paying attention to that economic calendar and put in the effort to learn what each event means and how to interpret the results to figure out how the market will react. It's simply not as easy as looking at the technicals. It should be obvious that there's no magic formula to trading, but many of us try hard to avoid coming to terms with the fact that there's a lot more to "analysis" than just price action, risk management, and indicators.
The problem is we as traders want trading to be easy. It's a career that society glorifies, and even if we tell ourselves we know it's not a get-rich-quick scheme, we still want to "figure it out" so we can spend a few hours a week scribbling on our charts and making simple black and white decisions while we kick back and "live comfortably". And so we try to trick ourselves into thinking it is easy by endlessly parroting mantras like "Risk management is all that matters" and "Trading is 100% psychology" and "All you need to do is find the strategy that works for you and stick to it." The first two are certainly pieces of the puzzle, but there's so much more to the big picture.
The last mantra isn't even remotely true, and brings me to my second point, which thankfully is something I figured out early in my career, but it's too related to the previous topic to not mention: Mechanical strategies. The sentiment that you need to clearly define a precise, detailed strategy and always stick to it is another lie to make trading seem simpler than it really is. Even when I was just starting to demo trade, I was finding trades that would tick all the boxes outlined by my strategy, but my gut would hesitate. Long after I identified that problem, I also began to notice that I'd be forcing myself to hold onto trades, even if they were not moving as fast or far as I initially thought they would. Once I decided to leave room for my own instinct and discretion, I became much more successful. It's important to understand your strategy is a set of rules you yourself made up. If your strategy does not line up with your own professional opinion of the situation based on your personal experiences and observations, you need to find out why. Yes, you absolutely should draw on your past experiences and be consistent in how you examine the market, how much you risk, and what tools you use, but give yourself enough credit to form your own opinions. The market is not consistent. Do not expect to succeed by applying one cookie-cutter set of rules to different currencies, at different times, during different events. Long-term success in any other line of work is dependent on critical thinking and the ability to adapt to an ever-changing world, and forex is no different. It's not simple, it's not easy, and you will have to make difficult decisions.
This wound up being longer than I anticipated, so thanks for reading. I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts on these topics, so please share them.

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