Retail Currency Trading – Retail Forex

Patience means that we need to wait until trading signal fully forms or to check all the variables when adding to a position. A lot of times we have seen reversals if only five out of six required conditions were met. If you trade manually you should take great care to be consistent and thorough. Namely, as long as you are patient you stay on the sidelines and your portfolio is safe. Once you enter you lose control. Now you can only exit as market will allow.

If you are right and market moves your way, do move your stop loss on your entry point or a few pips better. You never know (and nobody else, for that matter) what can change the market sentiment in your cross to opposite direction. You do not want a winning trade to become loser again! It is adviseable (we did not say must, although we mean it) to have trading logbook. Information should include the reason (trading entry signal) for opening the trade,stop loss (why 23 and not 35 or 16), follow up strategy when your cross moves to positive territory (stop loss move, trailing stop, take profit, partial take profit, doubling a position etc….)

Gamblers should never gamble under influence or when emotionally disturbed. The same goes to forex traders. Forex is unforgiving. Each mistake costs money. Therefore, trader should have at least some help from a machine. A machine is 100% patient. Human is not. Human will unconsciously try to outsmart the market. Machine will not. Human will judge, machine will not.

To every trader we recommend a semi-automatic expert advisor. Semi-automatic means that trader checks daily fundamental and technical analysis results and setup entry conditions for an entry signal. Let then the machine monitor the market and enter a trade when all the conditions are fullfilled. When positions are open a human trader will make better decissions, so let her/him follow up. Yes, we firmly believe in semi-automatization.

Why we do not use trailing stops? We like trailing stop. It is very useful function for automatic trading. When we are not able to actively watch the market we would certainly let trailing stop to take us out in profit.

The only thing preventing us to use trailing stop in our daily trading is that we can not tell our computer in advance to watch all the variables we can, and to judge things accordingly.

As we described in Third Bite, it is far better to move stop loss manually, because curency trading is not a smooth ride. It jumps, dips, rises, tread water, wave, breaks resistance, or falls through support.

Trailing stop is just a predefined number of pips that cant take into account playing around support and resistance levels, sudden quick reversals etc. It is higly probable, that a cross will retrace after breaking through support forcefully but it is also much more probable that it will test former support as new resistance. We are much safer if we stay above resistance than below even if it only means 10 pips difference.

Trailing stop does not take into account these bumps in a road. It tends to close the trade prematurely. If we are able to monitor market movements on hourly bases, manual movement of stop loss makes far better strategy than trailing stop.

If, on the other hand, you are away then let the machine do it`s work and let it close the trade at trailing stop.