I want everyone who searches these people to see this on forex cuz this is the truth they need to see! Hopefully it will save alot of traders throwing money at these fools!
Look listen i got both of their courses for free from a website i found a download.
Nick & Momo charge 1k per course for terrible content & i lost a little respect for nick & momo as momo convinced nick to make a signals group which nick pledged never to do!
That Group makes 70k a month from it; it's called LevelsFX also these guys both have full courses 1 each that sell for over 1k and nick and momo's excuse for doing LevelsFX was ppl were re-selling their courses and they had to get a legal team and pay 4-5 figures a month to take down few small time course re-sellers on Instagram Look listen i got both of their courses for free from a website i found a download they charge 1k per course for terrible content & i lost a little respect for nick & momo as momo convinced nick to make a signals group which nick pledged never to do!
That Group makes 70k a month from it; it's called LevelsFX also these guys both have full courses 1 each that sell for over 1k and nick and momo's excuse for doing LevelsFX was ppl were re-selling their courses and they had to get a legal team and pay 4-5 figures a month to take down few small time course re-sellers on Instagram which is obvious BS + Nick would keep on changing the number he said he needed to pay every month etc obvious liar and taking. Advantage of his audience like any Guru.
The real reason they started this service is because the courses weren't paying and that's how they make their money and live trading profits etc. Can easily be faked look here:which is obvious BS + Nick would keep on changing the number he said he needed to pay every month etc obvious liar and taking. Advantage of his audience like any Guru.
Search: Gurus MT4 Exposed on Google or Youtube for more info
Don't buy a Guru's course if you can download it for free not seen one yet that's worth it! ~ Never have bought a course!
Site i used was Coursed co and searched LucidFX (Still available for download) & MissionFX
I don't like Gurus i hate them & I have to say Nickshawnfx has let me down in the past and I'm seeing many mentions of them on forex .
As you know no-one without a third party verified track record (real server data from a well regulated broker) can be trusted. So pretty much no-one in the FX industry can be trusted.
Edit: Mistakes fixed etc

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!
To start trading, open an account on Plus500, one of the leading Forex brokers: Click Here

I worked with many HFT startups and I have a pretty good idea of the initial costs that such trading shops have.
Data: High-frequency strategies are data-intensive, so you need to get the best data providers at the tick level (level 3). That’s expensive. Depending on the market you are in (forex, futures, bonds, etc) the cost could vary. FX is even more complex, because of its highly fragmented nature, so they will need to have a broad view of all of them. Each provider cost could start from $5k per month each, up to $50k per month
Servers: You will need power. A decent server (please don’t use the cloud), could cost you 20k at least. It needs to have 32-cores at least. You can rent a dedicated server, and its cost could start from $2k per month
Collocation: That powerful server must be placed inside a collocated environment. The idea is to reduce the latency as much as you can, so being close to the exchanges/venues is the best choice. These data centers will charge you for your server space and for the connectivity you use (cross-connection). This varies considerably depending on the markets you are in.
Software: this would be the most expensive piece of your setup. Remember, that the software is the brain of your operation. Not only needs to get ALL the data from the exchanges/venues but normalize it, store it, manipulate it, and prepare it to be consumed by your strategies(s) that will be doing tons of different calculations based on the data they receive. And all that must be done in a fraction of milliseconds (hopefully within 10–50 microseconds)
On top of that, you must be sure, that you will have all the different modules in place: price aggregators, order management systems (OMS), execution management systems (EMS), smart order routing (SOR), liquidity manager (LM), risk management systems (RMS). and any interface you may need (to databases, storage, monitoring systems, reporting, etc)
Cost-wise, all of this will depends on what you choose. If you go with an off-the-shelf solution (not recommended, cheaper, you don’t own anything, slow), or you start your own development (time to market +1 year, very costly). The cost could vary between $300K to $1M
People: you will need human resources. This is not a one-guy operation. You will need to have software engineers, quantitative analysts, and researchers. Think about 150k /year at the low end.
Brokers/Prime Brokers: you will need to open up a brokerage account to have access to the trading venues. They will require you to have a minimum capital to trade (besides the commissions/fees they may charge). So, that adds up to your initial setup cost.
Conclusions
It’s a very lucrative business but is hard to get started. Usually, startups try to start small and grow as they see profits, but that always falls into failure. If you do that, you will fail to have all the above points I’ve listed.
Your initial investment is high, and keeping in mind that after having all these startup costs, all your infrastructure in place, and the software ready to run, your first profitable trades could start to come in after 6 to 12 months of operations.
I hope my question is not as vague as the others…
Please, let me know if I was missing something else, so we can add it to this list 😎

Ariel Silahian
http://www.sisSoftwareFactory.com/blog

I wanted to write a quick post in answer to the people who routinely make claims I have a history of stealing from people in my previous company and base this upon a blog they read. If you would like to discuss this further, please make a post and link it to me to engage on. I will do so as long as we deal with the facts of how a PAMM company really works.
I won't engage in circular debates where the essential point is, "I don't believe you". You don't have to - that's not how any of this works. Just fact check.

Anti-SEO:

I want to avoid Google ranking on this post. Although for my personal 'PR' it would be beneficial to aim to rank something answering claims, at some points in this some others involved in the company will not really come over in the best light. I assume it's likely these people are still involved things (Not spoke with them for 5 yrs) - It'd be unfair to rank bad PR on them.

The failure of the company was squarely due to me. Anything anyone else did either would not have happened or not have mattered if I'd done better. I do not want anything I do now to further hinder anyone.

So I will refer to names by only one letter (or number if applicable).

Ponzi Claims:

I found it strange at the time this ended up centred around the ponzi scheme side of things. There was a reasonable question to be asked and answered as to if it was a pyramid scheme. Were people signing up just to sign people up, or was there a core product of fair market value. The services sold I'd previously ran at the same sort of price point direct to market - so I felt on fairly good ground on that.
Initially I's actually been a bit excited initially, because I was a reader of the blog in question and I liked the work they'd done on pyramid schemes. I thought I'd be able to either validate I was doing things right, or learn how I should be doing them better. I never thought the ponzi side of it would take any more than a few minutes to clear up. But that was not so ...
A ponzi scheme was to all intents and purposes impossible. All of our business was done via three different brokers and all of our results publicly tracked with close to real time updates for marketing purposes. Of the three brokers we were using, two of them had good regulation. An off-shore broker had to be used for US clients, so this is the only one with any sort of question mark.
All of our results over all the brokers were almost identical (Some execution/costs variance). The two regulated brokers were under different regulators. Most, if not all, the brokers held clients funds in segregated accounts. All brokers would have to have been fully complicit in the scam - and it costs more to get regulated than there was to steal. Logically, it could not have been so.
We were using a PAMM model. This works by the client opening a brokerage account and signing a LPoA to allow trades to be copied onto their account. The LPoA grants the company no access to the funds. Money laundering laws also dictate the funds can only be redeemed to same source they were funded. PAMMs are big business. Protection of all parties is built into it, it's a well trusted model.
This should have taken no less than 5 minutes to self verify. It could not have been a ponzi.

£50,000 Fine:

That happened. Turns out if you set up a PAMM in the Netherlands and then let a bunch of people refer investment to it this is classed as running a ... I can't remember exactly and even at the time it was in Dutch so I didn't personally read it all. The underlying problem was not the model in any way. We were told at the time we basically jut had to pay £2,000 for each country we did business in.
We were global. At this time the company had neither the money to do that, or pay the fine they gave us for not having the money to do that.
My mistaken assumption was that since when you run a PAMM you are basically piggybacking off the broker's licence, all was well and good. This was true - but the problem was sourcing. Paying people to refer investment was what we were fined for when you get right down to it.

$180,000 Stolen:

This was just a headline. In many ways it's misleading. Firstly, nothing was stolen or even taken. It was lost or given away to clients who'd lost in the PAMMs that went bad. All the money lost was lost trying to get enough money to make good all the PAMMs. So it was not stolen, and there is nothing in anyway to imply that's a suitable word to use. In the blog, no explanation of that is offered.
What seems to be inferred is that this was commissions due out to clients that the company kept. Even outside the above mentioned this would be wrong. All affiliates were paid. You will not find a single one who says they were not. Further to that, of all the funds invested into the company (We'll call the company '5') somewhere in the 60 - 70% range was sourced directly by me.
Other funds were sourced by my co-founder. Investments were made through passive advertising without them being attributed to a refer. All in all, assuming we did not pay the affiliates and we had this much, $18,000 would be the number. Of the $180,000 somewhere a bit over $100,000 would have been mine. I never took that, and could not have "Stolen" it.
I don't see the point in getting super technical on everything by going through how, but the number also probably wasn't $180,000. I think this was an overestimate made in a throw away comment by my co-founder (We'll call her 'M') who was (Justifiably) extremely angry at me at the time she came up with the number and added it in a post (Of this multi paragraph post, this one line and one number was taken - if memory servers, all context was left out when the blogger cited this as stolen. Which would make sense. The post was berating me for losing the money. That didn't fit the narrative.

What Backs the Story?

Of all of the claims of wrongdoing (Apart from the fine, which is documented and true) - there is no evidence proposed for any of the claims made. All of it hinges on a story told to the blogger by one person, who was another of my co-founders 'We'll call her 'E'. E was either a late teenager or very early 20s at the time.
In the founding of 5, E was essential. Before 5 I'd been running a service selling trading signals and selling them at $5 a week subscription. I was generating a lot of business (Working all day, every day and having fun with it. Like I did here for a while, but at that time I really was marketing). 5 - 10 people a day could be signing up.
I knew nothing at all about how to structure an online business. No listing of new clients to send emails. Nothing about making membership sites with password access etc. I was working off a Wix site I made myself with no on-boarding system in place. The volume of people joining was crushing me. I could not process them and was getting a lot of PayPal disputes.
I wanted to send them the stuff. Just did not have the process to ensure this was being done. E stepped in and saved me on that. She made original 5 website (On Wordpress, I believe it was later upgraded to something else). Set up memberships payments. Automated listing. Also she suggested changing the name to what the company became. E made the work I was doing work.
After that, she had varying performance. Her gripe in the blog is she was not paid for helping to found the company. Left out of this is the fact she was not paid because she was head of marketing and we were not getting enough clients. Almost all of them coming from me hitting the DMs and signing people up the old fashioned way.
On results of trading, everything was going well (and this was my area). Things were going so well people legit through it must be a ponzi! But we did not have in-flow of clients. On this I again blame myself. I sort of assumed this would all work itself out and did not put focus on fixing problems before they became problems.
There was a lot of pressure on everyone. E got into a new romantic relationship. I think she was heavily influenced by this person (I found E to be good hearted on the whole). E and M started to get along less and less. Then E and M seemed to hate each other. It all seemed to come from nowhere, but it quickly got to the point me and M felt it was not working with E, and she thought the same.
Pretty much everything is based upon the story told to the blogger by E. As I've said before I found her to be a good heart overall and believe she was influenced into doing what she did, and would not have done it on her own gumption. Therefore I won't rip into her; but if you're reading, 'E' (Won't be lol) - that was a bit naughty, wasn't it? Little 'Economic with the truth'.

Why would the blogger post such big claims with no evidence?

People should ask themselves this on the first read through of the blog, to be fair. If you're a single source reporting on a story - tell how you know it's true. I think this mainly came down to revenge. After the ponzi thing I wrote blog line by line ripping the initial blog to bits. It was written in a very cheeky sort of tone, and what I was saying was right.
He then played, "My blog's bigger than your blog" , on which he was right.

If you think there is some smoking gun here in any way, just email the blogger and ask them how they know. What evidence were they ever given any money was stolen. There was none.

Money taken from the company:

In it's sad and drawn out end, cash on hand and assets within the company got down to around $10,000 and we were due out over 10* this to clients who I wanted to pay back. I was not bringing in new business (It seemed unethical to do until I fixed old problems - this was a miscalculation. No business was the big problem) and there was the 50K fine.
The company was essentially bankrupt. I wanted to use the remaining 10K to have one last ditch effort to re-coup losses, or randomly select clients to pay the 10K to. M didn't. At this time we fell out (Forever). I have no idea what happened to that 10K. I think M probably kept it. At the time I was livid about that - but to be honest, after all the work she did she deserved something. Losing was not her fault. To 'M' if you're reading (Won't be), I'm sorry.

What went wrong?

I was not good enough. When I got ahead I thought I was coasting. I came from a background of having nothing and as soon as I started to make a few grand I assumed I was gliding to being a millionaire. I stopped learning. Stopped improving. I never watered what I planted, and it withered and died.
I fail. Turns out you can not coast up a learning curve without ending up on your arse.

Can you please DM me and tell me how you are doing this.. I am looking to trader using MT4 and some EAs and would really like to be able to use Cryptocurrencys as well through a broker.. But this is my first time signing up and after reading thread after thread I have been getting a head ache trying to figure out what to do.. can some experienced US citizens who trade please help!
Thanks..
And please DM me so this doesnt just start an argument on here please.. Thanks!

First - always start with the platform of choice and features/add-ons/EAs that you’ll be using. This should narrow down the number of brokerage agencies a bit. Once that’s clear - time to look at the broker. If you want to share your Forex Reviews then can take a look at https://www.forexprotect.com/
Regulated - Must be regulated with at least one big regulator. Always check with the regulator if that broker is indeed regulated or is just registered. Spreads, fees and commissions (contract specifications) - depending on the type of trading strategy this (spreads) might not be a factor for some. Account specifications - types of accounts, how to fund it, minimum amounts for funding and withdrawals and timeframes required for the transactions to go through. Also, the different ways you can fund and withdraw are important (bank transfer, card payments, payment providers like Skrill, for example) Order execution - DMA/STP is essential but these days every broker will claim that and it’s a bit tricky to pin down until you’ve actually started a live account. One thing that you can do to determine if the broker is a genuine DMA/STP provider is to ask for a post-trade report (also called post-trade transparency report) - if they can provide you with such a report you can then see for yourself if the execution times are delayed at any point of the process. Again, it’s almost impossible to verify this point without a funded live trading account! No Dealing Desk - The market is hard enough to navigate without having to trade against your broker. This one is kind of explained in the point above. Negative balance protection - self-explanatory Online reviews and community feedback for the broker - want to take some time to research what your friends, colleagues and the internet in general and trading communities have to say about this particular broker. The broker has been operating for at least 5 years. Is Automated/Algorithmic and High-Frequency Trading (HFT) allowed - if not this could be a signal for internal issues and system/platform problems within the broker’s structure and potential trading and security vulnerabilities. If a broker’s systems can’t handle a high volume of trades that means his servers and systems are not good enough and thus may become an issue for all traders using his services. 10 Last but not least - Support response speed and knowledgeability. - You want a broker who has the support desk that will get involved with your issues and requests as fast as possible.

Almost every day people come to this subreddit asking the same basic questions over and over again. I've put this guide together to point you in the right direction and help you get started on your forex journey.

A quick background on me before you ask: My name is Bob, I'm based out of western Canada. I started my forex journey back in January 2018 and am still learning. However I am trading live, not on demo accounts. I also code my own EA's. I not certified, licensed, insured, or even remotely qualified as a professional in the finance industry. Nothing I say constitutes financial advice. Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but everything I've outlined below is a synopsis of some tough lessons I've learned over the last year of being in this business.

LET'S GET SOME UNPLEASANTNESS OUT OF THE WAY

I'm going to call you stupid. I'm also going to call you dumb. I'm going to call you many other things. I do this because odds are, you are stupid, foolish,and just asking to have your money taken away. Welcome to the 95% of retail traders. Perhaps uneducated or uninformed are better phrases, but I've never been a big proponent of being politically correct.

Want to get out of the 95% and join the 5% of us who actually make money doing this? Put your grown up pants on, buck up, and don't give me any of this pc "This is hurting my feelings so I'm not going to listen to you" bullshit that the world has been moving towards.

Let's rip the bandage off quickly on this point - the world does not give a fuck about you. At one point maybe it did, it was this amazing vision nicknamed the American Dream. It died an agonizing, horrible death at the hand of capitalists and entrepreneurs. The world today revolves around money. Your money, my money, everybody's money. People want to take your money to add it to theirs. They don't give a fuck if it forces you out on the street and your family has to live in cardboard box. The world just stopped caring in general. It sucks, but it's the way the world works now. Welcome to the new world order. It's called Capitalism.

And here comes the next hard truth that you will need to accept - Forex is a cruel bitch of a mistress. She will hurt you. She will torment you. She will give you nightmares. She will keep you awake at night. And then she will tease you with a glimmer of hope to lure you into a false sense of security before she then guts you like a fish and shows you what your insides look like. This statement applies to all trading markets - they are cruel, ruthless, and not for the weak minded.

The sooner you accept these truths, the sooner you will become profitable. Don't accept it? That's fine. Don't bother reading any further. If I've offended you I don't give a fuck. You can run back home and hide under your bed. The world doesn't care and neither do I.

For what it's worth - I am not normally an major condescending asshole like the above paragraphs would suggest. In fact, if you look through my posts on this subreddit you will see I am actually quite helpful most of the time to many people who come here. But I need you to really understand that Forex is not for most people. It will make you cry. And if the markets themselves don't do it, the people in the markets will.

LESSON 1 - LEARN THE BASICS

Save yourself and everybody here a bunch of time - learn the basics of forex. You can learn the basics for free - BabyPips has one of the best free courses online which explains what exactly forex is, how it works, different strategies and methods of how to approach trading, and many other amazing topics.

You can access the BabyPips course by clicking this link: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex

Do EVERY course in the School of Pipsology. It's free, it's comprehensive, and it will save you from a lot of trouble. It also has the added benefit of preventing you from looking foolish and uneducated when you come here asking for help if you already know this stuff.

If you still have questions about how forex works, please see the FREE RESOURCES links on the /Forex FAQ which can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index

Quiz Time
Answer these questions truthfully to yourself:

-What is the difference between a market order, a stop order, and a limit order?
-How do you draw a support/resistance line? (Demonstrate it to yourself)
-What is the difference between MACD, RSI, and Stochastic indicators?
-What is fundamental analysis and how does it differ from technical analysis and price action trading?
-True or False: It's better to have a broker who gives you 500:1 margin instead of 50:1 margin. Be able to justify your reasoning.

If you don't know to answer to any of these questions, then you aren't ready to move on. Go back to the School of Pipsology linked above and do it all again.

If you can answer these questions without having to refer to any kind of reference then congratulations, you are ready to move past being a forex newbie and are ready to dive into the wonderful world of currency trading! Move onto Lesson 2 below.

LESSON 2 - RANDOM STRANGERS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOU GET RICH IN FOREX

This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but that random stranger on instagram who is posting about how he is killing it on forex is not trying to insprire you to greatness. He's also not trying to help you. He's also not trying to teach you how to attain financial freedom.

99.99999% of people posting about wanting to help you become rich in forex are LYING TO YOU.

Why would such nice, polite people do such a thing? Because THEY ARE TRYING TO PROFIT FROM YOUR STUPIDITY.

Plain and simple. Here's just a few ways these "experts" and "gurus" profit from you:

Referral Links - If they require you to click a specific link to signup for something, it means they are an affiliate. They get a commission from whatever the third party is that they are sending you to. I don't care if it's a brokerage, training program, hell even an Amazon link to a book - if they insist you have to click their super exclusive, can't-get-this-deal-any-other-way-but-clicking-my-link type bullshit, it's an affiliate link. There is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, but you are literally generating money for some stranger because they convinced you to buy something. Some brokers such as ICMarkets have affiliate programs that payout a percentage of the commission you generate - this is a really clever system - whether you profit or blow your entire account, the person who referred you to the broker makes a profit off you. Clever eh?
Signal Services, Education & Training Programs, Courses - If somebody is telling you they are making a killing with a signal service and are trying to convince you to join it, I guarantee they are getting a piece of your monthly fee. And better still, these signal services often work...for about a week. Just long enough to suck a bunch of poor fools into it. You see people making money, you want in so you agree to pay the $200+/month subscription fee. You follow the signals and it looks like it's making money for a few days or weeks. Then it turns sideways, you start losing money hand over fist. Pretty soon you have lost most of your trading account because you blindly followed a signal service. And better still - when you go screaming at the person running the signal service they will be very quick to point you to their No Refunds policy. To add insult to injury, the buttfucker that referred you to the signal service in the past will likely listen to you getting mad, and then come back with something like "Sorry it didn't work out, but I just joined this other amazing service and it's working great, you should come join it to earn your money back. Here's my link..." You get the point here right?
Multi-Level Marketing (MLMs) - These people are scum. They are going to offer you training and education, signals, access to forex experts and gurus, and all kinds of other shit with the promise that you will live the dream and become financially free. They are also loading you into a pyrmaid scheme where you will be hounded to recruit other people and make money off them just like you got roped into it. A really prime example here is iMarkets Live (or IML for short). Don't touch this shit with a 10 foot pole. I don't care what they are claiming, you will lose everything using them.
Fund Managers - These people make my skin crawl. It's a classic scam and it works like this - somebody will post online about how much money they are making trading forex/commodities/stocks/whatever. Most of the time they won't explicitly post they are offering a trading service, rather they just put the message out there and wait for the ignorant masses (that's you) to contact them. They will charm you. They will lie to you. They will promise you the moon if you simply wire them some money or give them API access to your trading account. Care to guess what happens next? If you send a wire transfer (or Western Union...hell any kind of payment to them) they will vanish. Happens usually after they take a bunch of suckers for the ride. You sent them $2,000 and so do 9 other suckers. They just made $20,000 and are gone. With API access to your account, you will find your account gets blown super fast or worse - possibly leaving you open to persecution by the broker you are using.

These are just a few examples. The reality is that very few people make it big in forex or any kind of trading. If somebody is trying to sell you the dream, they are essentially a magician - making you look the other way while they snatch your wallet and clean you out.

Additionally, on the topic of fund managers - legitimate fund managers will be certified, licensed, and insured. Ask them for proof of those 3 things. What they typically look like are:

Certified - This varies from country to country, in the US it's FINRA (http://www.finra.org). They need to have their Series 7 certification minimum. You can make the case that other FINRA certifications are acceptable in lieu of Series 7, but the 7 is the gold standard.
Licensed - They need to have a valid business license issued by the government. It must clearly state they are an investment company, preferrably a hedge fund because they have some super strict requirements to operate (and often require $25,000+ in fees just to get their business license, so you know they at least have some skin in the game).
Insured - They need to be backed by an insurance company. I'm not talking general insurance for shit like their office burning down. I'm talking about a government-implemented protection insurance program - in the US I believe that is issued by the Securities Investment Protection Corporation (https://www.sipc.org/).

If you are talking to a fund manager and they are insisting they have all of these, get a copy of their verification documents and lookup their licenses on the directories of the issuers to verify they are valid. If they are, then at least you are talking to somebody who seems to have their shit together and is doing investment management and trading as a professional and you are at least partially protected when the shit hits the fan.

LESSON 3 - UNDERSTAND YOUR RISK

Many people jump into Forex, drop $2000 into a broker account and start trading 1 lot orders because they signed up with a broker thinking they will get rich because they were given 500:1 margin and can risk it all on each trade. Worst-case scenario you lose your account, best case scenario you become a millionaire very quickly. Seems like a pretty good gamble right? You are dead wrong.

As a new trader, you should never risk more than 1% of your account balance on a trade. If you have some experience and are confident and doing well, then it's perfectly natural to risk 2-3% of your account per trade. Anybody who risks more than 4-5% of their account on a single trade deserves to blow their account. At that point you aren't trading, you are gambling. Don't pretend you are a trader when really you are just putting everything on red and hoping the roulette ball lands in the right spot. It's stupid and reckless and going to screw you very quickly.

Let's do some math here:

You put $2,000 into your trading account.
Risking 1% means you are willing to lose $20 per trade. That means you are going to be trading micro lots, or 0.01 lots most likely ($0.10/pip). At that level you can have a trade stop loss at -200 pips and only lose $20. It's the best starting point for anybody. Additionally, if you SL 20 trades in a row you are only down $200 (or 10% of your account) which isn't that difficult to recover from.
Risking 3% means you are willing to lose $60 per trade. You could do mini lots at this point, which is 0.1 lots (or $1/pip). Let's say you SL on 20 trades in a row. You've just lost $1,200 or 60% of your account. Even veteran traders will go through periods of repeat SL'ing, you are not a special snowflake and are not immune to periods of major drawdown.
Risking 5% means you are willing to lose $100 per trade. SL 20 trades in a row, your account is blown. As Red Foreman would call it - Good job dumbass.

Never risk more than 1% of your account on any trade until you can show that you are either consistently breaking even or making a profit. By consistently, I mean 200 trades minimum. You do 200 trades over a period of time and either break-even or make a profit, then you should be alright to increase your risk.

Unfortunately, this is where many retail traders get greedy and blow it. They will do 10 trades and hit their profit target on 9 of them. They will start seeing huge piles of money in their future and get greedy. They will start taking more risk on their trades than their account can handle.

200 trades of break-even or profitable performance risking 1% per trade. Don't even think about increasing your risk tolerance until you do it. When you get to this point, increase you risk to 2%. Do 1,000 trades at this level and show break-even or profit. If you blow your account, go back down to 1% until you can figure out what the hell you did differently or wrong, fix your strategy, and try again.

Once you clear 1,000 trades at 2%, it's really up to you if you want to increase your risk. I don't recommend it. Even 2% is bordering on gambling to be honest.

LESSON 4 - THE 500 PIP DRAWDOWN RULE

This is a rule I created for myself and it's a great way to help protect your account from blowing.

Sometimes the market goes insane. Like really insane. Insane to the point that your broker can't keep up and they can't hold your orders to the SL and TP levels you specified. They will try, but during a flash crash like we had at the start of January 2019 the rules can sometimes go flying out the window on account of the trading servers being unable to keep up with all the shit that's hitting the fan.

Because of this I live by a rule I call the 500 Pip Drawdown Rule and it's really quite simple - Have enough funds in your account to cover a 500 pip drawdown on your largest open trade. I don't care if you set a SL of -50 pips. During a flash crash that shit sometimes just breaks.

So let's use an example - you open a 0.1 lot short order on USDCAD and set the SL to 50 pips (so you'd only lose $50 if you hit stoploss). An hour later Trump makes some absurd announcement which causes a massive fundamental event on the market. A flash crash happens and over the course of the next few minutes USDCAD spikes up 500 pips, your broker is struggling to keep shit under control and your order slips through the cracks. By the time your broker is able to clear the backlog of orders and activity, your order closes out at 500 pips in the red. You just lost $500 when you intended initially to only risk $50.

It gets kinda scary if you are dealing with whole lot orders. A single order with a 500 pip drawdown is $5,000 gone in an instant. That will decimate many trader accounts.

Remember my statements above about Forex being a cruel bitch of a mistress? I wasn't kidding.

Granted - the above scenario is very rare to actually happen. But glitches to happen from time to time. Broker servers go offline. Weird shit happens which sets off a fundamental shift. Lots of stuff can break your account very quickly if you aren't using proper risk management.

LESSON 5 - UNDERSTAND DIFFERENT TRADING METHODOLOGIES

Generally speaking, there are 3 trading methodologies that traders employ. It's important to figure out what method you intend to use before asking for help. Each has their pros and cons, and you can combine them in a somewhat hybrid methodology but that introduces challenges as well.

In a nutshell:

Price Action Trading (Sometimes called Naked Trading) is very effective at identifying when trends will start and finish. This gives you the advantage of staying ahead of the market and predicting when a change in trend direction will occur. It has the disadvantage of being really easy to screw it up if you don't plot your support and resistance lines properly and interpret the chart wrong. Because you can identify a change in trend direction, you'll generally make more profit on a new trend than a technical strategy will.
Technical Analytics (or TA) uses math and statistics to try and identify where the market is headed or confirm/reject whether a trend is happening. It has the advantage of being very math and stat driven which is hard to refute the numbers, but it has the disadvantage of being late to the party when it comes to identifying trends (hence why people call TA a lagging strategy). When people fail using TA, it's not because of the math - it's because you misinterpreted what the math is telling you.
Fundamental Analysis (or FA) uses news and macro scale events to predict what is going on. A really good example right now is Brexit, what a clusterfuck that is. Every time some major brexit news breaks it causes all sorts of choas in almost every currency pair. Fundamental trading has the highest potential profitability per trade but it also has the highest potential drawdown per trade.

Now you may be thinking that you want to be a a price action trader - you should still learn the principles and concepts behind TA and FA. Same if you are planning to be a technical trader - you should learn about price action and fundamental analysis. More knowledge is better, always.

With regards to technical analysis, you need to really understand what the different indicators are tell you. It's very easy to misinterpret what an indicator is telling you, which causes you to make a bad trade and lose money. It's also important to understand that every indicator can be tuned to your personal preferences.

You might find, for example, that using Bollinger Bands with the normal 20 period SMA close, 2 standard deviation is not effective for how you look at the chart, but changing that to say a 20 period EMA average price, 1 standard deviation bollinger band indicator could give you significantly more insight.

LESSON 6 - TIMEFRAMES MATTER

Understanding the differences in which timeframes you trade on will make or break your chosen strategy. Some strategies work really well on Daily timeframes (i.e. Ichimoku) but they fall flat on their face if you use them on 1H timeframes, for example.

There is no right or wrong answer on what timeframe is best to trade on. Generally speaking however, there are 2 things to consider:

Speed - If you are scalping (trading on the really fast candles like 1M, 5M, 15M, etc) odds are your trades are very short lived. Maybe 10 minutes to an hour tops. For the most part, scalping strategies will produce little profit per trade but make up for it in the sheer volume of trades. Whereas swing trading may only make a few trades but each one could be worth a significant amount of money.
Spread (the fee you pay to the broker when you trade) - If you are a scalper, the spread is your worst enemy because you have to overcome it very fast to make a profit on your order. Whereas swing trading the spread hardly impacts you at all.

If you are a total newbie to forex, I suggest you don't trade on anything shorter than the 1H timeframe when you are first learning. Trading on higher timeframes tends to be much more forgiving and profitable per trade. Scalping is a delicate art and requires finesse and can be very challenging when you are first starting out.

LESSON 7 - AUTOBOTS...ROLL OUT!

Yeah...I'm a geek and grew up with the Transformers franchise decades before Michael Bay came along. Deal with it.

Forex bots are called EA's (Expert Advisors). They can be wonderous and devastating at the same time. /Forex is not really the best place to get help with them. That is what /algotrading is useful for. However some of us that lurk on /Forex code EA's and will try to assist when we can.

Anybody can learn to code an EA. But just like how 95% of retail traders fail, I would estimate the same is true for forex bots. Either the strategy doesn't work, the code is buggy, or many other reasons can cause EA's to fail. Because EA's can often times run up hundreds of orders in a very quick period of time, it's critical that you test them repeatedly before letting them lose on a live trading account so they don't blow your account to pieces. You have been warned.

If you want to learn how to code an EA, I suggest you start with MQL. It's a programming language which can be directly interpretted by Meta Trader. The Meta Trader terminal client even gives you a built in IDE for coding EA's in MQL. The downside is it can be buggy and glitchy and caused many frustrating hours of work to figure out what is wrong.

If you don't want to learn MQL, you can code an EA up in just about any programming language. Python is really popular for forex bots for some reason. But that doesn't mean you couldn't do it in something like C++ or Java or hell even something more unusual like JQuery if you really wanted.

I'm not going to get into the finer details of how to code EA's, there are some amazing guides out there. Just be careful with them. They can be your best friend and at the same time also your worst enemy when it comes to forex.

One final note on EA's - don't buy them. Ever. Let me put this into perspective - I create an EA which is literally producing money for me automatically 24/5. If it really is a good EA which is profitable, there is no way in hell I'm selling it. I'm keeping it to myself to make a fortune off of. EA's that are for sale will not work, will blow your account, and the developer who coded it will tell you that's too darn bad but no refunds. Don't ever buy an EA from anybody.

LESSON 8 - BRING ON THE HATERS

You are going to find that this subreddit is frequented by trolls. Some of them will get really nasty. Some of them will threaten you. Some of them will just make you miserable. It's the price you pay for admission to the /Forex club.

If you can't handle it, then I suggest you don't post here. Find a more newbie-friendly site. It sucks, but it's reality.

We often refer to trolls on this subreddit as shitcunts. That's your word of the day. Learn it, love it. Shitcunts.

YOU MADE IT, WELCOME TO FOREX!

If you've made it through all of the above and aren't cringing or getting scared, then welcome aboard the forex train! You will fit in nicely here. Ask your questions and the non-shitcunts of our little corner of reddit will try to help you.

Assuming this post doesn't get nuked and I don't get banned for it, I'll add more lessons to this post over time. Lessons I intend to add in the future:

Demo Trading
Why you will blow your first account and what to do when it happens
Trading Psychology (this will be a beefy one and will take a while to put together)
Exotics vs Majors and which you should focus on as a newbie (aka how to blow your account in a single trade with exotics)
Which Broker Should You Use? (This is covered in pretty good detail on the FAQ already - https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index - so I may not bother)
Hedging (there isn't really a good guide written on this anywhere)
Doubling Your Risk to Save Your Ass or Lose a Shit Ton (aka Martingale & Anti-Martingale)
Risk On/Off
Forex Calendars
Currency Strength / Heat Maps
Swap
Margin Calls (What are they and why are you getting them?)

If there is something else you feel should be included please drop a comment and I'll add it to the above list of pending topics.

Cheers,

Bob

TL;DR - I will try and flip an account from $50 or less to $1,000 over 2019. I will post all my account details so my strategy can be seen/copied. I will do this using only three or four trading setups. All of which are simple enough to learn. I will start trading on 10th January.
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As I see it there are two mains ways to understand how to make money in the markets. The first is to know what the biggest winners in the markets are doing and duplicating what they do. This is hard. Most of the biggest players will not publicly tell people what they are doing. You need to be able to kinda slide in with them and see if you can pick up some info. Not suitable for most people, takes a lot of networking and even then you have to be able to make the correct inferences.
Another way is to know the most common trades of losing traders and then be on the other side of their common mistakes. This is usually far easier, usually everyone knows the mind of a losing trader. I learned about what losing traders do every day by being one of them for many years. I noticed I had an some sort of affinity for buying at the very top of moves and selling at the very bottom. This sucked, however, is was obvious there was winning trades on the other side of what I was doing and the adjustments to be a good trader were small (albeit, tricky).
Thus began the study for entries and maximum risk:reward. See, there have been times I have bought aiming for a 10 pip scalps and hit 100 pips stops loss. Hell, there have been times I was going for 5 pips and hit 100 stop out. This can seem discouraging, but it does mean there must be 1:10 risk:reward pay-off on the other side of these mistakes, and they were mistakes.
If you repeatedly enter and exit at the wrong times, you are making mistakes and probably the same ones over and over again. The market is tricking you! There are specific ways in which price moves that compel people to make these mistakes (I won’t go into this in this post, because it takes too long and this is going to be a long post anyway, but a lot of this is FOMO).
Making mistakes is okay. In fact, as I see it, making mistakes is an essential part of becoming an expert. Making a mistake enough times to understand intrinsically why it is a mistake and then make the required adjustments. Understanding at a deep level why you trade the way you do and why others make the mistakes they do, is an important part of becoming an expert in your chosen area of focus.
I could talk more on these concepts, but to keep the length of the post down, I will crack on to actual examples of trades I look for. Here are my three main criteria. I am looking for tops/bottoms of moves (edge entries). I am looking for 1:3 RR or more potential pay-offs. My strategy assumes that retail trades will lose most of the time. This seems a fair enough assumption. Without meaning to sound too crass about it, smart money will beat dumb money most of the time if the game is base on money. They just will.
So to summarize, I am looking for the points newbies get trapped in bad positions entering into moves too late. From these areas, I am looking for high RR entries.
Setup Examples.
I call this one the “Lightning Bolt correction”, but it is most commonly referred to as a “two leg correction”. I call it a “Lightning Bolt correction” because it looks a bit like one, and it zaps you. If you get it wrong.

https://preview.redd.it/t4whwijse2721.png?width=1326&format=png&auto=webp&s=c9050529c6e2472a3ff9f8e7137bd4a3ee5554cc
Once I see price making the first sell-off move and then begin to rally towards the highs again, I am waiting for a washout spike low. The common trades mistakes I am trading against here is them being too eager to buy into the trend too early and for the to get stopped out/reverse position when it looks like it is making another bearish breakout. Right at that point they panic … literally one candle under there is where I want to be getting in. I want to be buying their stop loss, essentially. “Oh, you don’t want that ...okay, I will have that!”
I need a precise entry. I want to use tiny stops (for big RR) so I need to be cute with entries. For this, I need entry rules. Not just arbitrarily buying the spike out. There are a few moving parts to this that are outside the scope of this post but one of my mains ways is using a fibs extension and looking for reversals just after the 1.61% level. How to draw the fibs is something else that is outside the scope of this but for one simple rule, they can be drawn on the failed new high leg.

https://preview.redd.it/2cd682kve2721.png?width=536&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4d081c9faff49d0976f9ffab260aaed2b570309
I am looking for a few specific things for a prime setup. Firstly, I am looking for the false hope candles, the ones that look like they will reverse the market and let those buying too early get out break-even or even at profit. In this case, you can see the hammer and engulfing candle off the 127 level, then it spikes low in that “stop-hunt” sort of style.
Secondly I want to see it trading just past my entry level (161 ext). This rule has come from nothing other than sheer volume. The amount of times I’ve been stopped out by 1 pip by that little sly final low has gave birth to this rule. I am looking for the market to trade under support in a manner that looks like a new strong breakout. When I see this, I am looking to get in with tiny stops, right under the lows. I will also be using smaller charts at this time and looking for reversal clusters of candles. Things like dojis, inverted hammers etc. These are great for sticking stops under.
Important note, when the lightning bolt correction fails to be a good entry, I expect to see another two legs down. I may look to sell into this area sometimes, and also be looking for buying on another couple legs down. It is important to note, though, when this does not work out, I expect there to be continued momentum that is enough to stop out and reasonable stop level for my entry. Which is why I want to cut quick. If a 10 pips stop will hit, usually a 30 pips stop will too. Bin it and look for the next opportunity at better RR.

https://preview.redd.it/mhkgy35ze2721.png?width=1155&format=png&auto=webp&s=a18278b85b10278603e5c9c80eb98df3e6878232
Another setup I am watching for is harmonic patterns, and I am using these as a multi-purpose indicator. When I see potentially harmonic patterns forming, I am using their completion level as take profits, I do not want to try and run though reversal patterns I can see forming hours ahead of time. I also use them for entering (similar rules of looking for specific entry criteria for small stops). Finally, I use them as a continuation pattern. If the harmonic pattern runs past the area it may have reversed from, there is a high probability that the market will continue to trend and very basic trend following strategies work well. I learned this from being too stubborn sticking with what I thought were harmonic reversals only to be ran over by a trend (seriously, everything I know I know from how it used to make me lose).

https://preview.redd.it/1ytz2431f2721.png?width=1322&format=png&auto=webp&s=983a7f2a91f9195004ad8a2aa2bb9d4d6f128937
A method of spotting these sorts of M/W harmonics is they tend to form after a second spike out leg never formed. When this happens, it gives me a really good idea of where my profit targets should be and where my next big breakout level is. It is worth noting, larger harmonics using have small harmonics inside them (on lower time-frames) and this can be used for dialling in optimum entries. I also use harmonics far more extensively in ranging markets. Where they tend to have higher win rates.
Next setup is the good old fashioned double bottoms/double top/one tick trap sort of setup. This comes in when the market is highly over extended. It has a small sell-off and rallies back to the highs before having a much larger sell-off. This is a more risky trade in that it sells into what looks like trending momentum and can be stopped out more. However, it also pays a high RR when it works, allowing for it to be ran at reduced risk and still be highly profitable when it comes through.

https://preview.redd.it/1bx83776f2721.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c76c3085598ae70f4142d26c46c8d6e9b1c2881
From these sorts of moves, I am always looking for a follow up buy if it forms a lightning bolt sort of setup.
All of these setups always offer 1:3 or better RR. If they do not, you are doing it wrong (and it will be your stop placement that is wrong). This is not to say the target is always 1:3+, sometimes it is best to lock in profits with training stops. It just means that every time you enter, you can potentially have a trade that runs for many times more than you risked. 1:10 RR can be hit in these sorts of setups sometimes. Paying you 20% for 2% risked.
I want to really stress here that what I am doing is trading against small traders mistakes. I am not trying to “beat the market maker”. I am not trying to reverse engineer J.P Morgan’s black boxes. I do not think I am smart enough to gain a worthwhile edge over these traders. They have more money, they have more data, they have better softwares … they are stronger. Me trying to “beat the market maker” is like me trying to beat up Mike Tyson. I might be able to kick him in the balls and feel smug for a few seconds. However, when he gets up, he is still Tyson and I am still me. I am still going to be pummeled.
I’ve seen some people that were fairly bright people going into training courses and coming out dumb as shit. Thinking they somehow are now going to dominate Goldman Sachs because they learned a chart pattern. Get a grip. For real, get a fucking grip. These buzz phrases are marketeering. Realististically, if you want to win in the markets, you need to have an edge over somebody.
I don’t have edges on the banks. If I could find one, they’d take it away from me. Edges work on inefficiencies in what others do that you can spot and they can not. I do not expect to out-think a banks analysis team. I know for damn sure I can out-think a version of me from 5 years ago … and I know there are enough of them in the markets. I look to trade against them. I just look to protect myself from the larger players so they can only hurt me in limited ways. Rather than letting them corner me and beat me to a pulp (in the form of me watching $1,000 drop off my equity because I moved a stop or something), I just let them kick me in the butt as I run away. It hurts a little, but I will be over it soon.
I believe using these principles, these three simple enough edge entry setups, selectiveness (remembering you are trading against the areas people make mistakes, wait for they areas) and measured aggression a person can make impressive compounded gains over a year. I will attempt to demonstrate this by taking an account of under $100 to over $1,000 in a year. I will use max 10% on risk on a position, the risk will scale down as the account size increases. In most cases, 5% risk per trade will be used, so I will be going for 10-20% or so profits. I will be looking only for prime opportunities, so few trades but hard hitting ones when I take them.
I will start trading around the 10th January. Set remind me if you want to follow along. I will also post my investor login details, so you can see the trades in my account in real time. Letting you see when I place my orders and how I manage running positions.
I also think these same principles can be tweaked in such a way it is possible to flip $50 or so into $1,000 in under a month. I’ve done $10 to $1,000 in three days before. This is far more complex in trade management, though. Making it hard to explain/understand and un-viable for many people to copy (it hedges, does not comply with FIFO, needs 1:500 leverage and also needs spreads under half a pip on EURUSD - not everyone can access all they things). I see all too often people act as if this can’t be done and everyone saying it is lying to sell you something. I do not sell signals. I do not sell training. I have no dog in this fight, I am just saying it can be done. There are people who do it. If you dismiss it as impossible; you will never be one of them.
If I try this 10 times with $50, I probably am more likely to make $1,000 ($500 profit) in a couple months than standard ideas would double $500 - I think I have better RR, even though I may go bust 5 or more times. I may also try to demonstrate this, but it is kinda just show-boating, quite honestly. When it works, it looks cool. When it does not, I can go bust in a single day (see example https://www.fxblue.com/users/redditmicroflip).
So I may or may not try and demonstrate this. All this is, is just taking good basic concepts and applying accelerated risk tactics to them and hitting a winning streak (of far less trades than you may think). Once you have good entries and RR optimization in place - there really is no reason why you can not scale these up to do what may people call impossible (without even trying it).
I know there are a lot of people who do not think these things are possible and tend to just troll whenever people talk about these things. There used to be a time when I’d try to explain why I thought the way I did … before I noticed they only cared about telling me why they were right and discussion was pointless. Therefore, when it comes to replies, I will reply to all comments that ask me a question regarding why I think this can be done, or why I done something that I done. If you are commenting just to tell me all the reasons you think I am wrong and you are right, I will probably not reply. I may well consider your points if they are good ones. I just do not entering into discussions with people who already know everything; it serves no purpose.

Edit: Addition.

I want to talk a bit more about using higher percentage of risk than usual. Firstly, let me say that there are good reasons for risk caps that people often cite as “musts”. There are reasons why 2% is considered optimum for a lot of strategies and there are reasons drawing down too much is a really bad thing.
Please do not be ignorant of this. Please do not assume I am, either. In previous work I done, I was selecting trading strategies that could be used for investment. When doing this, my only concern was drawdown metrics. These are essential for professional money management and they are also essential for personal long-term success in trading.
So please do not think I have not thought of these sorts of things Many of the reasons people say these things can’t work are basic 101 stuff anyone even remotely committed to learning about trading learns in their first 6 months. Trust me, I have thought about these concepts. I just never stopped thinking when I found out what public consensus was.
While these 101 rules make a lot of sense, it does not take away from the fact there are other betting strategies, and if you can know the approximate win rate and pay-off of trades, you can have other ways of deriving optimal bet sizes (risk per trade). Using Kelly Criterion, for example, if the pay-off is 1:3 and there is a 75% chance of winning, the optimal bet size is 62.5%. It would be a viable (high risk) strategy to have extremely filtered conditions that looked for just one perfect set up a month, makingover 150% if it was successful.
Let’s do some math on if you can pull that off three months in a row (using 150% gain, for easy math). Start $100. Month two starts $250. Month three $625. Month three ends $1,562. You have won three trades. Can you win three trades in a row under these conditions? I don’t know … but don’t assume no-one can.
This is extremely high risk, let’s scale it down to meet somewhere in the middle of the extremes. Let’s look at 10%. Same thing, 10% risk looking for ideal opportunities. Maybe trading once every week or so. 30% pay-off is you win. Let’s be realistic here, a lot of strategies can drawdown 10% using low risk without actually having had that good a chance to generate 30% gains in the trades it took to do so. It could be argued that trading seldomly but taking 5* the risk your “supposed” to take can be more risk efficient than many strategies people are using.
I am not saying that you should be doing these things with tens of thousands of dollars. I am not saying you should do these things as long term strategies. What I am saying is do not dismiss things out of hand just because they buck the “common knowns”. There are ways you can use more aggressive trading tactics to turn small sums of money into they $1,000s of dollars accounts that you exercise they stringent money management tactics on.
With all the above being said, you do have to actually understand to what extent you have an edge doing what you are doing. To do this, you should be using standard sorts of risks. Get the basics in place, just do not think you have to always be basic. Once you have good basics in place and actually make a bit of money, you can section off profits for higher risk versions of strategies. The basic concepts of money management are golden. For longevity and large funds; learned them and use them! Just don’t forget to think for yourself once you have done that.

Update -

Okay, I have thought this through a bit more and decided I don't want to post my live account investor login, because it has my full name and I do not know who any of you are. Instead, for copying/observing, I will give demo account login (since I can choose any name for a demo).
I will also copy onto a live account and have that tracked via Myfxbook.
I will do two versions. One will be FIFO compliant. It will trade only single trade positions. The other will not be FIFO compliant, it will open trades in batches. I will link up live account in a week or so. For now, if anyone wants to do BETA testing with the copy trader, you can do so with the following details (this is the non-FIFO compliant version).

Account tracking/copying details.

Low-Medium risk.
IC Markets MT4
Account number: 10307003
Investor PW: lGdMaRe6
Server: Demo:01
(Not FIFO compliant)

Valid and Invalid Complaints.
There are a few things that can pop up in copy trading. I am not a n00b when it comes to this, so I can somewhat forecast what these will be. I can kinda predict what sort of comments there may be. Some of these are valid points that if you raise I should (and will) reply to. Some are things outside of the scope of things I can influence, and as such, there is no point in me replying to. I will just cover them all here the one time.

Valid complains are if I do something dumb or dramatically outside of the strategy I have laid out here. won't do these, if I do, you can pitchfork ----E

Examples;

“Oi, idiot! You opened a trade randomly on a news spike. I got slipped 20 pips and it was a shit entry”.
Perfectly valid complaint.

“Why did you open a trade during swaps hours when the spread was 30 pips?”
Also valid.

“You left huge trades open running into the weekend and now I have serious gap paranoia!”
Definitely valid.

These are examples of me doing dumb stuff. If I do dumb stuff, it is fair enough people say things amounting to “Yo, that was dumb stuff”.

Invalid Complains;

“You bought EURUSD when it was clearly a sell!!!!”
Okay … you sell. No-one is asking you to copy my trades. I am not trading your strategy. Different positions make a market.

“You opened a position too big and I lost X%”.
No. Na uh. You copied a position too big. If you are using a trade copier, you can set maximum risk. If you neglect to do this, you are taking 100% risk. You have no valid compliant for losing. The act of copying and setting the risk settings is you selecting your risk. I am not responsible for your risk. I accept absolutely no liability for any losses.
*Suggested fix. Refer to risk control in copy trading software

“You lost X trades in a row at X% so I lost too much”.
Nope. You copied. See above. Anything relating to losing too much in trades (placed in liquid/standard market conditions) is entirely you. I can lose my money. Only you can set it up so you can lose yours. I do not have access to your account. Only mine.
*Suggested fix. Refer to risk control in copy trading software

“Price keeps trading close to the pending limit orders but not filling. Your account shows profits, but mine is not getting them”.
This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours.
* Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Buy limit orders will need to move up a little. Sell limit orders should not need adjusted.

“I got stopped out right before the market turned, I have a loss but your account shows a profit”.
This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours.
** Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Stop losses on sell orders will need to move up a bit. Stops on buy orders will be fine.

“Your trade got stopped out right before the market turned, if it was one more pip in the stop, it would have been a winner!!!”
Yeah. This happens. This is where the “risk” part of “risk:reward” comes in.

“Price traded close to take profit, yours filled but mines never”.
This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours.
(Side note, this should not be an issue since when my trade closes, it should ping your account to close, too. You might get a couple less pips).
*** Suggested fix. Compare the spread on your broker with the spread on mine. Adjust your orders accordingly. Take profits on buys will need to move up a bit. Sell take profits will be fine.

“My brokers spread jumped to 20 during the New York session so the open trade made a bigger loss than it should”.
Your broker might just suck if this happens. This is brokerage. I have no control over this. My trades are placed to profit from my brokerage conditions. I do not know, so can not account for yours. Also, if accounting for random spread spikes like this was something I had to do, this strategy would not be a thing. It only works with fair brokerage conditions.
*Suggested fix. Do a bit of Googling and find out if you have a horrific broker. If so, fix that! A good search phrase is; “(Broker name) FPA reviews”.

“Price hit the stop loss but was going really fast and my stop got slipped X pips”.
This is brokerage. I have no control over this. I use a strategy that aims for precision, and that means a pip here and there differences in brokerage spreads can make a difference. I am trading to profit from my trading conditions. I do not know, so can not account for, yours.
If my trade also got slipped on the stop, I was slipped using ECN conditions with excellent execution; sometimes slips just happen. I am doing the most I can to prevent them, but it is a fact of liquidity that sometimes we get slipped (slippage can also work in our favor, paying us more than the take profit would have been).

“Orders you placed failed to execute on my account because they were too large”.
This is brokerage. I have no control over this. Margin requirements vary. I have 1:500 leverage available. I will not always be using it, but I can. If you can’t, this will make a difference.

“Your account is making profits trading things my broker does not have”
I have a full range of assets to trade with the broker I use. Included Forex, indices, commodities and cryptocurrencies. I may or may not use the extent of these options. I can not account for your brokerage conditions.

I think I have covered most of the common ones here. There are some general rules of thumb, though. Basically, if I do something that is dumb and would have a high probability of losing on any broker traded on, this is a valid complain.

Anything that pertains to risk taken in standard trading conditions is under your control.

Also, anything at all that pertains to brokerage variance there is nothing I can do, other than fully brief you on what to expect up-front. Since I am taking the time to do this, I won’t be a punchbag for anything that happens later pertaining to this.

I am not using an elitist broker. You don’t need $50,000 to open an account, it is only $200. It is accessible to most people - brokerage conditions akin to what I am using are absolutely available to anyone in the UK/Europe/Asia (North America, I am not so up on, so can’t say). With the broker I use, and with others. If you do not take the time to make sure you are trading with a good broker, there is nothing I can do about how that affects your trades.

I am using an A book broker, if you are using B book; it will almost certainly be worse results. You have bad costs. You are essentially buying from reseller and paying a mark-up. (A/B book AKA ECN/Market maker; learn about this here). My EURUSD spread will typically be 0.02 pips or so, if yours is 1 pip, this is a huge difference.
These are typical spreads I am working on.

https://preview.redd.it/yc2c4jfpab721.png?width=597&format=png&auto=webp&s=c377686b2485e13171318c9861f42faf325437e1

Check the full range of spreads on Forex, commodities, indices and crypto.

Please understand I want nothing from you if you benefit from this, but I am also due you nothing if you lose. My only term of offering this is that people do not moan at me if they lose money.

I have been fully upfront saying this is geared towards higher risk. I have provided information and tools for you to take control over this. If I do lose people’s money and I know that, I honestly will feel a bit sad about it. However, if you complain about it, all I will say is “I told you that might happen”, because, I am telling you that might happen.

Make clear headed assessments of how much money you can afford to risk, and use these when making your decisions. They are yours to make, and not my responsibility.

Update.

Crazy Kelly Compounding: $100 - $11,000 in 6 Trades.

$100 to $11,000 in 6 trades? Is it a scam? Is it a gamble? … No, it’s maths.

Common sense risk disclaimer: Don’t be a dick! Don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose. Do not risk money doing these things until you can show a regular profit on low risk.
Let’s talk about Crazy Kelly Compounding (CKC). Kelly criterion is a method for selecting optimal bet sizes if the odds and win rate are known (in other words, once you have worked out how to create and assess your edge). You can Google to learn about it in detail. The formula for Kelly criterion is;
((odds-1) * (percentage estimate)) - (1-percent estimate) / (odds-1) X 100
Now let’s say you can filter down a strategy to have a 80% win rate. It trades very rarely, but it had a very high success rate when it does. Let’s say you get 1:2 RR on that trade. Kelly would give you an optimum bet size of about 60% here. So if you win, you win 120%. Losing three trades in a row will bust you. You can still recover from anything less than that, fairly easily with a couple winning trades.
This is where CKC comes in. What if you could string some of these wins together, compounding the gains (so you were risking 60% each time)? What if you could pull off 6 trades in a row doing this?
Here is the math;

https://preview.redd.it/u3u6teqd7c721.png?width=606&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b958747b37b68ec2a769a8368b5cbebfe0e97ff
This shows years, substitute years for trades. 6 trades returns $11,338! This can be done. The question really is if you are able to dial in good enough entries, filter out enough sub-par trades and have the guts to pull the trigger when the time is right. Obviously you need to be willing to take the hit, obviously that hit gets bigger each time you go for it, but the reward to risk ratio is pretty decent if you can afford to lose the money.
We could maybe set something up to do this on cent brokers. So people can do it literally risking a couple dollars. I’d have to check to see if there was suitable spreads etc offered on them, though. They can be kinda icky.
Now listen, I am serious … don’t be a dick. Don’t rush out next week trying to retire by the weekend. What I am showing you is the EXTRA rewards that come with being able to produce good solid results and being able to section off some money for high risk “all or nothing” attempts; using your proven strategies.
I am not saying anyone can open 6 trades and make $11,000 … that is rather improbable. What I am saying is once you can get the strategy side right, and you can know your numbers; then you can use the numbers to see where the limits actually are, how fast your strategy can really go.
This CKC concept is not intended to inspire you to be reckless in trading, it is intended to inspire you to put focus on learning the core skills I am telling you that are behind being able to do this.

I'm new to forex and have been trading on a real account for a month now. Almost everywhere (e.g. social media, videos and this forum) I've seen people posting their MT4 platform, so I assume the majority of forex trades use MT4 as their trading platform.
BUT WHY? What are the benefits of MT4?
I've been with IG broker and currently using their Web Platform and Android App for daily trading. So far, I find it much better and more convenient than MT4. Here are few reasons

I can trade on the Web Platform from anywhere and on any devices (independent of operating systems)
I have access to over 16.000 financial markets (stocks, cryptocurrency, indices, etc.) and is not limited to forex only
A great UI and UX , their charts are as good as TradingView, so I can do my analysis there as well.
Almost instantly execution time
IG sends me "trading statements" (history/balances) via email daily, so I'm not afraid that they could screw me, e.g. deleting my account and leave no traces behind.

My understanding is if I connect IG broker to MT4, then the MT4 trading platform will use the IG server to process all trading activities. So MT4 is just a client, just like the IG Web Platform/App - they all connect to the same server. Therefore, the execution time and delays should be the same for all platforms.
I'm not interested in all the indicators and automation tools (MQL programming) MT4 offers, as I trade purely on price actions and fundamentals.
The only drawback I see is that I can't connect IG platform to myfxbook.
So what are the benefits of MT4 (as the majority are using it), and should I switch?

Hello, I am having a problem with flask and quickfix. For those who don't know, quickfix is a python framework for creating FIX engines (FIX is a messaging protocol for financial services). My project started with a command line interface where I would start my quickfix app and keep a while loop asking for user input.
Now I must modify my project as a web app and decided to use flask. I set up a flask route to start the quickfix server but every time I access that API endpoint from Postman, my flask server dies, sometimes with a buffer overflow error and sometimes it does not give me any error messages.
Here is my flask code (it is very basic). The route that is causing the problem now is "/api/start_fix/" at flask_api.py:

from flask import Flask, render_template import fixapp from types import SimpleNamespace app = Flask(__name__) fix_handle = None @app.route('/') def home(): return "This is a sample
" @app.route('/api/start_fix/',methods=['POST']) def start_fix(config_file): #these three lines below are temporary and circling each other. args = vars(fixapp.get_default_args()) args['config'] = config_file args['verbose'] = 3 args = SimpleNamespace(**args) fix_handle = fixapp.create_fix_app(args,fix_mode='manual') fix_handle.start() return "SUCCESS" @app.route('/api/start_quote/',methods=["POST"]) def start_quote(symbol): options = {'55':symbol} fix_handle.send_subscribe_to_data(options) @app.route('/api/get_ticks',methods=['GET']) def get_ticks(): return fix_handle.get_ticks() #get_ticks should return a json object @app.route('/api/get_ticks/',methods=['GET']) def get_ticks_by_size(size): return fix_handle.get_ticks(size=size) #should be json if __name__ == '__main__': app.run(debug=True)

fixapp is my implementation with quickfix and structured as a python package. I was hoping to use fix_handle to access data from within it through flask but the server crashes right at the beginning.
I will include a snippet of the function fix_handle.start() in case it is useful even though it is very short fixapp/session_object.py:

class SessionBase(object): """Base session object. It will be used to initialized most of the session object parameters""" def __init__(self,args): self.args = args self.config_file = args.config self.settings = fix.SessionSettings(self.config_file) self.decoder = FixDecoder() self.datastream = DataStream() self.orderstore = OrderStore() self.storeFactory = fix.FileStoreFactory(self.settings) self.logFactory = fix.FileLogFactory(self.settings) def start(self): """Initiate FIX app and do nothing else. This will only work if the child class has implemented the self.app and self.initiator""" try: self.initiator.start() time.sleep(1) print("FIX application has started...") #fixapp.utils.fix_started_msg() except (fix.ConfigError , fix.RuntimeError) as e: print(e) . . .

self.initiator.start() is a function from the quickfix library and not implemented by me.
Also, to make it more clear, I want to remind that fixapp will start a process on its own and a server connection to a forex broker. This functionality used to work well from the command line but from within flask it can't work.
I looked into using threading or multi-threading libraries and was thinking of starting a new thread for each time my flask endpoint is sent a request, but it is still unclear to me how I could communicate with my quickfix process. Quickfix needs to be running in the background and those flask endpoints simply redirect to it. Quickfix will be continuously collecting FOREX data from the market.
I guess this is more about how to approach my problem by running quickfix from inside flask so that users of the web app can interact with it.
I would appreciate if someone can help me with this issue and if I wasn't clear or there is more information needed, please let me know.

Originally posted by Darkstar at Forex Factory.
Disclaimer: I did not write this. I found this post on ForexFactory written by a user called DarkStar, which I believe a lot of redditors will benefit from reading.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There has been much discussion of late regarding borker spreads and liquidity. Many assumptions are being made about why spreads are widened during news time that are built on an incomplete knowledge of the architecture of the forex market in general. The purpose of this article is to dissect the market and hopefully shed some light on the situation so that a more rational and productive discussion can be undertaken by the Forex Factory members.
We will begin with an explanation of the purpose of the Forex market and how it is utilized by its primary participants, expand into the structure and operation of the market, and conclude with the implications of this information for speculators. With that having been said, let us begin.
Unlike the various bond and equity markets, the Forex market is not generally utilized as an investment medium. While speculation has a critical role in its proper function, the lion’s share of Forex transactions are done as a function of international business.
The guy who buys a shiny new Eclipse more then likely will pay for it with US Dollars. Unfortunately Mitsubishi’s factory workers in Japan need to get their paychecks denominated in Yen, so at some point a conversion needs to be made. When one considers that companies like Exxon, Boeing, Sony, Dell, Honda, and thousands of other international businesses move nearly every dollar, real, yen, rubble, pound, and euro they make in a foreign country through the Forex market, it isn’t hard to understand how insignificant the speculative presence is; even in a $2tril per day market.
By and large, businesses don’t much care about the intricacies of exchange rates, they just want to make and sell their products. As a central repository of a company’s money, it was only natural that the banks would be the facilitators of these transactions. In the old days it was easy enough for a bank to call a foreign bank (or a foreign branch of ones own bank) and swap the stockpiles of currency each had accumulated from their many customers.
Just as any business would, the banks bought the foreign currency at one rate and marked it up before selling it to the customer. With that the foreign exchange spread was born. This was (and still is) a reasonable cost of doing business. Mitsubishi can pay its customers and the banks make a nice little profit for the hassle and risks associated with moving around the currency.
As a byproduct of transacting all this business, bank traders developed the ability to speculate on the future of currency rates. Utilizing a better understanding of the market, a bank could quote a business a spread on the current rate but hold off hedging until a better one came along. This process allowed the banks to expand their net income dramatically. The unfortunate consequence was that liquidity was redistributed in a way that made certain transactions impossible to complete.
It was for this reason and this reason alone that the market was eventually opened up to non-bank participants. The banks wanted more orders in the market so that a) they could profit from the less experienced participants, and b) the less experienced participants could provide a better liquidity distribution for execution of international business hedge orders. Initially only megacap hedge funds (such as Soros’s and others) were permitted, but it has since grown to include the retail brokerages and ECNs.

Market Structure:
Now that we have established why the market exists, let’s take a look at how the transactions are facilitated:
The top tier of the Forex market is transacted on what is collectively known as the Interbank. Contrary to popular belief the Interbank is not an exchange; it is a collection of communication agreements between the world’s largest money center banks.
To understand the structure of the Interbank market, it may be easier to grasp by way of analogy. Consider that in an office (or maybe even someone’s home) there are multiple computers connected via a network cable. Each computer operates independently of the others until it needs a resource that another computer possesses. At that point it will contact the other computer and request access to the necessary resource. If the computer is working properly and its owner has given the requestor authorization to do so, the resource can be accessed and the initiating computers request can be fulfilled. By substituting computers for banks and resources for currency, you can easily grasp the relationships that exist on the Interbank.
Anyone who has ever tried to find resources on a computer network without a server can appreciate how difficult it can be to keep track of who has what resources. The same issue exists on the Interbank market with regard to prices and currency inventory. A bank in Singapore may only rarely transact business with a company that needs to exchange some Brazilian Real and it can be very difficult to establish what a proper exchange rate should be. It is for this purpose that EBS and Reuters (hereafter EBS) established their services.
Layered on top (in a manner of speaking) of the Interbank communication links, the EBS service enables banks to see how much and at what prices all the Interbank members are willing to transact. Pains should be taken to express that EBS is not a market or a market maker; it is an application used to see bids and offers from the various banks.
The second tier of the market exists essential within each bank. By calling your local Bank of America branch you can exchange any foreign currency you would like. More then likely they will just move some excess currency from one branch to another. Since this is a micro-exchange with a single counterparty, you are basically at their mercy as to what exchange rate they will quote you. Your choice is to accept their offer or shop a different bank. Everyone who trades the forex market should visit their bank at least once to get a few quotes. It would be very enlightening to see how lucrative these transactions really are.
Branching off of this second tier is the third tier retail market. When brokers like Oanda, Forex.com, FXCM, etc. desire to establish a retail operation the first thing they need is a liquidity provider. Nine in ten of these brokers will sign an agreement with just one bank. This bank will agree to provide liquidity if and only if they can hedge it on EBS inclusive of their desired spread. Because the volume will be significantly higher a single bank patron will transact, the spreads will be much more competitive. By no means should it be expected these tier 3 providers will be quoted precisely what exists on the Interbank. Remember the bank is in the business of collecting spreads and no agreement is going to suspend that priority.
Retail forex is almost akin to running a casino. The majority of its participants have zero understanding how to trade effectively and as a result are consistent losers. The spread system combined with a standard probability distribution of returns gives the broker a built in house advantage of a few percentage points. As a result, they have all built internal order matching systems that play one loser off against a winner and collect the spread. On the occasions when disequilibrium exists within the internal order book, the broker hedges any exposure with their tier 2 liquidity provider.
As bad as this may sound, there are some significant advantages for speculators that deal with them. Because it is an internal order book, many features can be provided which are otherwise unavailable through other means. Non-standard contract sizes, high leverage on tiny account balances, and the ability to transact in a commission free environment are just a few of them…
An ECN operates similar to a Tier 2 bank, but still exists on the third tier. An ECN will generally establish agreements with several tier 2 banks for liquidity. However instead of matching orders internally, it will just pass through the quotes from the banks, as is, to be traded on. It’s sort of an EBS for little guys. There are many advantages to the model, but it is still not the Interbank. The banks are going to make their spread or their not go to waste their time. Depending on the bank this will take the form of price shading or widened spreads depending on market conditions. The ECN, for its trouble, collects a commission on each transaction.
Aside from the commission factor, there are some other disadvantages a speculator should consider before making the leap to an ECN. Most offer much lower leverage and only allow full lot transactions. During certain market conditions, the banks may also pull their liquidity leaving traders without an opportunity to enter or exit positions at their desired price.

Trade Mechanics:
It is convenient to believe that in a $2tril per day market there is always enough liquidity to do what needs to be done. Unfortunately belief does not negate the reality that for every buyer there MUST be a seller or no transaction can occur. When an order is too large to transact at the current price, the price moves to the point where open interest is abundant enough to cover it. Every time you see price move a single pip, it means that an order was executed that consumed (or otherwise removed) the open interest at the current price. There is no other way that prices can move.
As we covered earlier, each bank lists on EBS how much and at what price they are willing to transact a currency. It is important to note that no Interbank participant is under any obligation to make a transaction if they do not feel it is in their best interest. There are no “market makers” on the Interbank; only speculators and hedgers.
Looking at an ECN platform or Level II data on the stock market, one can get a feel for what the orders on EBS look like. The following is a sample representation:
You’ll notice that there is open interest (Level II Vol figures) of various sizes at different price points. Each one of those units represents existing limit orders and in this example, each unit is $1mil in currency.
Using this information, if a market sell order was placed for 38.4mil, the spread would instantly widen from 2.5 pips to 4.5 pips because there would no longer be any orders between 1.56300 and 1.56345. No broker, market maker, bank, or thief in the night widened the spread; it was the natural byproduct of the order that was placed. If no additional orders entered the market, the spread would remain this large forever. Fortunately, someone somewhere will deem a price point between those 2 figures an appropriate opportunity to do something and place an order. That order will either consume more interest or add to it, depending whether it is a market or limit order respectively.
What would have happened if someone placed a market sell order for 2mil just 1 millisecond after that 38.4 mil order hit? They would have been filled at 1.5630 Why were they “slipped”? Because there was no one to take the other side of the transaction at 1.56320 any longer. Again, nobody was out screwing the trader; it was the natural byproduct of the order flow.
A more interesting question is, what would happen if all the listed orders where suddenly canceled? The spread would widen to a point at which there were existing bids and offers. That may be 5,7,9, or even 100 pips; it is going to widen to whatever the difference between a bid and an offer are. Notice that nobody came in and “set” the spread, they just refused to transact at anything between it.
Nothing can be done to force orders into existence that don’t exist. Regardless what market is being examined or what broker is facilitating transactions, it is impossible to avoid spreads and slippage. They are a fact of life in the realm of trading.

Implications for speculators:
Trading has been characterized as a zero sum game, and rightly so. If trader A sells a security to trader B and the price goes up, trader A lost money that they otherwise could have made. If it goes down, Trader A made money from trader B’s mistake. Even in a huge market like the Forex, each transaction must have a buyer and a seller to make a trade and one of them is going to lose. In the general realm of trading, this is materially irrelevant to each participant. But there are certain situations where it becomes of significant importance. One of those situations is a news event.
Much has been made of late about how it is immoral, illegal, or downright evil for a broker, bank, or other liquidity provider to withdraw their order (increasing the spread) and slip orders (as though it was a conscious decision on their part to do so) more then normal during these events. These things occur for very specific reasons which have nothing to do with screwing anyone. Let us examine why:
Leading up to an economic report for example, certain traders will enter into positions expecting the news to go a certain way. As the event becomes immanent, the banks on the Interbank will remove their speculative orders for fear of taking unnecessary losses. Technical traders will pull their orders as well since it is common practice for them to avoid the news. Hedge funds and other macro traders are either already positioned or waiting until after the news hits to make decisions dependent on the result.
Knowing what we now know, where is the liquidity necessary to maintain a tight spread coming from?
Moving down the food chain to Tier 2; a bank will only provide liquidity to an ECN or retail broker if they can instantly hedge (plus their requisite spread) the positions on Interbank. If the Interbank spreads are widening due to lower liquidity, the bank is going to have to widen the spreads on the downstream players as well.
At tier 3 the ECN’s are simply passing the banks offers on, so spreads widen up to their customers. The retailers that guarantee spreads of 2 to 5 pips have just opened a gaping hole in their risk profile since they can no longer hedge their net exposure (ever wonder why they always seem to shut down or requote until its over?). The variable spread retailers in turn open up their spreads to match what is happening at the bank or they run into the same problems fixed spreads broker are dealing with.
Now think about this situation for a second. What is going to happen when a number misses expectations? How many traders going into the event with positions chose wrong and need to get out ASAP? How many hedge funds are going to instantly drop their macro orders? How many retail traders’ straddle orders just executed? How many of them were waiting to hear a miss and executed market orders?
With the technical traders on the sidelines, who is going to be stupid enough to take the other side of all these orders?
The answer is no one. Between 1 and 5 seconds after the news hits it is a purely a 1 way market. That big long pin bar that occurs is a grand total of 2 prices; the one before the news hit and the one after. The 10, 20, or 30 pips between them is called a gap.
Is it any wonder that slippage is in evidence at this time?

Conclusions:
Each tier of the Forex market has its own inherent advantages and disadvantages. Depending on your priorities you have to make a choice between what restrictions you can live with and those you cant. Unfortunately, you can’t always get what you want.
By focusing on slippage and spreads, which are the natural byproduct of order flow, one is not only pursuing a futile ideal, they are passing up an enormous opportunity to capitalize on true inefficiencies. News events are one of the few times where a large number of players are positioned inappropriately and it is fairly easy to profit from their foolishness. If a trader truly wants to make the leap to the next level of profitability they should be spending their time figuring out how identify these positions and trading with the goal of capturing the price movement they inevitably will cause.
Nobody is going to make the argument that a broker is a trader’s best friend, but they still provide a valuable service and should be compensated for their efforts. By accepting a broker for what it is and learning how to work within the limitations of the relationship, traders have access to a world of opportunity that they otherwise could never dream of capturing. Let us all remember that simple truth.

This is the version of various different strategies I am planning on running that I expect to preform the best.
Myfxbook: http://www.myfxbook.com/members/inweedwetrust/intraday-copy-trading/3117881

It is intraday trading. It will take multiple positions at a time, with varying risk depending on market conditions.

If copying, this should be copied directly. You should not edit not settings. You should not scale up, nor scale down risk (you can if you want, but I am not trading this intending it to be coped on default).

It is essential excellent brokerage is used. There will be stops of a few pips, there will be trailing stops tight to market price and many things that will not work on non ECN brokers. The results shown are the results you will get trading with IC Markets.

The strategy requires a minimum of $200 to copy.
Platform IC Markets MT4
MT4 Account number - 10361054
Investor password - u/inweedwetrust (ignore hyperlink)
Server demo 01.

This is tested and ready for live copying.

Myfxbook: http://www.myfxbook.com/members/inweedwetrust/intraday-copy-trading/3117881

Copying info (essential reads)
https://www.reddit.com/ForexCopy/comments/abogzf/how_to_copy_trades/

First, who I am. I work in the financial industry as a level 2 PC support. I have a computer science and mathematics degree and have worked as a programmer for over 3 years, and PC support for over 6. I’ve been working for the last 3 months on “breaking” a platform that we used in the past to auto-trade forex so that it could trade cryptocurrencies. I currently have a system running that has been making roughly .5-1% per day since mid-January but are looking to accelerate and improve this. I also have a system that is projected to make much more but implementing a way to execute those trades on the market will require a bit of work.
The Plan. I’d like to build a team of skilled individuals but divide them into teams that won’t share work with the exception of meetings to talk about progress and if one team seriously needs help understanding something another team is doing. This will slowly go away as everyone gets vetted and works together more frequently. Each of these teams will get their part of the project that I’ve developed over the last 3 months so that they can understand and improve upon it. The only time they will have access to another part of it is when they’re working with a member of that team either through discord or some RDC (Discord, VNC, RDP, TeamViewer, Skype etc.). The reasoning for this is so that one individual can’t run off with all of our work and build their own team to do this with, as has happened to me prior.
At some point I’d like to have everyone I add to the team get well-vetted enough to do away with the segregation and have one team working together, but until I get to know everyone I bring in I need to do this for all our benefit. As of right now I have assembled a team of 5 and look to add a few more.
Stage 2 of the plan -once we have proven ourselves through a strong portfolio- is to eventually build this into a fully-fledged trading fund. I already have someone who’s passed the series 7 and series 65 exams willing to join the team.
Team Structure. Team 1 will need to be strong in coding both python and C#, strong at making things that are not intended to work together run like a clock and will be the core to our back end. All data that comes from Brokers, Google Trends, Google Analytics, Twitter, etc. will come from the back end that is built by this team. As of right now it’s run in python because 2 of the API’s I use don’t have open-API’s but have libraries already built for python. Eventually I’d like to “break” our platform even further and integrate the entire backend into it using C# so everything becomes more streamlined. (2 open spots)
Team 2 will be somewhat split into two subteams, both of which will be working solely on the platform itself. The first subteam will need to be strong and experienced traders, understanding both fundamental and technical trading. A base understanding of programming to better articulate your thoughts to your teammates is also a huge asset. (1 open spot)
The second subteam will be made up of programmers who are able to code C# and are able to understand what the non-programming oriented first half of this team are trying to tell a computer to do. This will consist of writing and testing certain correlations that they may view impactful and creating new indicators as well as re-writing parts of the platform in our favor. (1 open spot)
Team 3 will work on the machine learning. It’s important they have a strong understanding of C# and data science theory. I’d like to integrate this directly into the platform for the sake of consistency and speed. Python is also a useful language to know but is not required. They will work with team 2 short term. And will have a more self-contained project long term. (1 open spot)
What we have:

Server running this 24/7
Back end that pulls in data from brokerages, twitter, google, etc. (Team 1)
Powerful forex trading platform modded to trade using our input (Team 2)
Unintended integration into this platform for a neural net (Team 3)
Tick by Tick Historical Data for over 100 crypto’s from the last 3 months.
Proof that a neural network can be easily implemented into the platform.

How much do you know about the GV CEO Ruslan?
He is an extremely experienced developer with a HUGE proven track record:

Software developer @ Tools 4 brokers -> Development for the trading platform MetaTrader, multithreaded and server applications, cross-platform applications.
Head Software developer for Forex broker -> Managing and tech leading the development of the site and the trading platform. Included a large web service for exchange Forex services (tournaments, PAMM, signals, diaries of traders, etc.).
Principle software developer - SAINT PETERSBURG STOCK EXCHANGE -> Development of the massive ASP MVC / Angular application for holding tenders and auctions in electronic form. Business logic included the calculation of prices, the life cycle of purchases and applications, signing of EDS actions.
Senior Backend Developer - Epam Systems -> Building the SaaS solution for processing data and investment analysis of private equity. The product offers users a web portal (ASP.NET), a client application (.NET based), a public WCF service and an iPad application with real-time calculations.
Software Engineer - QuantBrothers -> - Development of the concept of a distributed organization economy based on the blockchain

TALK ABOUT LEADING BY EXAMPLE.
Right now the Genesis Vision team are quiet, working away, with this guy spear heading the team. I am an early investor in GVT, before it was as successful and hyped as right now. I invested because of many reasons, I would need another thread to discuss them all. However amongst these many reasons, 1 of them was because of this guy, highly experienced, proven track record, I can quite happily say I trust them with my money and GVT.
2018 & 2019 will be HUGE for GVT ~ big things coming!

https://preview.redd.it/rmkk5akjj6221.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ada3a99b9bc81a7002ade61ba4a193b575c76b1
It is 04.00am and you are wide-awake — so don’t just lie under the blankets. Embrace your jet lag, spring out of bed and whip out your phone and view the latest derivatives deals matched to you on Level01. You find that there is a certain thrill in deciding on the movements of a market asset. So why not make the most of your irregular rhythms and make more money?
For people who don’t know this robust Peer-to-Peer Derivatives Exchange platform, Level01 can feel overwhelmingly efficient when compared to traditional Derivatives Exchange. Contained in a global Blockchain infrastructure that spans from Seattle to Hong Kong, this brokerless platform hosts a vibrant digital eco-system flush with the movement of its native LVX token used to facilitate derivatives trade of trillions of investment assets across the globe. If you are a new user on Level01, you will be totally roused by the vast array of derivatives you can trade: Forex, Cryptocurrencies, Commodities, Stocks and Indices.
A quick refresher in derivatives trading for those who are not familiar: A derivative price is intrinsically linked to the price of something else like cryptocurrencies, indexes or commodities. Derivatives enable traders to dabble in popular asset categories like currencies or stocks without having to go through markets clearing houses or other financial market infrastructure. It is a versatile financial instrument that can be used in every market condition to achieve every investment goal.
How it works is simple: Derivatives trading involve studying market patterns and deciding on the direction of the price movement in a market asset and if it will be higher or lower than the ‘exercise price’ (also known as ‘strike price’) at the expiry time of a given derivative contract. For a contract to go into effect, it must be matched by a counterparty that will accept the opposing side of the trade. At the contract maturity/expiry time, the asset price is compared against strike price and one of the parties will profit on the contract’s predetermined investment amount. The allure of this financial instrument’s speed and convenience casts your qualms aside and draws you into this fascinating marketplace where you can make profits in a jiffy.
https://preview.redd.it/dlkq3vrnj6221.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=57efa90afca0d7255d852b45e224fdb244a8c1ef
You glance through Level01’s data feed that is streaming live from Thomson Reuters, and your mind wanders to a conversation you had with a retired investor on your plane ride with him earlier. He told you that during 1970s, the global investment market was thriving with activity from derivative trading. Back then, your aged companion added as he took a sip of his whisky, complex methodologies priced derivatives and people used computers 24/7 to crunch numbers. Computers were pivotal for the boom in trade. But things are so different now, he tells you. There is a wild quality to the traditional derivative marketplace and it is best to tread carefully: governing authorities warned of fraud cases by brokers and here there are no lifebuoys for drowning investors who venture too far without conducting thorough research. Apart from the high rate of losses and frauds, traders on the traditional market have to deal with hidden fees, slow processing through several middlemen and lack of accurate and credible information. It seems to you that there are more pitfalls to watch for on the traditional Derivatives Exchange. It is a massive contrast to the clean and efficient trading environment on the Level01 platform.
A DIRECT WAY TO TRADE You decide to make a trade, so you open your Level01 app and set a Trading Allowance (A) with the platform’s LIST (Level01 Intent Sealed Transaction) smart contract. LIST is a smart contract protocol on Blockchain that works like a trusted god-father of all transactions. LIST can:
securely store trade match parameters of all users initiate trade investment token transfers serve as the transparent trustee of fund tokens vested into a trade match perform automated trade settlement upon trade contract expiry determines of contract payoffs to the profiting party. Once you have set a token allowance amount, your transaction is cryptographically signed with your wallet’s private key. This functions as a pre-authorization for LIST to transfer out and temporarily hold tokens upon a trade matching until trade settlement and profit distribution occurs.
You are now free to trade on the platform by creating derivative contracts in any asset class up to the value of A. Your derivative contract contains parameters that allow other users to decide if they want to be the counterparty to your offered contract. Level01’s dashboard empowers you to set your trade parameters such as: expiry time of the contract (E), strike price and position (>SP, The electric kettle in your room whistles, and you make your cup of morning coffee. You read Level01’s user guide and learn that all derivative contracts that are created and placed on the Level01 platform are known as trading intent (TI). When you create a derivative contract, it is sent to a pool of TIs on the off-chain servers’ trading engine, where it is curated, sorted, and displayed to other users based on their underlying asset interest and search criteria at that moment. (see Figure 01 below)

https://preview.redd.it/ilr4txooj6221.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=0c534227750f4183b91e542dfa77ef5194453fac
Halfway around the world, your trade match could be viewing her curated list of derivative contracts to match with, and she will consider the matching price (MP) amount for every derivative contract in the list, which can be dynamically adjusted to reflect changes in the current market price of the underlying asset. The MP is displayed based on Level01’s FairSenseTM algorithm, which is basically artificial intelligence that analyzes trade intent patterns of users on the platform and matchmakes or suggests them to counterparty users. MP is also partially calculated based on the notional value (NV, contract size) of the contract. If the contract is in an unfavourable position, it may require a bigger portion from NV to match with; and vice versa if the contract is in a favourable position, it will cost lesser portion of NV to be a counterparty matcher.
If your trade match is keen to become counterparty to your derivative contract; she can accept the current MP, and the platform system will automatically seal and finalize all parameters into a trade match (TM). The TM will be delivered at lightning speed to the LIST smart contract. LIST then automatically processes the contract upon its expiry, and ensures immediate trade settlement. Either you were right about the market price, or she is. Time will reveal whether the profiting party’s analysis of the market data is correct. (see Figure 01 above)
In a matter of hours, you would have lined up a few more derivative contracts that could result in profits that would make the down payment for your next sports car. Life is good with Level01, the World 1st Brokerless Derivatives Exchange in Partnership with Thomson Reuters. You make money legally, quickly and you do not have to worry about fraud, manipulated data or third party fees. All of your investments and profits are made and decided by you.

What is XTRD?

XTRD is a technology company that are introducing a new infrastructure that would allow banks, hedge funds, and large institutional traders to easily access cryptocurrency markets.
XTRD is launching three separate products in sequential stages to solve the ongoing problems caused by having so many disparate markets. Firstly a unified FIX API followed by XTRD Dark Pools and finally the XTRD Single Point of Access or SPA.
Our goal is to build trading infrastructure in the cyptospace and become one of the first full service shops in the cryptocurrency markets for large traders and funds.

A single FIX API for trading across all connected exchanges
A robust GUI for manual cross execution on all crypto markets
A large liquidity pool, based on orders books from all connected exchanges
Best prices and best top of book execution net of fees
Low transaction fees
99.99999% reliability and uptime
Fast execution
Parent/child orders on multiple exchanges to minimize individual market impact
Advanced order types common in the equity and FX trading space
Establish XTRD as a premier market-making entity to mitigate spreads and increase liquidity in the cryptocurrency space
Derivative trading - XTRD plans to connect to LedgerX (US based, approved by the CFTC) for cryptocurrency options and swaps to offer unified hedging and derivate trading strategies
Robust, US based technical support
Reliable and familiar deployment methods for institutions:
- IPSec as a connectivity option across the Internet
- Cross connection options
- Collocation space or VPS (Virtual Private Servers) that clients can rent from XTRD
- UAT/Sandbox environment for testing

What are the industry issues?

COMPLEX WEB OF EXCHANGES. A combination of differing KYC policies, means of funding, interfaces and APIs results in a fragmented patchwork of liquidity for cryptocurrencies. Trading in an automated fashion with full awareness of best pricing and current liquidity necessitates the opening and use of accounts on multiple exchanges, coding to multiple API’s, following varying funding and withdrawal procedures. Once those hurdles are cleared, market participants must convert fiat currency to BTC or ETH and then forward the ETH on to an exchange that may not accept fiat, necessitating yet another transaction to convert back to fiat. Major concerns for market participants range from unmitigated slippage and counterparty risk to hacking prevention and liquidity.
HIGH FEES. Execution costs are even more of a factor. Typical exchange commissions are in the 0.1% – 0.25% range per transaction (10 to 25 basis points), but the effective fees are much higher when taking into bid and ask spreads maintained by the exchanges. As most exchanges are unregulated, there is generally no central authority or regulator to examine internal exchange orders that separate proprietary activity from customer activity and ensure fair pricing.
THIN LIQUIDITY. A large institutional order, representing a sizable percentage of daily volume can move the market for a product, and related products in an exchange by a factor of 5-10%. That means a single order to buy $1,000,000 worth of bitcoin can cost an extra $50,000-$100,000 per transaction given a lack of liquidity if not managed correctly and executed on only one exchange. By way of comparison, similar trades on FX exchanges barely move markets a fraction of a percent; those price changes cost traders money, and deter investment.

What are the XTRD solutions?

FIX API
An API is an “Application Programming Interface”, a set of rules that computer programs use to communicate. FIX stands for “Financial Information eXchange”, the API standard used by most financial organizations as the intermediary protocol to communicate amongst disparate systems such as market data, execution, trade reporting, and order entry for the past 25 years.XTRD is fixing the problem of having 100 different APIs for 100 exchanges by creating a single FIX based API for market data and execution – the same FIX API that all current financial institutions utilize.XTRD will leverage our data center presences in DC3 Chicago and NY4 New Jersey to host FIX trading clients and reduce their trading latencies to single milliseconds, a time acceleration of 100x when it comes to execution vs internet. More infrastructure and private worldwide internet lines will be added in 2018 and beyond to enable secure, low latency execution for all XTRD clients, FIX and PRO.
XTRD PRO
XTRD PRO is a professional trading platform that will fix the basic problems with trading across crypto exchanges – the need to open multiple web pages, having to click around multiple windows, only being able to use basic order types, and not seeing all your positions, trades, and market data in one place.XTRD PRO will be standalone, downloadable, robust end-to-end encrypted software that will consolidate all market data from exchanges visually into one order book, provide a consolidated position and order view across all your exchange accounts, and enable client side orders not available on exchanges – keyboard macro shortcuts, VWAP/TWAP, shaving the bid and offer, hit through 1% of the inside, reserve orders that bid 100 but show 1, SMART order routing to best exchange and intelligent order splicing across exchanges based on execution costs net of fees, OCO and OTO, many others.
XTRD SPA
XTRD SPA is the solution to bridge cross-exchange liquidity issues. XTRD is creating Joint Venture partnerships with trusted cryptocurrency exchanges to provide clients on those exchanges execution across other exchanges where they do not have accounts by leveraging XTRD’s liquidity pools.An order placed by a client at CEX.IO, XTRD’s first JV partner, can be executed by XTRD at a different exchange where there may be a better price or higher liquidity for a digital asset. Subsequently, XTRD will deliver the position to CEX.IO and then CEX.IO will deliver the execution to the client, with XTRD acting as just another market participant at the CEX.IO exchange.XTRD does not take custody of funds, we are a technology partner with exchanges. All local exchange rules, procedures, and AML/KYC policies apply.
XTRD DARK
Institutions and large market participants who have large orders of 100 BTC or more generally must execute across multiple markets, increasing their counterparty risk, paying enormous commissions and spreads, and generally having to deal with the vagaries of the crypto space. Alternatives are OTC brokers that charge multiple percents or private peer-to-peer swaps which are difficult to effectuate unless one is deeply in the space.XTRD is launching XTRD DARK – a dark liquidity pool to trade crypto vs fiat that matches buyers and sellers of large orders, discreetly and anonymously, at a much lower cost. Liquidity is not displayed so large orders do not move thin markets as they would publicly. The liquidity will come from direct XTRD DARK participants as well as aggregation of retail order flow into block orders, XTRD’s own liquidity pools, connections with decentralized exchanges to effectuate liquidity swaps, and OTC broker order flow.XTRD is partnering with a fiat banking providebroker dealer to onboard all XTRD DARK participants for the fiat currency custody side with full KYC/AML procedures.

XTRD Tokenomics

TOKEN USAGE. XTRD will generate the XTRD utility tokens via smart contact during the Token Generation Event (TGE) in Q1 of 2018. The XTRD utility token will be utilized on the XTRD network by market participants to pay for execution, VPS, market data, software licensing, and other fees. Market participants will be able to purchase XTRD tokens directly from XTRD’s liquidity pool. The TGE will be preceded by a private institutional sale and a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Token) Platform based presale. The XTRD token will be fully ERC20 compliant to ensure that it functions properly on the Ethereum blockchain, similarly to other ERC20 tokens.
XTRD TOKEN LIQUIDITY AGGREGATION. The XTRD token will be used to create liquidity in the overall cryptocurrency market. Along with the utility of the XTRD token to pay for fees on the XTRD platform of products, most of the XTRD token revenue will be used to increase the inventory of other cryptocurrencies that are in demand by our customers. This will create points of liquidity for our customers to access across the worldwide crypto exchange ecosystem. These liquidity points will be created using XTRD tokens that are paid back into the system for fees. 70% of funds raised in the token sale will be used for liquidity aggregation.
XTRD STAKING. Discounts of 25% on XTRD services (execution, colocation, market data, software licensing) will be available for token holders in general and discounts of 40% on XTRD services will be available for token holders who maintain an average monthly stake of at least 50,000 XTRD tokens. Fiat will be accepted at no discount to par. Execution fees will generally be set as a percentage of the gross trade amount, based on a combination of factors such as liquidity, the pair being traded, market conditions at the time of the trade, and so on. All charges will be marked to market and remain constant, no matter the value of the XTRD token (a $10 charge will be 2 XTRD if $5 each or 0.5 XTRD if $20 each).
TOKEN LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS. XTRD tokens are ERC20 compliant utility tokens functioning on the Ethereum blockchain. The value of XTRD is derived purely from serving as a medium of payment for services by market participants in the XTRD trading ecosystem. XTRD tokens confer no voting rights, profit participation, equity, ownership of intellectual property, revenue sharing, rights to dividends, transfer of ownership upon company sale, control of company assets, or any decision-making ability regarding XTRD or its’ operations. XTRD tokens are not designed for speculation. In summary, XTRD tokens are not securities. XTRD Digital Assets, Inc has obtained a qualified legal opinion concurring that XTRD tokens are not to be considered “securities” under applicable U.S. securities laws given their failure to meet all prongs of the Howey Test.

Who is XTRD intended for?

XTRD is mainly aimed at major institutions, hedge funds, algorithmic traders who are currently unable to enter the crypto markets.
These firms include companies such as Divisa Capital run by XTRD Advisor Mushegh Tovmasyan.

XTRD Weekly Updates

Upcoming Events

Futurist Conference - August 14-16th Toronto
Blockchain Shift - October 11-12th Miami
The Trading Show New York - September 26th

AMA's

Further AMA's will be coming soon!

XTRD In The Media

Bloomberg Markets Bitcoin Growing Pains. Bloomberg
XTRD Brings Wall St Trading Infrastructure To Crypto Markets - Fintech News
Bad Crypto Meets Alex Kravets - Podcast Interview
Alex Kravets On Modernizing Crypto Exchanges - Podcast Interview
How Exchanges Work On Wall Street And How They Will Work In Crypto Markets. - Crypto 101 Podcast
Ethereum Outperforms Bitcoin - Article Feature
Crypto Markets Are Broken - CoinTelegraph Alex Guest Writer
Wall Street Comes To Crypto - CryptoCoinNews Article / Interview
Cryptocurrency Businesses Real Value - Business News Daily
Cryptocurrency Market Psychology - CBS News
Bitcoin Slides Again - Expert Option - Reuters

Resources

More information will be added to this thread as the project develops.
We are currently looking for key community members to assist in building out this thread.
If you are interested please email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

The general enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies did not make all representatives of the crypto-community fabulously rich. Only a few of them managed to achieve a really good profit. Most crypto-traders were in the red. How and why did this happen? Has it happened due to the lack of professional actions of new stock players, or the roots of the problem lie much deeper? We talked about this and many other things with the representative of the Forex broker Larson Holz IT Ltd, the head of control and audit-Alexander Smirnov.
– Exchange trading of crypto assets made some traders. fabulously rich, but most of the others parted with the lion’s share of their deposits on the first fall of bitcoin and were disappointed in crypto-trading. Why did this happen? All the fault is solely the actions of the investors themselves, isn’t it?
– This is a very good question, which is much more difficult to answer than it seems at first glance. The rapid growth in the value of cryptocurrencies has turned many people’s heads. More recently, the price of the same bitcoin could increase by 20 – 25 percent in a week. The desire to earn well, while making a minimum effort, attract to crypto-exchanges lots of players who had little idea where they got and what they are going to do. Young crypto-traders who did not have time to rely on serious exchange battles really lost 70, or even 80 percent of deposits on the first fall of bitcoin. But this happened not only because the actions of investors were too risky or rash – just crypto -trading, in the form in which it was offered to them, turned out to be a one-way game, the rules of which are written so that an ordinary user in 99 percent of cases is more likely to lose than win.
– What do you mean by that?
– The functionality of the platforms on which crypto-traders started trading, simply did not assume any other development of events. Perhaps, if people had carefully studied the rules of the game, none of this would have happened, but all people rushed to trade, and only realizing that things were not going as well as we would like, began to delve into the essence of things. The reality turned out to be harsh: it turned out that behind the beautiful words about “freedom” from monopolists, about unhindered trade in high-yield assets and the movement to a new independent economy, there was a rather primitive design for pumping money out of the population.
– So you’re saying it was a trap?
– Think yourself: 99 percent of crypto-exchanges do not have functionality for both simple and technical analysis, it is impossible to put stop-losses on them, but there are big buttons “buy” and “sell”. For any more or less experienced trader at first glance it will be clear that it is not necessary to communicate with such sites, because it is not so much an exchange as a casino, where nothing depends on the actions of a player by and large.
– But crypto-traders who came to earn bitcoin,were not embarrassed by interface or a very limited functionality…
– Absolutely. Moreover, the loyalty of crypto-traders was almost boundless: people believed, and still believe that it is absolutely normal to have regular pauses on. platforms, “technical updates” at the wrong time, the inability to make transactions with assets over several days and even a large-scale hacking of crypto-exchanges! For 2 – 3 days, the cost of the crypto-asset can both soar to the skies and fall below the floor, and people humbly wait for the crypto-exchange to restart the servers! But any such “simple” costs tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of net losses due to the inability to get rid of the asset that started to sharply become cheaper in time!
– It turns out that trading of cryptocurrencies is a true scam?
– Of course it is not. Do not turn away from crypto-trading after the first failures. As you know, they learn from mistakes, and those who managed to fill their bumps will continue to treat stock trading much more responsibly. The size of the initial deposit has decreased by half, three times? This doesn’t explain anything. Correct actions and several successful transactions will return you to success, and the deposit to its original state.
– But how to trade if the account is almost empty?
– Civilized trading environment knows the correct answer to this question: marginal trading. In a broad sense, it is making transactions on the stock exchange at the expense of credit funds provided to the trader by the broker under the guarantee of a certain deposit. The beauty of this trade is that with only $ 1,000 of your own funds, you can open a deal for $ 500,000 or even $ 1,000,000. If the transaction is successful-all. profit (minus interest on leverage) is yours, if not – by and large you risk only with your deposit.
– That is, the risk is present in any case?
– All stock trading is based on risk. The question is how big and justified it is. Marginal trading is a really handy tool that can give a trader a very good results if they follow a few simple but very important rules.
First, a successful trader does not care whether the market is growing or falling: he earns on price movements. An asset rises in price – a trader opens a long position, becomes cheaper – make it shorter. Second, a good trader never works with just one asset. He switches from cryptocurrency to Fiat and back. . But the most important thing is the understanding that the success of a trader depends not only on what he does, but also where. People who know how to count money will never get involved with sites that hang out at the most interesting place or from which someone can steal something.
– You would like to hint that it is better not to mess with crypto-exchanges?
– I am not hinting, but saying that brokerage companies that have functionality for working with crypto-instruments look much preferable to crypto-exchanges at least because of the use of Meta Trader 4 and Meta Trader 5 trading terminals. First broker with initially specializes in crypto-trading was LH-CRYPTO. It opens for a crypto-trader all currently known trading instruments from one crypto-account. At the moment, this site, both in terms of functionality and terms of trade, simply does not have worthy competitors.
Press about us:
http://cryptoconsulting.info/blog/2018/09/10/marginal-trading-will-save-the-crypto-investor-s-deposit/?noredirect=en_US

What is server time? - Forex Trading Hours - MQL4 and ...

I've seen mentions of Nick Shawn & Momo Forex here; Here's why i don't like them...

How To Start Trading Forex Reddit

How to trade Forex and be profitable

1. How to trade the Forex Market

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 Forex Reddit

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

How much money would it cost to setup high-frequency trading?

Running a ponzi and stealing $180K, IRL.

Anti-SEO:

Ponzi Claims:

£50,000 Fine:

$180,000 Stolen:

What Backs the Story?

Why would the blogger post such big claims with no evidence?

Money taken from the company:

What went wrong?

US Traders out there I have a question for you!

How do I know which one is the best forex broker?

How to get started in Forex - A comprehensive guide for newbies

Finding Trading Edges: Where to Get High R:R trades and Profit Potential of Them.

Why should I use MT4?

Run Another Service Within Flask

This is a sample

[Not my post] The Structure of Forex Brokers

Intraday ECN Copying (Best)

Looking for programmers to start a team

Ruslan Kamenskiy - Genesis Vision CEO - did you know this?

Speed Trading on Level01: Where Matches Are Made

The XTRD Megathread