Traditional Analysis

Our approach to the forex market begins with in-depth technical and fundamental analysis. Long-term trends typically project macroeconomics (macros) to a significant degree.  Short-term forex trading is heavily influenced by technical patterns, volume, and sentiment. Understanding macros and technical analysis is a great foundation, but it's not everything. Understanding sentiment or trader positioning can make or break you. 

Hunt or be Hunted

If you have been trading Forex for even a short period of time you have undoubtedly felt like hunted pray at least a few times.  The news is bullish, the technicals are screaming "buy" and you jump into a long position.  As if someone is watching you trade from outside your window, the pair suddenly plunges to trigger your stop loss within minutes. Well, they may not be watching through your office window, but they are watching order flow.  Just as you made this trade so too did a great number of other retail traders.  A trap was set and you took the bait.  You aren't crazy; you were hunted. Games like this are part of trading any market - stocks, commodities, forex, etc.  If you want to be in the market, you must accept this fact and learn how to benefit from it rather than becoming a statistic.

Gamesmanship is critical in achieving success, but is not often discussed or written about.  It's the elephant in the room many pros, talking heads and pundits refuse to discuss.  They believe speaking these truths may send retail investors running. We are realists and strive to teach our clients how to spot traps, dodge landmines and avoid being hunted, which is otherwise learned through painful experience.  We are considered a "small speculator" just like you, not a billion dollar hedge fund.  To avoid being hunted we must follow the hunters.  We have strategies that focus almost entirely of shifts in sentiment and sentiment extremes, trading against retail masses as large players and black box programs do.  These strategies are employed in our trading and our Autosignals service.  If this sounds better than your current approach, start your 30-day AutoSignals Trial NOW.

Choosing the Right Trade

When trading the majors, we must first decide if the US Dollar represents a better buying or selling opportunity on the whole. Sometimes this is clear, while other times it is completely mixed.  Using fundamental and technical expertise, along with analysis of sentiment, we identify the weakest currencies to sell against USD, and/or the strongest currencies to buy vs USD.  The forex trading we conduct is done in pairs, which means we can leave the dollar out and match up the strongest and weakest currencies in a cross pair. It may sound simple enough, but under the surface is a great deal of research and experience guiding our trades and your forex trading experience.

Forex Risk Management

Ideally, we aim to cut losses short and allow winners to run.  In reality, managing losses and gains in forex trading requires us to know what type of market conditions we are trading.  When market conditions are highly volatile and/or headline-driven, we tend to use tighter stops and trail them automatcially to reduce or elminate initial risk, and to protect unrealized gains. When the market lacks steady direction, we are often forced to book gains more quickly than we would prefer. When the market is trending, we look to build into trades as they work in our favor and allow them to run.  This is one of the hardest things for new traders to do; let winners run.

Managing Gains and Losses

While managing risk is the keep to survival in any market, we must also focus a great deal on how to manage profits as well.  Managing risk involves the use of stop loss orders and calculating how much money you have at risk on each trade and the aggregate risk on all open trades. We also consider exposure to one currency.  When possible, we try to cut losing trades ahead of our stop loss if technical or fundamental analysis suggests we are on the wrong side of the market. There are several ways to manage gains.  One common way is to trail stop orders, which can be done manually or automatically on some platforms such as MT4.  For swing and longer-term trades, we tend to trail stops manually as new levels of support and resistance form.   In day trading, particularly in volatile conditions, we often utilize automatic trailing stops.