Trading

Is this why I trade?

My name is Dave. I am a coder by day and trader by night.  On this site, I share my experience Trading Forex, Precious Metals, Crypto Currencies, and CFDs on Stocks, Indices and Commodities.
To read about why I trade and why I think you should too, you can read this post.

Read My Trading Plan

Every trader needs a plan. Plan your trades and trade your plan! My Trading Plan can be found here. I hope it will show you that I actually trade according to a plan and that luck is a minimal factor in my trading.

Learn my trading setups as well. And checkout my trading log here.

Get Free charting software from Tradingview

I use Tradingview to do all my chart analyses. I also use it to test new strategies by back testing them and by forward testing them using the paper trading feature.

Learn My Way of Trading

Becoming a trader is a process. And although some people have a natural ability to be successful in trading, most others do not have this.

I believe anyone can learn to trade the markets.
I have spent many years studying the markets, reading books on trading, doing back tests, and of course, trading itself. Finally, I am at the level that I make more money than I lose. So I feel confident I can share with you what I know on the subject.

Go Through My Trading Course

I have written a series of posts as a Trading Course: Learn To Trade. It will help you get started trading the way I do. I highly suggest you go through the articles in order. The first post can be found here.

If you rather have a printed version of the course, then I have got you covered as well. I have created a printable e-book. You can get it here.

I suggest you check out my YouTube channel as I post educational content there as well.

Practice Your Trading Skills

After reading my series of ‘Learn To Trade’ articles, you are ready to practice what you have learned so far.

You can open an account at a broker and start practicing on a demo account. Alternatively, you can fund a real account and practice trading very small position sizes. This is actually better, as with real money on the line, however small amounts, you will be able to practice the mental aspects of trading as well as the technical aspects.

Checkout my selection of brokers if you are looking for a broker.

About My Charts

I use charting that is independent of the platform I execute trades on. I mostly use Tradingview for my chart analyses. As an alternative, you can also use platforms like Investing.com, Metatrader, or CTrader. However, to use these last two platforms you will at least need to open a demo account at a broker that offers the platform and the usage of these demo accounts is often limited in time.
I recommend both Investing.com as well as Tradingview, because:

  • Both are free and easy to get started.
  • Both have excellent paid upgrades for the more demanding trader.
  • Both are independent resources.
  • Both offer charting, news, economic calendars, screeners, trading ideas, a trading community, all in one place.
  • Both offer tools on a wide variety of instruments, like stocks, forex, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, commodities, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies.
  • Tradingview even offers a replay function that will let you backtest your strategies.

In one word: both are excellent in my opinion.

Questions?

I have outlined some of the most useful resources I use for trading and investing myself. I hope it is helpful. Links on this site can be affiliate links. If you use them to open an account or buy something, then I might receive a commission. This is at no additional cost to you. If you have any questions about these resources or the site itself feel free to get in contact with me.

Here is a list of my latest trading related posts:

  • Which Forex Pairs are Generally Trending and Which Ones Tend to Revert to the Mean In this article, I will systematically investigate the tendency of different Forex pairs to either trend or revert to the mean. I will do so by backtesting a simple trend-following strategy. (Code available on Github. See the end of this […]
  • Automate your trading without writing code In this post, I will investigate and show you the ways I know that you can automate your trading without the need to be a professional software developer. In fact, you don’t even need to be able to code. The main reason why I trade end-of-day strategies is that […]
  • Should You Only Trade With The Trend as a Beginner When you start trading for the first time, it is very tempting to take every trade that comes your way. It is much better, however, when you are just learning how to trade to only ever trade with the trend. Why you should trade with […]
  • Where to place your take profit Ok, you see a nice trade opportunity. And you know where to place your stop loss. Now, how about the take profit order? Where do you place it? In this post, I will show you my approach to setting my initial take profit levels. This initial take profit level […]
  • Where to put your stop loss So I talked about “What is R in Trading” and why it is so important to understand. I hope I made clear that R lets you focus on and manage Risks by always setting a stop-loss order to take you out of a position automatically if things turn against […]
  • Risk And Why is R So Important to Understand? R in Trading is an objective way to think about success or failure in a trade. R expresses the (possible) return on a trade as a multiple of the risk taken on by that trade. In my trading log, I register the amount of R I […]
  • No, it’s not because of the Ferrari I am a coder by day and trader by night! Coding is my day job. I am fully aware that only having a job will not allow me to provide for my family and myself consistently in the long run. This is because most of the western societies […]
  • Mean reversion and Breakout strategy combo Below is a snapshot of some trading research I have been doing. By no means this is a trade-able strategy as is, but it does show two of the basic trading principles: Mean reversion This is the principle that price tends to return to it’s mean after it has […]
  • Japanese candlestick charts are arguably the most commonly used charts. It has not always been that way. Candlestick charting techniques were only introduced to western traders in the late 70s by Steve Nison. A bit of history of Candlestick Charting Candlestick charting was invented by a rice merchant named Munehisa Homma in Kyoto, Japan in […]
  • Bulls and Bears Support and resistance trading is one of the basic building blocks of trading. Not only is it a basic building block of my personal trading, but also of most trading done by professional traders. So even if your trading system does not incorporate support and resistance it is still good to understand […]