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.
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.
Roadmap to becoming a consistently profitable trader
Looking back at my journey I realized I haven’t been doing things in the right order. So I have written down a roadmap to becoming a consistently profitable trader. I am happy to share it with you in the hope it will speed up your development as a trader (as well as mine).
Here is the roadmap:
- Know WHY you trade
- Learn to trade
- Develop a trading strategy and plan
- Backtest your strategy
- Practice
- Trade live and be consistent
- Become funded and scale up
- Invest
- Spend
Why Trade
Trading is hard. The most important thing you need to know, is WHY you want to trade. Otherwise you will give up. To read about why I trade and why I think you should too, you can read this post.
Learn to Trade
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 written a series of posts, that will help you to 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 posts, then I have got you covered as well. I have created a free printable e-book. You can get the free eBook version here. Or you can get a printed book here at a small cost.
I suggest you also check out my YouTube channel as I post educational content there as well.
Develop a Trading Strategy and Plan
Every trader needs a 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. You can copy the plan and tweak it to make it your own.
Learn my trading setups as well.
Checkout my trading log here.
Backtest Your Trading Strategy
An important step in becoming a consistently profitable trader is that you not only develop a trading plan that fits your lifestyle and personality, but that you also thoroughly test the strategy on past data. This will help you become an expert in trading the strategy and you will build confidence in the validity of the strategy.
Get Free charting software from Tradingview to do backtests
I use Tradingview to do most of my chart analyses. I also use it to test new strategies by backtesting them using the replay function of Tradingview and by forward testing them using the paper trading feature.
Practice Your Trading Skills
After completing the above steps 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.
Demo account are meanly good for practicing trade operations, like placing and managing trades. You can also use it to forward test new strategies.
Trade Live and be Consistent
Now it is time to fund a real account and practice trading very small position sizes. This is a big step 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 and operational aspects.
I personally, started small and continue to scale the account by compounding profits and making regular additional deposits. This has made me slowly become more accustomed to larger trade sizes.
Checkout my selection of brokers if you are looking for a broker.
Become a Funded Trader
One way to make money trading is to become a trader funded by a prop firm. A proprietary trading firm is a company that let’s you trade on their trading account. They have strict trading rules. As long as you don’t break their rules and make a profit, you will share in the profits. As these firms can offer large accounts the profit-splits can be sizable. However this will only work if you are a consistently profitable trader.
I will soon share my experience trading prop.
Invest
You can become financially secure and independent by trading. You do not need a boss to trade. However it is still active income. If you do not trade, you do not make any money.
In order to become not only financially secure and independent, but also financially free, I invest.
Spend
Remember your WHY!
My Trading Resources
Finally, here are links to most of the trading resources I provide on this site:
Follow me on Gumroad
I use Gumroad as a platform to share my trading forecasts, reviews, and tools. If you follow me there you will get regular trading updates via email. Here are the latest posts:
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 general trading related posts, mostly focused on educating traders:
- 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 […]
