I started my Trading View/Oanda demo trading today. It's so much fun to sit back and watch the market. I've not yet pushed the buy/sell buttons, what I'm doing is just playing the buy/sell position on the trade chart and watching. I know it's only demo money, but I'm just not ready to pull the trigger yet and make an official mistake. This is me being the overthinker that I am. I'm not even willing to throw out fake money! This process is real, and it's a real practice for me. Practice doesn't make perfect folks, it's perfect practice that makes perfect.
In the world of trading, no matter what market you trade, there is no one who does it perfectly every time. It's a game, it's a market, it's a risk. There are just too many things that can go right, and too many things that can go wrong. For those of you who aren't familiar with FOREX, or the Foreign Exchange, it's another market like the Stock Market, but it's only currencies. It is money buying and selling money. You find the two (pairs) currencies you wish to trade with, be it Euros, Dollars, Yen, etc, and you buy one using the other. For instance, if I trade the EUR/USD I'm using Euros to buy U.S. Dollars, and conversely, if I trade the USD/EUR I am using Dollars to buy the Euros. The market changes second by second! You can go long and buy, you can go short and sell, you can sit and wait - - which is what I do.
I am mostly a Swing trader at this point, but I'm practicing using the Day Trading method of getting in and getting out so I can practice putting in the trades and finding my place in line. I could lose, I could win. I'm practicing knowing when to enter. I'm reading patterns on the Daily and 4Hr chart, then dropping down to the shorter time frames of 1Hr and 15Min. to see if the candles give me a reason to enter. It's a process, not something you learn overnight.
My method is simple: I do what Steven Hart of The Trading Channel suggests, but he is by no means telling me what to do. He is not giving me Financial Advice. He's showing us online what he does, and how he does it, and we can take that information and use it or not. I'm following his guidelines as much as possible, but I will be honest, I broke protocol today by a mile! I decided to add a bit of risk just for the heck of it, and I ended up winning. I won't do that with real money! I only did it with fake demo money, and I didn't hit the buy/sell buttons either. I'm not willing to stick my neck out yet - - I will tomorrow or Friday. I'm inching my way into the market like it's a fresh cold pool of water! Once I'm in I'll be OK, I'm sure.
Right now I'm doing the longer waiting thing just to have more fun tonight. I was in a few-minute trade earlier, and I won. I will now try the waiting game and give it 4-8 hours to see if I made target or if I was stopped out. It's a good way to practice and I don't mind losing because it's learning. When I stop learning that's a problem. I'm hoping for a 68% win ratio over the next 1000 trades and if I can maintain that I'll start pushing the buy/sell button with my own capital.....maybe! I know I will have to do that sometime, but I really don't want to lose, so I'll keep the practice going until I'm really confident that I'll make a bit more each time than I risked. I can do the shorter risk-to-reward ratio for the first 3 months to be sure I know what I'm doing because I don't want to get overconfident... yet.
Geez this is fun - - and nerve-wracking at the same time! LOVE IT.
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