Forex rebates on every trade - win or lose!

Dil - this one might be better. It's running gmt +0. Think I might switch to it myself
http://www.alpari-idc.com/en/metatrader4/open-demo-account.html

The dollar tumbled Thursday afternoon amid the release of dovish comments from Fed Chair Ben Bernanke indicating that the Fed will act in a timely and decisive manner in order to stimulate the US economy.Saying that the risks to growth in 2008 are more pronounced, the Bernanke asserted that further easing of interest interest may be necessary in order the stem problems in the housing and credit market.The dollar dropped to 1.477 versus the euro, extending its losses from earlier in the session when ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet signalled that policy makers in Europe are more concerned with inflation than recession. With the decline, the dollar was nearing a 6-week low of 1.4824 from earlier this month.The Dow Jones Industrial Average skyrocketed higher by more than 100 points moments after Bernanke''s comments, which he is expected to deliver in a speech at 1 pm ET.The dollar tumbled Thursday afternoon amid the release of dovish comments from Fed Chair Ben Bernanke indicating that the Fed will act in a timely and decisive manner in order to stimulate the US economy.Saying that the risks to growth in 2008 are more pronounced, the Bernanke asserted that further easing of interest interest may be necessary in order the stem problems in the housing and credit market.The dollar dropped to 1.477 versus the euro, extending its losses from earlier in the session when ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet signalled that policy makers in Europe are more concerned with inflation than recession. With the decline, the dollar was nearing a 6-week low of 1.4824 from earlier this month.The Dow Jones Industrial Average skyrocketed higher by more than 100 points moments after Bernanke''s comments, which he is expected to deliver in a speech at 1 pm ET.

Wouldn't you know it - he's speaking to Women in Housing and Finance, in Washington ;)

Thanks for the info about the MACD indicator, CC. I've downloaded it and installed it now. I'm just waiting for a crossover now to see whether it will play Jingle Bells for me.

I presume that the red and green arrows in boxes are also a downloaded add-on from somewhere or other. Perhaps you could also let me know how that works.

:o)

CC, I have been reading your posts with interest. I haven't commented up until now as I am no forex expert that's for sure.

What I would say is that after 8 months of trial and error with indicators of all shapes and sizes I have returned to basics - higher lows and lower highs on a 5 minute chart with a few moving averages for good measure.

My weakness is discipline. Ignoring what the setup is telling me and going with what I 'know' will happen next.

I feel I am getting there slowly but I still have moments of weakness. I was up at 5:30 this morning nursing a cable long which started off as a quick 10 pip trade (no signal) and turned into an overnighter. In this instance stubborness won in the end but my rule book was torn up in the process !

On a lighter note (sorry about the pun) I have joined a NHS smoke free course. I got my prescription for Zyban this afternoon. The leaflet of possible side effects makes interesting reading :

irritable or aggressive behaviour, seizures fits or convulsions, palpitations, hallucinations, strange dreams, insomnia, depersonalisation, restlessness, delusions, paranoia, difficulty concentrating, sweating, depression with suicidal thoughts ....

Apart from the seizures and fits it sounds like a normal trading day to me !

My counsellor reckons she has a 70% success rate, she didn't say if any of them are still alive though ;-)

On a more serious note, qwento, Nick Winterton petitioned the Secretary of State for Health some years ago, in particular with regard to how many deaths had been attributed to the use of Zyban, following the tragic death of the son of a friend.

Choccie: I assume that your preferred venue is the one with the bridal suite ;-)

Either way, I could make it, I'm too lazy to drive and I need to use up my air miles to avoid the fate of dying an air miles millionaire (if I croak it before I use them, go long BAY.L, it'll save them a fortune).

I'll call you about the format -- maybe we can help in some way.

Etrop Grange? Stayed there before, nice country hotel, right next to the airport. Dunno about a bridal suite but mine had a four poster bed!!

red and green arrows. No download required.

On my mt4 you can get them from the box left of M1. 2 rows vertically below help.

they don't auto-pop for you. I just put them on manually to show the entry points. a bit like text labels.


If you wanted them to auto-pop up at the cross of the macd you need to rewrite the code in the indicator you downloaded. It isn't a difficult job but it's beyond my ability for the momemt.

Oh dear - i see a rush of hot pink arrows and thumbs up on your charts now ;-)

Interested in potential seminar, not a babe but probably still a forex babe

CC,

After I posted last night, I did some Googling as I'd assumed that the arrows did automatically pop up.

I managed to find a file on one of the forums which claimed to make arrows pop up when the MACD crossed through the zero line. Unfortunately though, this file is a *.ex4 file and I haven't got a clue what to do with it so it's still sat on my desktop.

After that I Googled some more and managed to find a *.mq4 file which made arrows pop up automatically when two ma's crossed over (MACD through zero line crossover is essentially 2 ema's anyway). I fiddled about with it for a bit last night and it seemed pretty good.

This is all I can tell you Hilary. When you load the .mq4 into the indicators directory mt4 automatically creates a .ex4 file to go with it. Don't know why it does this.

But some of the .ex4 files are not indicators they are expert advisors. Now expert advisors are great as they allow you to backtest the signal produced through the strategy tester to see whether the signal is profitable. I believe they can also be used to let mt4 just trade away on its own. The expert advisors go into the experts folder.
Edit: and some of the .mq4 files aren't indicators but they are experts - in any event if you try to load an indicator wrongly as an expert or vice versa mt4 will tell you to go away.

The best places to find all these indicators and gadgets is www.tsd-forex and www.forexfactory but as I said before you need to check their validity as some of the people who have written the code make mistakes.

You can look at the code yourself if you hit f4 and choose the indicator or expert from a list. As you will be able to see some of the code is not that difficult to understand but other parts are just well way way beyond my understanding.

Now the other day when you suggested just trading one pair with one signal i had decided to trade the macd on the cross (histogram changes from -ve to +ve on the 3 line histogram) before you changed it to signal line through the zero line.
I went and ran the strategy runner on a expert i found based on the ma cross. This took me ages to sort cos obviously this sort of strategy is hopeless based on a 24 hour period cos of the chop a the dead times of night when the signal line is just flat lining +/- noise.
Eventually i managed to restrict it running to only running from 07:00 to 18:00 and i got mixed results and even then i needed to alter the output data.
The most fascniating result was that this did indeed prove that on eurjpy the chocopops macd does beat the standard macd settings.

Anyway i'm starting to ramble. I think mt4 is the most fantastic tool but I shan't be investing any more time in trying to understand it.

this is my favourite chart. All the macd's for all time periods on one chart. I really really felt I should have been able to make successful trades out of this but it just another idea that didn't work. Technically fantastic but any use for trading - well it didn't work for me which is the whole point.

CC,

Using the Chocopops MACD settings on EUR/JPY M1 yesterday would have made you money for sure had you acted on every signal. There were certainly a number of losing trades, but these were more than offset by a small number of larger winners.

There are two points that I feel should be learned from this that I hope to get across. Firstly, I believe it's important to bang away a trade at every signal regardless of whether it's a duffer. It's part of the age old thing of discipline, seeing and thinking. Let's face it, 90% of the Essex boys in the city are straight out of comprehensive schools and aren't really the brightest. But they simply do as they've been told without giving it a second thought.

The second point is that the standard indicator settings that come with these charts aren't the best and will never make you money. A lot of them were designed for daily stock charts and their cycles are totally out of sync for the sort of timeframes that we're using here. It's necessary to think outside of the box as to what they do and how they do it so as to adjust the settings better.

For now though, I think you should keep banging away at EUR/JPY M1 for the next week or two to see how you get on, keeping it nice and simple along the way. Then we can look at ways of making it work a bit better.

Regarding MT4, I've only been using it for a couple of months but I'm really impressed with it. I started with Interbank FX's version, but their server was struggling to keep up. I've more recently switched to ODL and that seems a lot better. I'll probably open a live account with them soon.

Choc

I would be very interested in a FX brainstorming session. As long the hotel has a good food and booze facilities.

Do you have any dates in mind so I can pencil them in on my wife's calendar.

Bob

Look up the Britannia on Tripadvisor - not pretty reading :o(

CC, you have mail.

FXers, Choccie hasn't been posting today as her PC is hors de combat. We're trying to get her sorted out but, in the meantime, keep those postings and emails about the Forex get-together coming. The more interest there is, the better the chance of getting some good speakers as well as all the usual trader schmoozing.

Choccie, I would be happy to head down South (!) for a get-together - great idea!

I'll let you know if I need the bridal suite later ;-)

Good luck getting the PC back into action..

CC

I noticed your post re responses from others on the thread. I used to share your frustration, but eventually accepted that people will post when they want to and often disappear for days or weeks on end. My own experience is that I post when it's going well and not when it isn't. As a rule when Meggers appears it livens up :)

I listed some rules a little while ago, which I was supposed to stick to and found myself once more breaking most if not all. It's not a system I need, stick to the rules the rest will follow, but discipline. Having taken a break for a few weeks and with encouragement from a fellow FXer I re-entered the fray yesterday on the Eur/Jpy pair and have managed to harvest 200 pips. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing right all of a sudden; however, through lack of confidence I'm wondering if it may be that the pair is going nowhere at the moment and if the entry isn't too bad it comes back to you, therefore hard to get it entirely wrong!

I have never been into systems, back testing and all that jazz, I don't have the patience, but I'm following Hils' advice (amongst others) and keeping it simple - trend lines, MA crossovers and the MACD. As always when to exit a trade is the thorny issue (whether winning or losing) but if it's a loser and I'm not sure, I cut, if I think my entry was slightly mistimed I'll add. If I think I have closed a winner too early, after some reflection I'll have another go.

Must admit, early days once more, but those 200 pips were anything from a 1 pip trade to the largest at 62. No daily targets, just trying to take it when it's there.

One other rule I have put in place is to reduce my stake, it's far less stressful and frees up the margin for adding if necessary. Stake size is relative to one's wealth of course, but whilst building confidence again less stress and worry is paramount.

If I can keep this up I'll start posting some trades and reasons again.

Just a load of old waffle really, but your post deserved a response. Good luck.

pth

Delboy,

Do you have MT4 installed on a machine anywhere? If so, I wonder if you could spend a few minutes looking at a little problem for me please.

Sorry, Hil, I don't have it installed. But, for you I could :) What's your problem?