Trading Educators Blog

Day trading has always been a tough game, requiring a very strong psyche, discipline and a high level of trading skills to succeed in.  Nowadays though it's even harder due to the stronger competition, not only by humans but especially by computers trading at a speed a human trader simply can not match up to. High-Frequency Trading is happening in literally all of the popular markets out ther...

There are two important components of federal market activity which affect long- term economic activity and stock and commodity values; these are interest rates and money supply. A contracting money supply was one of the factors that caused the Great Depression of the 1930's. In the early 1980's most traders focused almost totally on the money supply figures, which would cause cash bonds and T-Bil...

Question from a subscriber: "Once I’ve achieved success as a trader, then what? I’ve heard that after a while trading can become boring." I know you would all like to have that problem, but I can vouch for its being true. I always have to find new ways to trade or I do become bored. However, I have never run out of ways to trade that remain exciting, at least for a fairly long time. After the obje...

As a trader, it's essential that you set specific goals. Trading is chaotic enough without trying to achieve unstructured goals that are difficult to manage and reach. Making profitable investments requires you to prepare carefully. You have to develop hypotheses regarding current market conditions. You have to devise ways of identifying setups and determine how and when to enter and exit the trad...

I’m happy to tell you that today a new AlgoStrats service was launched: Ambush Signals for Futures. To find out more have a look at the following video presentation: Happy Trading! Marco

A popular concept in the world of trading, especially among technical traders and chartists is to wait for confirmation before entering a trade. This means you have a Signal, for example a price action pattern and now you wait for the markets to confirm that pattern before you enter. The idea of course is to filter out bad trades this way and to gain confidence before entering the trade. But that ...

When I started out trading I had the illusion that being a successful trader meant to no longer have drawdowns or at least on very rare occasions. And I think most traders start out with that idea in their mind even though they don’t understand what it actually means. In Trading, you are in a Drawdown anytime you don’t make new equity highs on your account, or if you have multiple accounts across ...

As I’m about to go on vacation I thought it’s a good idea to write down my thoughts about trading on vacation. Is it a good idea to do so, or just crazy? I believe it depends. If you’re longer-term position trader and have a couple of positions open that are doing great and you don’t want to close them out now for example, I think there’s nothing wrong managing your position once a day while you’r...

After writing about why good trading usually is quite boring last week, I’ll continue down that road today and write about another similar topic.  And again it’s more of a rant that many of you maybe don’t want to read about. But I believe it really can be an eye-opener to those of you who’re really serious about trading and these are the traders that I care for the most. Actually I wish I ha...

When you start out trading, it’s pretty much all about the excitement. You watch every trade tick by tick, gazing at a chart ticking up and down together your P&L. You’re long. When it goes up, you feel excited because you’re making money, if it goes down you’re excited because you’re losing money. But boy you’re making sure you don’t miss any of this. You sit there and gaze at that chart as i...

I’m happy to tell you that AlgoStrats:FX is Live and Trading will start on Monday July 25th! To celebrate the Launch we’re starting with a Free Trial Week. Meaning you can follow AlgoStrats:FX completely free for a whole week. No strings attached, no credit card required - 100% free. Registration is already open, so go ahead and register your Free Account! I’ve also uploaded a new video ...

FYI: Get 20% off Ambush through July 13th. Simply enter the coupon code ambush20 when you check out. No doubt, the decision if or if not one should trade through the BREXIT-event and on which days was not an easy one for traders. But like most of the time, the answer at least in hindsight for Ambush traders was a clear "Yes". I personally didn't have any positions on going into the BREXIT...

Actually I didn't want to jump on the BREXIT bandwagon but since a few of you asked me if I trade the Brexit and if so how, I'll let you know and give you a bit of a warning along the way. There's tons of traders out there on social media, blogs, trading sites and forum talking about how they'll trade the Brexit event, stay up over night and so on. Now I'm not one of them. Actually the Brexit is o...

I just posted another video on our YouTube channel about another very common trading mistake, and that's trading your P&L instead of the actual market. While there are many variations of this, I guess I covered some of the most common ones that I've done myself again and again when I started trading. Go check it out and let me know if you have any questions or comments!

I just uploaded Episode 3 of my Questions & Answers Series to YouTube. It covers questions on the usefulness of demo-trading and on trading 123 formations. In the last part I talk about why I developed my own python-based backtesting platform which is probably only interesting for those of you who're hardcore into system-development. So if you're not, just stop there ;)

About a year ago I wrote an article about measuring performance where I explained the concept of measuring trading performance in Rs instead of $s. Everyone who trades for a while quickly realizes that $s don't really say too much about performance. You made $10? Maybe great. You made $50.000? Maybe not so good. The question always is in relation to what? What account size does the t...

Hi Trader, now this has been a quite volatile week so far in many markets and I hope you've also been able to capture some nice profits out of these wild moves! Thanks to my trading being almost completely systematic right now I still had a few minutes to record a new video for YouTube and actually start of a new Series. In the first one I explain what a BID/ASK spread is for those of you who're c...

“Michael Marcus taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me about making your best judgment, being wrong, making your next best judgment, being wrong, making your third best judgment, and then doubling your money.” – Bruce Kovner This is an immense important quote from Bruce Kovner. This...

I wrote an article with the headline "Sometimes others get to play and you don't" some time ago and today (Friday 04/01) was such a day. And I tell you, it is difficult to watch markets are going my way knowing I could have made my shares for April but I missed the trade. Well, I haven't missed the trade actually because it wasn't my train. Here comes what happened. At 7:30 AM CT this morning we h...

I hope so since thanks to Ambush we're short the USD across the board today. Entry in the Euro FX Future for example was at 1.11825 around the low of the day.