2Bull Forex Blog

Most traders try and trade short term and end up taking low odd trades and losing, whereas they could make more money and spend less effort, by catching and holding the big trends. Look at any Forex chart and you will see big trends and if you look closely, they all start and continue from new market highs or lows. If you buy or sell, breaks of important levels of support or resistance you can get in on all the big trends and make big profits.

Breakout methodology is timeless and will always work, as long as Forex markets trend.

You need to be patient when looking for good breakouts and look for levels that have been tested several times in fact, the more times the better. When these levels breaks, stops will bit hit and fresh technical buying or selling will kick in and push prices further from the breakout point.

Breakout trading allows you to get the odds on your side and you don’t have to predict anything, you simply trade the reality of price change as you see it on a Forex chart. Most traders can’t trade breakouts, they feel they have missed the start of the move and want to wait to get in at what they consider is a better level, but as we seen, when prices break through important levels, the trend continues and the trader waiting on the sidelines misses the trend.

If you are following big trends, you mustn’t make the key error most traders make which is to trial stops to close.

If you want to stay in a big trend for weeks or months, you have to hold your stop back outside of normal volatility, so you don’t get stopped out to soon. You need to accept short term dips in open equity, to make a big banked profit at the end of the trend, so be disciplined and patient.

I know traders who 100% or more per annum, trading just a few times a month; these traders are not interested in trading for fun, their trading to make big Forex profits, by hitting and holding the big trends. Long term Forex trend following using breakouts, is easy to do so make it part of your essential Forex education and get on the road to currency trading success.

Most novice Forex traders want to make money using mechanical Forex trading systems but most lose money, as most systems lose. This article is all about finding the right system and trading it for long term currency trading success.

Here are your 3 steps to Forex trading success with a mechanical trading system.

1. Get Verified Evidence of Performance

Any system that terms itself a Forex robot or Expert Advisor will lose you money. They have catchy names, cost a hundred bucks or so and tell you, they can double your money each month with no drawdown and no effort. These systems lose money and never have an independent track record of gains to back up their ridiculous claims of profit. All you get are simulations and unverified figures.

Look for a system which has an independent and verified track record of gains over at least 2 years. So what realistically can you expect from the best systems? This leads us onto the next point.

2. Performance to Drawdown

The best systems will give you 50 – 100% annual gains compounded and these are the best. These gains are great but you will get drawdown and the bigger the long term gain, the bigger the short term drawdown will tend to be.

You should expect a 20 – 50% drawdown at some point and it will probably last for a few weeks. Short term drawdown happens to all trading systems, even the best – so you need to be able to be confident in your system and trade it with discipline through these periods. We will discuss how to trade with discipline in the next point.

3. Confidence in the Logic to Trade with Discipline

You need to be confident in the logic of the system to stick with it when it has a losing period so learn how and why the system works and make sure you agree with the logic. If you don’t have confidence in the system to win long term, you will struggle to trade it with discipline in the short term. Keep in mind, if you can’t trade a trading system with discipline, you don’t have one!

If you follow the above simple steps, you will be on the road to making Mechanical Forex Trading Profits and 30 minutes a day or less.

I know everyone who wants to succeed in forex trading and make extra money online thinks that they will only be successful if they have something special. They think they need the ‘holy grail’ of forex trading.

Well, I hate to repeat this for so many times when people asked whether I have a forex trading guide that can win 100% of the time. My answer here again will be no, I do not have it and I do not think anyone has it.

If you want to be a successful trader, you don’t really have to go until such extends to search for the strategy or system. All you need is a mentor or coach who can give you free forex trading advice. On the internet, you can find plenty of them and of course this blog here is one of them.

A common mistake made by many beginners is that they think they can buy success in forex trading by buying a trading system or strategy for $67, $97, $147 etc. Even if there is some forex trading advice sold on the internet, you have to judge whether it’s really worth the money and not some marketing gimmicks.

If at any time you will need to pay for those forex trading advice, how do you decide if it’s good? Some forex tips here.. Look for a real time track record and a money back guarantee. If you don’t get both, then don’t buy. This involves your hard earned cash, so you should do some research on the products that you are interested in.

You can find plenty of stuffs and education related to forex trading on the internet and they are free. Here are some of the topics that you may want to look up and study more on them.

1. Technical Analysis – You can find information on chart formations, candlesticks patterns, fibonacci numbers, support and resistance and many more that are used in many forex trading strategies. These mentioned technical stuffs are very important if you are a chartist or technical trader, and can be combined to become a powerful forex trading system.

2. Technical Forex Indicators – Most of the traders will trade using their favorite technical indicators and you should too have some in your trading system. However, do not flood your charts with lots of indicators because large quantity of them will only give you more restrictions to your trading.

When you draw your charts with trendlines, chart formations etc, you will also need some timing indicators which include Stochastic, RSI, MAs, MACD etc. There are many more besides those that I mentioned, but in general, they are good enough for entering the forex market.

If you surf the internet, you will come across plenty of sales page selling various forex products, with lots of hype. I know there are many forex trading systems out there in the market and every product seems to claim that they can make big money in a short period of time, without too much capital, it is very easy to use and anyone can do it without any knowledge in trading.

But after people bought the products, then they realize it’s all marketing gimmicks and then the search for better forex trading systems begins again. So to help you guys, I have some forex tips that can help you avoid scams in your search for the best forex system.

1. Look Out For The Forex Trading Track Records

Although this seems common sense, but there will still be forex traders buying a forex trading system without looking for the track records first. If that is so, then there is no wonder why they lose. Please don’t be attracted by the claims like: ‘near 100% success rate’, ‘earn your first million in 2 years trading forex’, ‘forex training that can give you financial freedom ever’ and many more.

Look for the real time proof of the forex trading system because vendors will try to cheat by using a track record on a hindsight (they already know the closing prices), so look for a trading statement that they are trading daily.

2. Look Out For The Largest Drawdowns

Any forex strategy will have a drawdown and it’s a matter of whether it is small or huge. This means that your trading account will experience a drop in value or margin which is in floating losses but yet the trade is still opened. Although the losses are not realized, but we should be looking for a forex trading system that gives you as little drawdowns as possible, a guide will be around 5% – 8%.

Depending on the system’s trading strategy, the drawdowns may be days, weeks or even months, so you will have to make sure that you are comfortable with those down swings.

3. Are You Comfortable With The Trading Timeframe?

This is a very important factor to look out for in a trading system. If you are working all day with very little time to trade the forex market and you purchased a trading system which requires you to monitor several times a day, then you are simply wasting you money.

What’s the point of having a good system but yet you have no time to trade and make profits? So if that’s the case, you might want to look for some systems that will allow you to trade but only have to monitor maybe once per day…and this type are mostly swing trading strategies. So be anxious to find out timeframe is the forex trading system operating on first.

Do you know what a forex calendar or economic calendar can do for you? And are you using it to the full potential in your forex trading? The economic calendar can be found at some of the forex websites, an example will be Forex Factory. It will help forex traders and investors about the upcoming major news and events. Here are some of the best ways to make money using a forex calendar.

Some of the very important and common economic information is interest rate announcements, non-farm pay roll, consumer price index, unemployment rates(which is the main concern in the financial world right now), retail sales, manufacturing PMI and lots more. There are news release almost everyday.

If you are trading on technicals and does not keep up with recent economics events, then you are missing out on a big part of the financial world. You will need to know the forex market conditions even if you are using technical analysis for your forex trading.

For example, you have a good forex strategy and it makes you nice profits consistently, but the strategy does not tell you when is a choppy market. Then how do you judge when is a choppy market? Here comes the market conditions that you will need to know. By keeping tabs on the forex calendar, you will be handed an extra edge on how your forex trading systems should be trading.

By knowing the timing of economic news release, it is not a forex signal for trading. In fact, you should not be trading 2 to 3 hours before any data is released which has got to do to the related currency pairs. For example, when there is going to be a interest rate announcement (a very big event) for U.S, then you should not be trading pairs like EUR/USD, USD/CHF, AUD/USD etc. This is to help you filter out those whipsaws that might happen when the announcement is being made.

Sometimes when a news is released, there will be a huge movement for a few minutes before the trend reverses again, those are fake signals that you would not want to take in. It is recommended that you take in trading signals around 15 minutes to 30 minutes only after the market is stabilized.

Without the aid of a forex calendar, you will hardly know when to act because you will have to be sure what is happening around and when is it happening. It’s very usual for a trader to check the forex calendar for a few times a day as it is one of the criteria in a trading plan.

So do you want to get the most out of your trading account? If yes, then you better start checking a economic calendar if you have not done so for your forex trading.