(Part 2) Top products from r/Forex

anil is your best bet for free assistance. Specifically, watch his weekly videos but also he's made a few discussion videos. the most important is one he recently did that roughly covers Elliot Wave Theory. this gives some perspective and also the most important non technical lesson you can get for EW... don't get bogged down in labelling every wave of every degree. just see the larger structure and wait for entries. some more anil notes down the bottom as they would detract from the rest of what i want to stay...

if you haven't read the book you should as it quit good at getting the basics. and an excellent reference and shits over the free super summarised pdf that you can download.

Once you feel like you are correctly seeing the structure, obviously start trading it. if you are not sure if you are actually trading it right, research how to trade it or buy a book like this one.
Something else you can do is sign up for one of the wave analysis services for a month and see how your counts stack up to theirs. It will widen your perspective and glue real-life analysis.

Anil Notes:

• you gotta look past, though getting harder, him talking about the haters and how he was right. he says the haters don't affect him but clearly it does to a certain level. also i believe there is a rising ego that isn't helping.
  
• the the book by prechter, they don't talk about contracting flats at all, just running and expanding. anil points out that in forex contracting flats exist and are fairly common. this trips some people up.
  
• he rarely counts waves, no surprise on that really, but he does draw the waves out so you can actually count the waves if you want.he wont draw all degrees in each video but you get a pretty good idea.
  
• if you watch this video you get a better understanding of how his mind works through his life story. he's a highly educated and successful doctor who understands why education exists and how you need to know enough to think for yourself etc.
  
• anil says often that double three's are fairly common and they are. learning how to spot them will help you
  
• his trend lines, as he will say all the time, don't mean much. but they are quite useful as a tool to recognise when trend may be changing (e.g. wave has finished) and also possible confluence points for rob retracements
  
• he uses the extension of 127% (1.272) extensively as a target for impulsive waves (1/3/5/a/c) as opposed to 100% that most others use.
  
  
  a final note, there are a few people picking up subscribers that are posting elliott wave charts. treat all, even anil really, with caution and suspicion and a lot post how things are going to be and its completely different and wrong. a good example of this is the IgnatBorisenko guy. his wave counts look perfect enough to hang on your wall, but i've never seen him post an accurate prediction.
  

> Is this really just a bullshit game of fluking the right pattern at the right time?

If you haven't read Market Wizards , you absolutely must. The point is not to be inspired by their towering successes, rather it is to realize that people can and do make it as traders. More importantly, it's realize that everyone does it differently. But it's important to work through the stories and see how hard it was for many people, it's not enough just to read what someone else says about it.

> Why are there so many?

Because humans are inventive and creative! The fact that there are so many ways of making trading work is something we traders should be grateful for, because it means there's likely something out there that suits each trader.

>How do you even begin picking a strategy or pattern or whatever to learn or study.

In some ways, I think you let it come to you.

Read about what other people do. Some of it you will automatically think is just BS, or recognize that your current life circumstances just don't let you test out that approach.

Some of other stuff will naturally appeal to you (and don't make the mistake of thinking because you want to do it, so does everyone else, so it can't be any good). Follow that up. Investigate it, learn a lot about it, throw away the stuff that doesn't work.

If someone, somewhere made an approach work, then you're in with a chance of making it work too, so long as it's a good fit for you. Your personality, your style of intelligence, your risk tolerance levels, your available time, your stress tolerance, your view on the market, your view on the way the world works in general. Don't worry about trying to find the best strategy, or the most profitable one, or the true strategy. You only need one that works for you.

This is very cool. Thank you

Edit: in case anyone is looking for more in depth information on any of the experiments or biases mentioned (Anchoring, as-if and other defences, loss aversion...), check out Behavioural Investing by James Montier.

Its a collection of papers, but put into a great format that is easy to read and very visual. It is also available on torrent sites.

That being said, I do hope to post some of the best ones on /r/forex in the near future.

Day Trading and Swing Trading the Currency Market by Kathy Lien (a free pdf is available online, I didn't link it so it doesn't get too much notice and is taken down) is also a great book to start with, for beginners especially. She goes into fundamental analysis to some extent, and there is a very helpful formal approach she discusses in Chapter 8, on how to develop a trading plan.

StockCharts has some great articles. There was one by Andrew Aziz, I think, on studying candlesticks in charts. Or it can be that people are just blatantly copy-pasting. I have seen Kathy Lien's chapters ripped off and claimed by some other authors as their own.

The best book i've ever read for Forex is this: http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Analysis-Complete-Financial-Technicians/dp/0137059442/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1398231664&sr=8-2&keywords=technical+analysis


Very in depth and goes over a lot of detail. 600 pages of great info. I also have heard that in a lot of broker sponsored events that introduces TA trading, a lot of them recommend that book, and i can see why. The only thing i would add in the book is consolidation zones and better opinion on Engulfing Candlesticks.

The book of Japanese candlesticks I read was specific but no to that extent more like how to give context to all the candles and their meanings. By any chance the book you read is this? the one I read on Japanese candlesticks is this one if by any chance you're interested.

I was reading the book Antifragile.

There was a part where the author describes the major shock he had when first introduced into the forex trading pit. He describes the sheer cognitive dissonance watching traders who could barely write their names and appeared to have an education of a high school level trading so much money. He came from quant like style of trading and was expecting sharp traders. The reality was that these traders knew next to nothing about countries and generally not bright. However, these below average intelligence people were making money hand-over-fist in the currency market. It was such an entertaining part of the book to hear how he describe the reality of large traders.

His take away message is, theory and practice are two very different thing. Practitioners are the ones who wins, not the academics with fancy forumlas.

open a small accont, risk a little of if for each trade (less than .3% of your capital) and study the markets.
A good read for starters is this book, IMO:
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Professional-Commodity-Trader-Lessons/dp/0470521457/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Good luck

Here's the most important stuff:

Adam Grimes, free course, book and blog. Currently the best educator on technical analysis because he has a very good balance between a quantitative and a discretionary approach. Also extremely cheap, you only pay for the book. Be free to ignore his meditation and hand drawing stuff.

Alexander Elder, it's a bit more general and less rigorous, but has a lot of nuggets.

Chat with traders, a lot of guests are there to sell you shit and are incredibly boring, but you can spot them pretty easily once you listen to a couple of podcasts.

But what benefited me most was backtesting (the right way, going bar by bar). I backtested hundreds of trades and a few half dozen approaches/strategies, found something that worked, forward tested it, went live. That's what I would recommend because it saves you a lot of time, you don't need to spend a year with a $500 account to find out if your strategy works, and a lot of the psychological issues disappear.

3 parts to a trade.

Lot size.
Entry.
Exit.

Too much is focused on the entry - or probably more correctly not enough on correct lot size (risk) and exit (trade management).

A good trading psychology book is called Mean Markets and Lizard Brains - https://www.amazon.com/Mean-Markets-Lizard-Brains-Irrationality/dp/0470343761

Not very well written, but a decent Divergence Trading Strategy

(Not mine...I just like Divergence trading)

http://www.amazon.com/Currency-Trading-Intermarket-Analysis-Shifting/dp/0470226234/ref=pd_sim_14_6?ie=UTF8&dpID=51ZOeBuVImL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR109%2C160_&refRID=16H1T8RDVKYHDXC83AAC

Also sounds like what youre looking for will be in Jaratt Davis' videos. Check his youtube