Forex Pair AUDUSD Morning Review + Live Trade + Subsequent Opportunities 29th September

A Great Trading Month For Warren!

Some nice feedback once again and a great month for Warren!

''I am so happy I found your website and did your course. I have been trading demo accounts and very small accounts on forex for a while trailing different methods. I can honestly say so far your system is the best you can just see it working time after time.

I am one month in and 112.8 points up as of yesterday for the month of September.

Thanks again

Warren Russell''

Beginner Blogs Coming Next Month

Starting next month - regular blog posts from two beginner traders. This will allow you to experience their journey, including the highs, the lows, and the lessons learned along the way.

Regular Forex Pair AUD/USD reviews starting tomorrow

A solid trading plan works across markets. Early morning short and finished trading by 8am today.

Ftse 100 Morning Review + Live Trade + Subsequent Opportunities 27th September

Wednesday Quote Hour

Early Morning Motivation

An 8:15am Finish Today

We had a nice early morning sell today with a target at the pivot. When it comes to trading, a robust trading plan beats market prediction every time. Zone Trader is what allows me to have days where I am finished after 15 minutes, not a crystal ball.

This Weeks Expected Dividends

Ftse 100 Summary and Analysis for The Week Ahead 25th September

The Latest Zone Trader Feedback Email

Some great feedback to wake up to. I love it when someone does their homework. Backtesting gives you the confidence in a system and allows you to trade more effectively. It's even better to see it on the AUD/USD pair, showing the methods of Zone Trader work just as well on my secondary market.

''Hi Mr Orr,

I have gone through the Zone Trader Course and have back tested historical data for about 2 years on the AUD/USD. I must say that I have learned a lot and realized what mistakes I have made and honestly some of them are simply too embarrassing to mention to you to but I just want to say how thankful I am for what you have done for me. Over the period I have tested I managed to get a 85.6% efficiency rate which is much more than I could ever hope for.''

Martin Van Staden

Today's Morning Email to Subscribers

''Slightly too high for blind position, however signals are still good to go (Sell from 6870 target 6840)''

Ftse 100 Review + Loss + Subsequent Analysis 20th September

Wednesday Quote Hour

Early Morning Trading Humour

Where Are You Going?

Reading Time - 4 Minutes

I have decided to expand the scope of my Think Like a Trader blog. I am doing this for a couple of reasons:

-       There is only so much I can write about the physical act of trading without the material growing stale and my mind turning to mush as I try and think up new articles.

-       The second reason is that I believe becoming a successful trader – or a success at anything in life – is a lot to do with the steps you take as a person day to day, not merely in the limited field of what you are striving to learn.

My hope is that by writing about things that interest and help me, I will also be able to offer a glimmer of insight and inspiration to you, the reader. We can waltz through this crazy thing called life together, on the back of shared experiences and feedback – yes, that little comment section on the blog or Facebook channel is for you and your views and insight should you ever want to share.

So where are you going?

It’s a big question unless you dial it down to the simplest foundation of the question – ‘Well, I’m on my way to work,’ or ‘I’m heading to the cinema.’

Life is essentially a great big mystery. Sure, lots of people act like they have it all figured out and know what they’re doing, but in reality they are just as lost as the rest of us. Our understanding of life is essentially to follow the rulebook left over by our ancestors whilst trying to slowly improve our quality of life.

This can create problems for all of us. I know it did and still does for me. Because our well laid out rulebook leaves very little for interpretation. It goes a little something like this:

1)   Go to school and get an education.

2)   Head off to higher education in order to give yourself the best chances in later life.

3)   Get a job, meaning a career where you will spend most of your time for the next forty odd years.

4)   Find a partner. Buy a house. Have 2.4 children.

5)   Retire.

I am sure you would all draw up a similar step-by-step if you all had to explain the journey, as expected of us, through life.  The problem is that it isn’t good enough for a large portion of us. It is nowhere near good enough.

I didn’t go to University – shock shock, horror horror. I didn’t go because I didn’t see the need for it. I had just spent the majority of my childhood in an educational setting that seemed weighted toward the ability to remember pages of textbooks and then regurgitate that information during a test setting. I noticed that the ‘smartest’ amongst the school discipline were often people with very little common sense or ability to work around problems outwith the textbook remit.

I am not trying to belittle schooling here. I should point that out. School offers a fantastic opportunity for many people and if it fits with you then that is absolutely fine.

But what about the rest of us? The ones who find themselves looking for something different?

Well, it may not be pointed out by the mainstream, but we have just as much chance of success as those who hit the books and study (aka memorise). It isn’t pointed out during education that a huge portion of those we all look up to and admire are lacking in formal education. Lots of them were considered as people who would not succeed.

So where are you going? Because it is a question that is absolutely necessary to ask yourself. And if the answers do not fit in with societies 5 step playbook, then it is also ok to realise that you are more than capable of finding your own path.

Maybe you want to travel the world – That is fine.

Perhaps you want to dedicate your life to photographing butterflies – Good for you.

You want to learn how to make fish tanks and start your own business selling custom made ones? – Excellent idea!

You want to try and become a trader? To learn an industry with a 90% failure rate – Go for it!

One thing I have learned is that the journey of life is a very individual experience. If I could pass on one piece of advice, it would always be that it is ok to do what you want to do rather than what is expected of you.

You are the only one who is experiencing your life. At the end of it all you are the only one who has to pay the price of life – and that is death. The in-between is yours to do what you want. To go where you want and follow your own path.

So make it a good one!

I hope you all have a great trading week!

Expected Dividends for This Week

Ftse 100 Review and Analysis Week Commencing 18th September

The Weekend Is Here - Friday Winning Trades

Great way to go into the weekend after a down day yesterday. Double winning trade after a pre-market winning sell position. Have a great weekend everyone!

Is Trading a Con?

Reading Time - 4 Minutes

For this blog post I am going to focus on brokers. I get at least one email per week and at least one comment on the YouTube channel per week telling me that brokers ‘rig’ the market and trading is a con.

So is it a con? 

Well, the short answer is no, it is not a con!

First of all, I’m going to focus on proper, regulated brokers here. I am not talking about brokers with PO Box addresses and headquarters in places you struggle to pronounce. If you are using those sorts of brokers, then the hard truth is that you should have done your research before committing capital. It is no different to deciding to order a newly released Iphone 7 from a company who is offering it at half price, located in Outer Mongolia. 

You want to use a regulated broker. For example, IG are FCA regulated and also one of the largest brokers in the world. These are the main reasons I have one of my accounts with them.

A couple of the things I hear all the time are:

-       Brokers take the other side of your trade so want you to lose

-       Brokers know where your stop is and take it out.

These are both fairly ridiculous when you actually think about it, but they are the most common and so I will address them both.

First of all, the regulation means that these companies abide by strict rules. Their books are open for inspection should it be deemed necessary. However I do understand that people can think the regulation is not enough of a reassurance.

Some brokers do act as market makers and do take the opposite side of your trade. They make money because a huge portion of retail traders lose money. And if you start becoming a consistently profitable trader? Does your broker suddenly go bust? No, they hedge their position and go right along as normal. They do not care if 5% of their client base is profitable. 

So let’s instead look at the very real world limitations of what is being said:

There are countless thousands/millions of people trading at any one time. These traders are across different timeframes, looking at different methods, and all of them using different entries, stops and targets.

How does a broker act biased against every single one of those people? It is impossible. Every trade is slightly different. Do you truly believe that the broker told the charting software to spike down to take out your stop so he can get your money but not the thousands of other traders going the opposite direction? 

Perhaps you do believe that. So let’s add to it: The charts you are looking at on your brokers screen are following official charts. I do not finish trading on the ftse 100, look at Yahoo Finance and find out the official figures showed a high of 6500 but my brokers high was 6700. If this were the case, the broker would be out of business within days.

So we have charts that are aligned with a market trading billions and billions of pounds in a day. Floor traders and banks dealing in positions worth millions of pounds each. The simple question is – how are these markets manipulated to work against you, a retail trader, with let’s say a £100,000 account, trading at £50 per point maximum? It just doesn’t happen.

Why do people then state so decisively that trading is a con?

Because they are bad traders.

Simple. Brutal. But very truthful.

People lose money in markets and look to blame everything and everyone except themselves.

If your stop is in a very obvious place, say just above key resistance, then guess what? You’re going to get stopped out a lot. This has nothing to do with your broker working against you. The market moves by taking peoples money. An easy way to do this is to go for where large groups of people are placing their stop. It’s not your broker working against you, it’s you working against yourself by executing a flawed trading plan.

Every time you enter the market it moves in the opposite direction? No, your broker is not doing that so it can take your position of 20 points at £2 per point and make a cool £40. You are simply entering the market at the incorrect time.

If you want to be a successful trader, it is possible. It is not easy, but you can do it with enough hard work and determination, just as you can do anything else you want to do in life. The problems arise when you expect things to come easy and when they don’t, you blame the world around you. Your broker is not stopping you from making money at trading. That is the unavoidable truth. Many people make a living at trading, myself included. You are losing out because you are not addressing your mistakes and working on improvement.

Hopefully this helps to dispel some of the worry that brokers work against you.

I’ve had a trading loss this morning – nothing to do with the broker. I move on from it now and onto the next trade, because I know what I do is profitable and the loss was nothing to do with the broker. 

I hope you’ve all had a great trading week!

Ftse 100 Review + Live Trade + Market Evaluation 13th September

Wednesday Quote Hour

Small Account Trading - 8% in first two weeks of September

Weekend Email from Happy Subscribers

''Thank you for your morning emails and afternoon breakdowns... also I wanted to thank you for getting back to me on the questions you answered for me from Wednesday.

It was quite a down day today and I also placed a short side trade this morning on the AUD/USD, without a doubt your Zone Trader course has given me confidence to trade and I came out with 72 points on that pair...!

Have a great weekend too and please keep going with all you're doing... It's brilliant!''

A great email to receive from subscribers Guy and Carla who are working hard to achieve their trading goals. This is the sort of thing that puts a smile on my face. Well done!

Ftse 100 Summary and Analysis 11th September

NZDAUD Forex Analysis and Potential Future Trading Areas - Daily Timeframe 9th September

How Low Can You Go?

Reading Time - 5 Minutes

Well, the answer is pretty simple – very low.

What I’m talking about, is how low trading can drag you when things are at their very worst. So what I’m going to do for you in this post is something very few professional traders and educators do – I am going to outline how I was when at my worst. I can still remember the day, the feelings and the situation as though it were yesterday. By doing this, I hope it can help anyone else who is struggling to see that there is a way forward and at some point, all of us have struggled.

So I used to trade sitting at my desk, facing my bedroom wall. I was tucked in the corner. I had convinced myself that being in that position meant I had no distractions and so could focus on trading. I used to get up at 6am and switch between the Forex pair AUDUSD and the Dow Jones. Sometimes I’d be there until 11 at night.

This particular day started like any of the others. I was well on my way to learning how to trade. I had a lot of knowledge, was forming a good trading strategy, and all in all I thought I was ‘on the up.’ However emotional trading was still a huge issue, one that I conveniently brushed under the proverbial carpet. The reason I was able to do this is because, on most occasions, I managed to keep hammering at the charts during those bouts of emotional trading until I pulled my account back to breakeven or a slight profit for the day.

I liked to trade around the open of markets most of all – usually the Euro open and the London Exchange open. I still like trading at these times best today, but now I am much more refined and, have a grasp of my emotions and… know what I am doing.

So anyway, this morning I sat down with my coffee (essential component of any successful trader!) and watched the charts. I got into my first trade a little after 7am. It was a losing trade. I was pi##ed off, but for the time being, I held it together. At around 8am I entered my second trade… that was also a loser, one where I moved my stop to try and stop it from becoming a loser.

Warning bells begin to sound for all readers. You can tell it isn’t going to go well from here on in. But the problem was, for me at that computer; the warning bells were drowned out by my frustration and anger at losing two trades in a row, one of which violated my rules. And how does an emotional trader deal with those losses? In a logical way, stepping away, working out where I went wrong and figuring out how to correct it? Nope. The emotional trader continues to trade.

By 10am I had been in at least fifteen trades. Some were small wins, some were small losses, and others were larger losses. They no longer followed any sort of reason or rules. I was at the point of taking trades because –

‘I’m certain it’s going to go up here.’

‘It looks like it’s going to go up. That means it’s going to go down.’

‘My last trade lost as a long. So by now the market is due to shoot up. I’ll enter another long.’

These are all genuine things I thought (they’re in my trading diary) and believed at the time.

Fast forward to around 8pm. I hadn’t moved from my desk. Not to go to the toilet. Not to get a drink of water. Nothing. I had lost count of the number of trades I had entered – probably up towards a hundred at least. And had it worked? Had I made it all back and saved the day as had happened on so many other days?

No.

I was down. And I was down big. Thousands of pounds wiped out. My account was decimated. My head was a fractured mess of exhaustion, anger, sorrow, self-hatred… you name it.

So that’s the story. I was essentially broken after that day. The lowest I have ever been through trading. I truly believed that there was no way for me to become a trader. I thought I was useless and would never amount to anything… all that good stuff that creeps in to kick you when you’re already down.

So first thing is – it happens to us ALL. There is no professional trader who has been doing this for any length of time (so that they can consider it a career) that has not felt as low as that and made idiotic mistakes like that. It happens. It is part of the learning process. We are emotional beings attempting to shape ourselves into a career that demands an emotionless approach. It is monumentally difficult.

But you can get through that stage. The important part is that you learn and you grow. Correct your mistakes. I did not blame my broker or a book I read or a course I took. I knew the problem was with me. But more than that, because I knew the issue was with me, I knew that I could correct it. I HAD to correct it. Because for me the alternative really was pretty terrifying. The alternative was to admit that I couldn’t sit at a computer and follow a set of rules. If I couldn’t do that, then what control did I have over my life? If I wanted to do one thing but was repeatedly doing the opposite, then who was pulling the levers in my head?

I don’t want to start getting all wishy washy and diving into Metaphysics, but that was one of my key motivations. Yours can be anything you want it to be. Just find the reason for continuing and at the same time work your ass off in order to find ways to improve. They can be in any area that is needed –

 

-       How do I begin to control my emotions?

-       How do I find or develop a professional trading plan?

-       Where am I lacking knowledge and how do I find that knowledge?

-       What are my goals and what steps do I need to take to achieve them?

It wont be easy. Nothing in life is every easy. But hopefully by showing you just how low I have been in the past, you can see that it happens to us all and take encouragement from the fact that if I can climb my way out of it, so can you!

I hope you’ve all had a great trading week!

James Orr

Ftse 100 Review + Live Trade + Subsequent Opportunities 6th September

Wednesday Quote Hour

The Monday Club

The Monday club is back again for Decisive Traders. Today's review email:

''Blind sell at the open down toward 6896 as per video, first target being 10 - 15 points.''

Ftse 100 Summary and Analysis 4th September

Subscriber Trade

Today's pre-market Subscriber video review - watch 6777 zone for early morning shorts. Have a good weekend everyone!

How do you Speak to Yourself?

Reading Time - 5 Minutes

How do you speak to yourself? On a day to day basis.

First of all, I don’t mean the sort of walking down the street, having a full on conversation with yourself or your imaginary friend type of talking to yourself. If that’s what you’re doing, I don’t think my blog is going to be much help to you… your imaginary friend may just love it though!

Perhaps a better way to phrase this question is – how do you treat yourself?

This is so important in life in general, not merely trading. I truly believe that how you treat yourself, how you talk to yourself, will have an immense impact on the life you lead. Because you are you, and there’s no one you trust more than yourself.

Just think about it for a moment. Because a lot of people let their self-belief and their inner talk have a detrimental affect on their life. Are you your own worst enemy?

Now think about some of the people you really admire and respect – it may be Bill Gates, Muhammad Ali or Richard Branson. How do you imagine they talk to themselves? Is it in line with how you speak to yourself? If not, the disconnect is likely where a lot of the issues you face are coming from.

New age bull**it, I hear you say. Well, I don’t think so. Our brain is essentially a large sponge, which sucks up information and stores it for later use. It doesn’t have a filter whereby you can pick and choose the things that it remembers – just think about the last time you had an annoying song stuck in your head. Now imagine bombarding that sponge with negativity, day after day, consistently and with a poisonous power. The negativity is coming from within and there is nowhere for it to go and so it is stored, over and over again, on repeat until the voice gains so much strength that you begin to believe it is actually you who is speaking.

Do you think that is going to influence your day-to-day life? Will it affect you when you’re in a trade and the market starts to move against you?

‘You’re a loser, I told you that you can’t do this.’

‘Another mistake. What else did you expect?’

‘Why don’t you just give up? This clearly isn’t for you.’

Sound familiar?

I should add here that I am in no way perfect. That negativity creeps in on me at times as well. The way I talk to myself drops down to the equivalent of two drunken Scottish guys arguing. I don’t believe you can have 100% positivity. In fact, I think that would be an oxymoron. How can positivity exist unless there is negativity to measure it against?

So I’m not perfect, but I do work my ass off to make sure that the majority of the time, my internal talk is positive and in line with the goals I set for myself. Rather than trading, I’ll take another quick example for you – writing. When I first started sending my work out, I was bombarded with formalised rejection letters. It would have been easy to let that rejection swamp me and just give up. But I didn’t – I continued doing what I was doing, pushing through, and hey-ho, acceptances began to appear. I actually was in the position of having my short stories accepted more than once, and had to choose who I preferred to go with.

Now the way I did this is much more important than the example itself. And it really is quite simple – I prepared for the negativity. I expected it and so I was able to build defences before it even arrived.

How did I do this? Well for writing, I firstly made damn sure my work was good. I wrote every single day, for at least an hour, for years. I looked over my work, judged it, corrected it, adapted. If you don't work at your craft and toward your goals, if you don't focus on improving what you're doing, then there is no way you will succeed.

After that – and this is the important bit – I looked at other people’s shortcomings and failures.

That doesn’t sound very ‘positive’, does it? But I wasn’t revelling in their failure. Instead I looked at some of the authors I really admired – Stephen King, JK Rowling, Jim Butcher – and I researched the early days of their writing; before they were shiny and polished and famous. I looked to see how they fared. And guess what? Their early writing careers were FILLED with rejection. I should point out that this was also the way I figured out I needed to write for an hour a day at a minimum. Because it’s what they all did.

Now jump back to the rejection letters rolling in. Instead of being disheartened and swamped by negative talk, I was able to brush it off. ‘This is all part of the process. If it happened to Stephen King, it was bound to happen to me. But he kept going and that’s what I need to do. No, I’m not a failure, I’m not useless and I shouldn’t give up. If anything, I know that I am on the right path.’

When you do this – research the hardship and then prepare for it – you remove the ability to self-hate. You do this because you know what you are going through is normal. You’ve already researched the bumpy path that you need to take.

 

Reframe the negativity that comes your way. If you lose a trade through a mistake – ''That’s ok. Every trader on the planet has done the same, especially as a beginner. The important point is that they worked to correct the mistakes, and that’s what I need to do now.''

You can do this for literally anything – Trading, Writing, Parenting, Learning to Drive, Starting a business etc.

For me, the keys to success live in the cracks of successful people, residing right there in their failures and early careers.

I hope you’ve all had a great trading week!