June 30th, 2009

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In my last posting I asked “what if I raised the risk level on M5G cyborg“. Well after 3 weeks and tripling my demo account, it did this:

Before you say “I told you so – never get greedy and fool with the leverage settings”, an interesting thing is I am trading the same system with the same settings (except leverage) using the same broker and both accounts opened the same trades. The difference is my live account closed the same trade for a profit and the demo did not hit the target and found the stop instead. Just goes to show the price feeds for live and demo and the order execution are similar, but quite not the same. This is why you should never really totally trust a demo account forward test.
(Another more superstitous part of me knew that as soon as I published the last post on my blog the account would blow up….)
June 26th, 2009

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About 3 weeks ago I decided to take one of my demo accounts that I am running M5G cyborg and push it to the extreme by raising the risk level to something obscene (15% instead of the recommended 2%). This is what happened: a 5K account has tripled. In reality the risk of ruin is extreme for this kind of trading and I would never try this style of trading with money I am not prepared to loose, but it is always fun to see what is possible. I might let it run for a few more weeks and see if it blows up.
If you have tried a similar experiment, let me know.
June 22nd, 2009

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I am a chronic trading book buyer and long ago I ran out of space on my bookshelf. So I can make some space, I am reluctantly selling off some of my books on ebay. If you want to get yourself a bargain (you know how expensive trading books can be ….) why don’t you go onto ebay and make a bid on the following:
June 20th, 2009

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The BBC reality TV series “Million Dollar Traders” has just shown here in Australia. If you have missed it, it is a 3 part series. The premise of the series is 8 every day people (vets, engineers, students, shop owners etc) are given some training and 1 million dollars to manage under the watchful eye of a professional trader and the investor. They are given Bloomy terminals in a London office. As the series progresses the intention is to eliminate the weaker traders until the best survive.
The series itself is yet another reality show out of the BBC sausage factory; in hedge fund terms a million dollars is small fry; and the trading methods used are nothing to write home about, but I must admit I enjoyed it immensely as all the psychology issues involved in trading came out. Read the rest of this entry »
June 14th, 2009

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If have ever been on the forex factory forums, there is a very popular and long running discussion thread devoted to trading a set of trading strategies by James16. The thread has been running since 2005 and has over 2,500 pages on it. Given the insane length of this thread trying to understand this trading method takes a lot, a real lot, of of hard work. You can pay James a subscription of $129 a month to help decode this massive thread, but as many others have noted, most of the content is on the Forex Factory thread, you just need to pull it apart yourself.
I have not coughed up the cash to find out what happens in the paid group, but I am curious about the James16 phenomenon, so I thought I would bravely try and summarize what little I know about the James 16 trading method. If you are interested, then read on.
Read the rest of this entry »