DIET BEBAS MAKAN MALAM ft. Clarin Hayes || Mie Instan Hack || Turun bera...

Why Visualization is a Bad Word - MATT FURREY

As the saying goes, "If I had a nickel
for every person who told me he can't
visualize, I'd be a wealthy man."

It's astounding yet true that many, 
many people read books on seeing
a goal in their mind's eye, yet feel
inadequate and/or unable to do it. 

Many people learn that some people
can't visualize because they're mostly
kinesthetic or auditory. 

I'm not in agreement with these
assessments because I've found
it relatively easy to teach virtually
anyone to visualize... if you replace
the 'v' word with imagination. 

When it comes to "imagining" a 
goal, you can use whatever senses
you want. You can see it, feel it, 
hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it
and/or intuitively download it.

In fact, if ALL you do is SEE 
the goal in your mind's eye - 
that's probably not going to 
be enough to start your engine.

Yes, it could - but it's probably
not going to be sufficient.

Bring in as many senses as you
can - so long as they make sense. 

Instead of only seeing the ball go
into the hole or hoop, hear it go 
in and feel excited about it. 

The legendary hitter, Ted Williams,
the last MLB player to bat .400 in
a season, remarked that he could 
smell "burnt wood" when he hit
the ball correctly. 

Williams also cooked his bats each
day to remove excess moisture he
truly believed accumulated during 
the day, making his bat heavier. 

Crazy as Willaims' ideas may sound,
they allow you to see that despite his
20-15 vision, he was also tapped into
a sense of feel and smell, not to mention
sound. 

So the next time you think you can't
visualize - or that you're not doing it
"right" - relax, take a few deep breaths, 
change dictionaries and begin using
your imagination. 

Matt Furey

Slow motion of foot landing in marathon

How To Run Properly For Beginners - 5 Running Secrets

5 Running Tips for Beginners �� 5 Things I Wish I Knew about Running from...

Running Form: Correct technique and tips to run faster

Risk Reward & Position Sizing – Forex Money Management

By Nial Fuller 

Where beginning traders run into trouble is becoming “convinced” that THIS setup is a winner; it just looks SO solid to them that they don’t see how it could possibly not work out. They then proceed to over-leverage because they are so convinced of the trade setup, and the stage is now set for an account blow-out.

The setup may indeed workout and the trader may clean up, but you can be assured it only takes ONE episode like this to lose a huge chunk of your trading account and kick off a cascade of emotional trading mistakes. This is how losing traders think about the market; they forget that each trade setup is simply another execution with about the same probability as any other similar setup; they do not have a thorough understanding of risk to reward scenarios or position sizing. This article will hopefully give you that understanding.

Thinking in Probabilities

Aspiring forex traders often spend countless hours searching for that perfect trading system which they think will make them rich by following a particular set of trading rules in a robotic manner. Unfortunately, most traders fail to realize that the real “secret” to successful forex trading lies in a thorough understanding and implementation of risk reward scenarios and position sizing. Forex trading is at its very core a game of probabilities, to become a consistently successful forex trader you will need to view each trade setup as a probability. When you learn to think in probabilities you will be on the path towards trading success, because you will be viewing the market from an objective and mathematical mindset instead of an emotional and illogical mindset.

What ultimately separates winning traders from losing traders is how they think about the market. Winning traders view each trade setup as just another execution of their trading edge, they then think about how to minimize their risk on the trade while simultaneously maximizing their reward. Through the power of risk to reward scenarios and position sizing, professional traders know how to effectively manage their risk on each trade and as a side-effect of this knowledge they also manage their emotions. When you begin to view each trade setup as just another execution of your trading edge and effectively implement position sizing and risk to reward scenarios, you will also be managing your emotions because you know your possible risk and possible reward BEFORE you enter the trade, you then set and forget the trade and therefore there is nothing to become emotional about.

The Not SO Secret, Secret.

Anyone who has studied forex trading for any period of time has undoubtedly heard the old axiom “Cut your losers short and let your profits run”. The funny thing about this saying is that no one ever really expands on it by telling you HOW it is actually done or how it can be applied to today’s forex markets. Most traders hear this and they begin by setting really small stop losses with unrealistically huge targets on each trade. The problem with this is that the forex market does not move in a straight line, it ebbs and flows, sometimes having a large move and then an even larger correction before swinging back in the original direction. If you do not properly understand the power of risk to reward scenarios and position sizing, this volatility will end up killing you sooner rather than later.

Risk to Reward Scenarios

Let’s get right to the meat of this issue now, risk to reward scenarios are what you should be thinking about every time you find a trade setup. If you are trading price action strategies for example, you might find a really good looking pin bar formation on the daily chart…the first thing you want to do is define your risk on the trade. Risk management should be your main concern as a forex trader, most traders take the other route; worrying mainly about rewards and not actively managing their risk. Get that idea out of your head. From now on you are to think of yourself as an aspiring professional risk manager, get the whole idea of becoming a professional trader out of your head. Once you learn that risk management is the most important aspect of trading you will become a professional trader as a result, so concentrate on effective risk management and the reward aspect will take care of itself.

Back to our example…you have found a great looking pin bar strategy on the daily chart, now you must find the safest place to put your stop loss so that the probability of it getting hit is as low as possible, you want to give the trade as much room as possible to work out while still maximizing your risk to reward scenario.

In this daily gold chart we can see a pin bar has formed in the context of an uptrend. Your stop loss is placed just below the low of the pin, if you enter at the pin bar closing near $1175.00 your stop loss will be about $20/oz because it would be near the low of $1156.35, we will say $1155.00 to make it an even $20. Now, how do you figure your reward now that you have properly defined your risk?

It depends on the condition of the market you are trading. For this example of gold, it was in a very strong uptrend at the time, in this case it is acceptable to expect a reward of at least triple the amount you have risked or more. In this particular example we exited near $1215.00 for a risk to reward of 1:2, meaning we made 2 times our risk on this trade setup.

This is but one example of the many risk to reward scenarios that setup themselves up each day in the markets. When you have a strong entry method, like price action setups, combined with an understanding of risk to reward scenarios you begin to think in probabilities. This is how professional traders think about the market. For example, if this same pin bar setup above occurred in a range-bound market or in the course of a downtrend, you would not likely set a target of more than 1 to 2; therefore the trade would be a lower probability setup. This is what is meant by thinking in probabilities. You must learn to take into consideration the strength of the price action signal in question but also the context it is occurring in. Many traders simply set unrealistically large profit targets for their trades with no rational behind them besides greed. I can promise you that you will blow out many trading accounts if you don’t learn to take profits by setting logical reward scenarios of 2, 3, or 4 times your risk, if you trail your stop you can sometimes pick up 5 times your risk or higher, it all depends on market conditions and whether or not you can deal with letting a 1 to 2 or larger winner turn around and move against you because you were hoping for a bigger reward.

Position Sizing

Position sizing is the glue that holds risk to reward scenarios together. Where most traders mess up in position sizing is in fitting their stop loss to their desired position size instead of fitting their position size to their desired stop loss. For example, say you are risking $100 per trade and you see a really good trade setup. The only problem is that the most logical spot to place your stop loss is 200 pips away. This is a critical juncture where many traders make a mistake; if you need to place your stop 200 pips away to give your trade the best shot at working out, than you simply reduce your position size down to meet this stop loss size. So if you were trading 1$ a pip before, now you will trade .50 cents a pip, .50 x 200 = $100.

To illustrate the example of adjusting your position size to fit the necessary stop loss let’s look at a daily chart of AUDUSD currency pair. Notice in this example our desired risk amount is $100, but our necessary stop loss distance is 109 pips, because the safest spot for our stop loss in this example is just below the low of the pin bar. So, after dividing the risk amount by the stop loss distance (1oo / 109), we get .917. Now, some forex brokers allow you to trade micro-lots, this basically means you have the flexibility to trade a position size as small as 1 penny per pip, in this case you could trade 9.1 micro lots (.91 cents per pip), you would not want to go up to 9.2 micro-lots because your risk would then be over $100: (.92 x 109 = 100.28$), at .91 your risk will be just under $100: (.91 x 109 = $99.19). If you use a broker that does not allow micro-lot trading than mini-lots are your next option, typically these are flexible up to .10 cent increments, this means you can trade .10 cents per pip at the smallest position size. In this case you would just trade .90 lots which would be (.90 x 109) $98.10 risked. This is how you should view position sizing; always adjust the number of lots you trade (position size) to meet the stop loss distance that gives your trade the best chance of profiting. NEVER adjust your stop loss to meet a desired position size, this is GREED.

It really is as simple as that. Most traders end up doing the opposite of the above example however. They end up arbitrarily placing their stop loss just so they can trade a larger position size, this is a mistake born out of greed and will end up killing your trading account in the end. Proper usage of position sizing not only means you will have more winning trades, but it also means you will trade more objectively, because you are placing your stop loss at logical points above or below support or resistance levels, instead of randomly placing it a set amount of pips away from entry. When you combine position sizing with risk to reward scenarios you truly have a “set and forget” trading method which will put you in the proper trading mindset; calm, confident, and objective. There is simply no need to risk more than you should on any one trade when each trade is simply another execution of your edge. This edge may take 100 trades to play out and bring you consistent profits, so to put too much emphasis on any one trade is simply a mistake.

My Thoughts on Correct Trading Money Management - MM1

By Nial Fuller in Forex Trading Articles

I’ve written a few articles on the topic of money management and the main idea I try to convey is that it’s arbitrary for someone to trade a percentage of their account. There are many factors affecting how any one trader should manage his or her money in the market; net worth, personal trading skill and confidence, risk tolerance, etc., the point is that every trader is different and has different circumstances that dictate the best way for them to manage their money.

Due to these varying circumstances between traders, it simply makes no sense to recommend (as many ‘experts’ do) that traders risk 2% or some other percentage of their account. My approach to money management is a much more personal one as I believe each trader’s money management plan should vary depending on their individual circumstances.

Why you shouldn’t risk a fixed % of your account

Let’s assume for a moment that you have a 50% drawdown on your trading account, not unheard of even for a professional trader. If you have such a drawdown and you are risking 2% on every trade, it’s going to take you an extremely long time to build your account back to where it was. If you lose 50% of your account, you need to make a 100% gain on it just to recover that loss, and risking 2% per trade is not how a professional would recover from such a loss, because it would take virtually forever.

If you are a skilled and confident trader, why would you relegate yourself to risking only 2% on every trade you take? Perhaps if you are a day-trader who enters many positions per day this 2% approach might make sense, but as I discussed in my article on why I hate day trading, I am not a day trader and I do not teach or condone day trading.

The way that I trade and the way I teach my students to trade is to take a very patient, sniper-like approach so that we are not over-trading. Instead, we may only take a small handful of trades each month, but we feel confident about those trades and as a result, we give ourselves a chance of making a nice profit on them.

For example, if you risk 2% per trade and let’s say you take 25 trades per month, you have effectively risked 50% of your account that month (2% x 25). Alternatively, if you risked say 10% of your account on just 3 trades per month, that would only be 30%. This is a crude example perhaps, but my point is multi-faceted:

1. There simply aren’t many high-probability trading opportunities that arise on any given month in the market. If you are trading very often as in my first example above, you are over-trading and unnecessarily risking your money in the market, essentially you’re gambling.

2. If we instead trade less frequently but perhaps trade a bigger position size when we do trade, we are giving ourselves a much better opportunity to make money while reducing our stress, frustration and ‘gamblers’ mentality. This obviously assumes that you know how to trade properly and you know what your trading edge is and you are sticking to it/ waiting patiently for it to arise.

Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions from my example above, I am not necessarily condoning you risk ‘10%’ of your account per trade. My point was to show that trading less frequently but more precisely and skilled, can allow you to be confident because you know you will risk a decent position size on the trades you do take. Many people feel if they trade daily charts and swing trade them that they are ‘missing out’ on opportunities because they may not be in the market everyday like a day trader, but what I am trying to show you is that this is an erroneous way to think about trading.

The proper way to think about trading and specifically money management, is that trading less but more precise and disciplined will give you plenty of opportunity to make ‘a lot’ of money, you just have to have the patience and mental fortitude to make it all work.

You need to protect your money from yourself

One of the most important aspects of proper money management as a trader is protecting your money. More specifically, I’m talking about protecting your money from the risks of trading too frequently or gambling in the market.

It can be extremely tempting to jump back into the market after you have a winning trade. In fact, I’ve found that it seems to be almost an innate human tendency to become overly-focused on finding ‘another trading opportunity’ right after winning a trade. Your defenses go down after a win, as does your overall perception of how risky trading really is. In essence, a winning trade can lull us into a sense of complacency to a certain degree.

As a trader whose number one goal is to protect their money and get the most out of it in the market, you have to be very vigilant after a winning trade so that you don’t lose the discipline that probably brought you that winning trade in the first place.

There is no worse feeling than giving back all the profits you just made on a trade that you patiently held for multiple because you jumped in and out of the market a bunch of times the very next day. One of the best ways to protect your money is by sticking to your trading strategy no matter if you’ve just won or lost on a trade, and not letting the results of your previous trades influence your next trade.

Your trading account is a margin account

Due to the fact that a Forex trading account or similarly, a futures trading account, is highly leveraged, there is no need to keep all of you trading money in the account or calculate your risk per trade based on a percentage of that account.

To compare, take a stock trading account for example. A stock trading account is not leveraged in the same way a Forex or futures trading account is. For that reason, you do need to keep most or all of your trading money in a stock trading account, and it’s not a ‘margin account’ like Forex or futures.

Margin means you can control a much larger value of currency or commodity than what you could buy with the money you have on hand, and leverage is what allows this to happen. For example, to control say $100,000 worth of currency, or 1 standard lot, you only need about $1,000 in your trading account with 100:1 margin ratio or ‘leverage’.

So, as you can see, when trading a highly leverage instrument like Forex, we do not need to keep all our trading money in our account, so it makes no sense to calculate our risk based off our ‘account size’. Instead, I propose a much more personal and perhaps intuitive way to determine how much to risk per trade…

So, how much should I risk per trade?

I probably get this question of ‘how much to risk per trade’ or ‘how much to fund my account with’, more than any other on the email support line.

The answer is much simpler than what you might currently believe. I believe in determining a dollar amount that you are comfortable with losing on any one trade, and sticking to that dollar amount at least until you have doubled or tripled your account, at which time you can consider increasing it.

This amount should be an amount that satisfies the following requirements:

1. When risking this dollar amount, you can sleep sound at night without worrying about trades or checking on them from your phone or other device.

2. When risking this dollar amount, you are not glued to your computer screens becoming emotional at every tick for or against your position.

3. When risking this amount, you should be able to almost ‘forget’ about your trade for a day or two at a time if you have to…and NOT be surprised by the outcome when you check on your trade again. Think, ‘set and forget‘.

4.When risking this amount, you should be able to comfortably take 10 consecutive losses as a buffer, without experiencing significant emotional or financial pain. Not that you would IF you’re sticking to an effective trading strategy like my price action strategies, but it’s important you allow that much buffer for psychological reasons.

In summary, money management should not be based on some arbitrary percentage of your overall trading capital. Rather, it will and should vary from trader to trader depending on things like your net worth, trading skill and confidence and your tolerance for risk on a per-trade basis. As these things vary from person to person / trader to trader, the amount of money that you risk in the market and the amount you risk on any given trade, has to be an amount that works for your personal situation. Most importantly, and if you remember nothing else from this lesson, your risk should never exceed what you are mentally and emotionally OK with potentially losing on any given trade.