Originally Posted by neolee

If you believe in fairy tales that is. I prefer the cat in the hat to help my forex trading

Originally Posted by nicesurf

Manual trading is the best choice for trading. He...he..he..

Originally Posted by nicesurf

Manual trading is the best choice for trading. He...he..he..

Originally Posted by Elfive 9

1. If you cannot quickly recite the daily, weekly and monthly support & resistance values for any pair you're planning to trade with an EA, you shouldn't be trading.

2. If you can't manually calculate the currency exchange conversion values for any pair you're planning to trade with an EA, you shouldn't be trading.

3. If you cannot read and understand the code of an EA you're planning to trade with, you shouldn't be trading with it.

4. If you haven't learned to successfully trade manually for at least a year or two, you shouldn't be mechanically trading trading with an EA.

5. 99% of all EA's are destined to fail. Some sooner, some later.

6. Technical indicators don't work. They're a big fib to appease retail traders.

7. Knowledge of only price action, a few key patterns, and support/resistance is necessary to trade.

8. If you cannot quickly name the 10 key news events and their dates/times during the upcoming month, you shouldn't be trading.

9. You're worst enemy in trading is your broker.

10. Broker Pip spreads are only a portion of your trade cost. You are regularly gouged by slippage costs. If your EA has a default slippage value of 3, guess what your typical slippage will be? If it's set to 4, guess what your typical slippage will be?

11. The only EA's that will be profitable are the ones that are cleverly designed to out-fox the brokers and other insideous market forces by resorting to tricks, gimmicks, and smoke & mirrors tactics.

12. Any EA's freely available publicly will lose your trading account.

13. 95% of "traders" on public forums are as uneducated as you are about trading. Be wary of free advice.

14. The average trader who is persistent and lucky enough to eventually become a profitable trader regularly will first lose $20K - $30K in the markets and spend another $10K on books, lessons, eBooks, subscriptions and software. The rest will perish somewhere along that path.

15. The amount of time you are "exposed" in the market through active trading, either manually or mechanically, is inversely proportional to your profitability success rate.

16. Two high probability trades yielding 15 pips each and using a lot size of 50 is all you need each week.

I have more if you'd like to hear them.

Originally Posted by autofx

Where do I start, hmmmm...

Having the awareness listed in points 1, 2, 7, 8 would be good for manual traders, but once you've got a thoroughly tested EA that has been proven in all market conditions, you can completely forget about that stuff. COMPLETELY.

I challenge that you have to be able to read and understand EAs if you're going to run them. THOROUGHLY TEST THEM IN ALL MARKET CONDITIONS, you bet. Have some understanding of what they're doing, and why, you bet. But read/understand the code itself? Not really necessary. I say this as a professional software engineer who supplies EAs to people with varying degrees of software savvy.

I also challenge the assertion that you have to be able to trade well manually before you should be running EAs. Why would that be?

Number 6 says "Technical indicators don't work". That's a silly statement, because what is the meaning of "work"? A technical indicator simply is what it is -- a mathematically determined quantity. What you choose to do with it is where the rubber hits the road. Strategies and tactics may or may not work, but technical indicators neither work nor do they NOT work -- they just are.

Now then...number 11. VERY GOOD! I agree with that 100%. And now I will add that the power of well constructed logic is very, very hard to thwart. Trying to "read the tea leaves" via fundamental and/or technical analysis, or otherwise trying to figure out what is going to happen next, is where everyone gets killed.

Better to simply REACT and CORRECT.