Trading FX can be a lonely business, particularly if we’ve been a full time employer and have eventually, after years of hard work and effort, finally taken the step to become a full time trader. Suddenly we may find that we have hours of time on our hands to fill, so what can we fill it with?
Here’s one suggestion that might make us think about getting out of our comfort zone and trying to meet new people; whenever you hear of, or are invited to an FX seminar, or FX and trading seminar, always try to attend and we’ll explain the reason why using a simple anecdote…
I was invited to attend an FX seminar which was held yesterday in a city close to where I live in the UK. Having attended tens of these meetings over the years I always have to give myself a nudge to motivate myself as to why I should bother. However, I always make the effort as you never know who you might meet, or what ideas you may pick up. And as the title suggests this can be a lonely business in particular if you’re working remotely so it’s good to meet folk ‘talking FX’ and chatting in general about our overall industry. And watching someone address a live audience is what I do day after day through the medium of the internet, therefore I often pick up tips and clues from others’ presentations.
Anyhow, this presentation was to sell a residential FX trading school course and my feelings tend to remain resolute on such sales; [quote]why bother giving a sales firm your hard earned €5,000 when you should be putting it in your own trading account?[/quote] But as the ‘pitch’ progressed my prejudices towards the ideas and overall concept began to recede and it made me realise that despite (or maybe as a consequence) the very poor attendance figure the pitch to the audience had completely changed versus what I’d witnessed previously in their seminars. The presenter was absolutely fixated on money management and overall risk and was now encouraging folk to only risk one percent of their capital per trade and came up with an analogy which I thought was worth sharing.
This analogy was quite apt given that yesterday we published an article concerning our ‘sweaty palms’ when trading and it went something like this…imagine you had a five thousand euro account, what risk would you be willing to take per trade? The analogy he used was;
[quote]What sudden loss of money would sting and annoy you, but once you thought about it wouldn’t really affect your day to day living, or alter the course of your life much?[/quote]
On an imaginary five thousand euro account the answers varied, but the average came in at €50-€100. In short the presenter had come up with an imagined scenario for risk and after obsessing over risk during his meeting had (by what felt like a form of mild hypnosis) managed to get folk to agree to an acceptable level of risk without him mentioning the one percent figure throughout his presentation. But there was more to come from the meeting that surprised me…
His obsession with risk was revealed by him stating that when you’ve taken your trade you should consider that money spent and lost, you should consider that trade a loser and any wins a bonus. Further he went on to state that a 50:50 win loss, with a projected R:R of 1:1 can be extremely profitable if you use trailing stops. Moreover and what really took me by surprise, was his revelation that the principle strategy that they’d teach during their two day seminars was in fact a pivot point break out strategy using pin bars on a five minute chart. Now this strategy is something I’ve used to great effect on many of the major and commodity pairs for many years, but to see a trading school now teaching ,it versus their usual MACD + two simple moving averages technique, represents a major change. As an addendum and despite lowering the cost by half, no one (in the very thin audience) committed to buying the course, more of an indictment of the austere times in the UK versus the quality of the presentation.
Getting out of your home office, or man cave, meeting folk at seminars can be one very interesting way of meeting new traders who share the same passion as ourselves. Moreover you might be surprised at who you meet and what they say. So next time you’re invited to one take a break and go along.
