[steveh2009]

Whisper, give Al Brooks a read. His first book is tough reading but a gold mine of information. The 1st new book on trends is a longer rehash of parts of the original work but at least it's written more clearly. I would pass on the new 2nd and 3rd books and get their info from the original after the new 1st starts making sense.

He personally trades the ES with size and a high winning pct so that inverts his payoff ratio (i.e., risking $1 to make 50 cents). Ignore all of that. You can take his approach on the CL and get the 2:1 with 50/50. Search the recent postings on elitetrader dot com for NoDoji and you'll find a wealth of information relating to price action edges adapted from the Brooks book.

I would recommend that you stop looking at the Forex and focus on practicing on the Crude futures (CL contract). That contract MOVES and you need nice volatility like that on a consistent basis where you get plenty of opportunities on a 5 min chart with a 20 ema as a simple trend guide (e.g., what Brooks uses)

I may get flamed for this but all I see in the Forex market on forums is an overwhelming majority of either young or under-funded (or both) wannabe traders getting their head handed to them time and again because the market they're in is designed to require larger stops and incur horrible spreads and slippage.

Apply good price action methods to the CL in sim over a year's time before going on a board and declaring the impossibility of it all. That's a GREAT day trader's market where you can risk $100-$150 per contract to get $150 to $500 on scalps...within 2 to 10 mins during pit hours (9:00 AM - 2:30 PM EST)

If you don't have a minimum of 10K to trade with to trade the CL, then your time is better spent sim trading *that* until you do instead of throwing it away in the Forex, a completely unregulated market with no 3rd party (e.g., CME) involved.

I say this over and over again. This isn't a team sport. You're in this for yourself. You enter alone and you exit alone so trade in an isolated environment where your focus promotes greater levels of intuition to come into your trading.

Most of the people I see in forums "getting it" over time tend to be older, well-funded and have an emotional maturity which extends beyond just sounding smart and objective. When the heat gets turned up, you see the differences emerge.

People from an engineering or programming background or have been successful in their lives from having the gift of gab or a strong personality tend to have the hardest time in learning to trade well. Having a lot of perfectionist tendencies is the worst. You need more creative thought involvement and less rigidity in your beliefs.

Finally, if you're under 30 years old, what the heck are you doing in the first place? You should be experiencing real-world jobs, growing relationships and treating this as more of a hobby for making extra money for nicer vacations or gaining the knowledge to occasionally adjust your 401K / IRA to the rhythms of the markets (1-3 decisions per year). You've got YEARS to hone your skills at that time of your life in case you get fed up with things in your 40's and, by then, you're more than capable to make a full-time living at this.

I'm certainly not the best trader but I do have 8.5 years full-time at day trading the futures markets (Russell 2K e-mini futures and now the CL for the past 1.5 years) so I think I speak with enough of an understanding to have at least a 70% chance of a clue as to the advice I'm giving is of above average benefit to those less down the road than I.

[BlueHorseshoe]

It simply isn't enough to rely on somebody in a book (like bullkowski or murphy or nison) telling you that they have 'backtested' and researched something and that it showed great results. There are two possible reasons why whis is not a good idea:

a) they haven't tested it in any proper rigourous manner - they've just flipped through some charts and seen whatever they wanted to see - they probably deceived themselves just as much as they might deceive you.

b) they have performed thorough backtests in which the were able to objectify the pattern to the extent that a computer could recognise it - unfortunately you don't know exactly how they did this (unless they give you code), so you can't repeat the results.

Using concepts and strategies from other traders is great, but it is absolutely critical that you test it thoroughly for yourself.

Hope that helps.