It’s Time to Get Real

Podcast:

#414: It’s Time to Get Real

In this video:

00:23 – Keep it real

01:04 – We fail to recognise the effort required to succeed

01:32 – A trading example

03:22 – You need to understand the market

04:42 – You need dedication and hard work

As a Forex trader, you need to learn to get real. Let me explain more right now.

Hey, traders, Andrew here at the Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 414.

Keep it real

Now, this is going to be all about getting real, keeping it real with your expectations. So, what we see online is everybody's success. We see lots of money being made in trading. If we're into sports, we see great sports men, great sports women out there having success, scoring the runs, taking the wickets in their cricket, winning grand slams in tennis, scoring tries in rugby, scoring the goals in soccer.

With musicians, we see the great guitarists, the amazing singers, the drummer, all those type of things. We all see their success and we go, "Wow, wouldn't it be amazing too?"

We fail to recognise the effort required to succeed

But the problem is, is we don't see the hard work, the blood, sweat, tears, the dedications, their failures, their commitments behind the scenes to get to that level of success. Trading is no different. Trading does take work, dedication, commitment to learn how to do this properly. It is no different from being a fantastic singer or tennis player or whatever it is that you follow.

A trading example

A great example of that was something that I got sent just yesterday. Someone sent me a link to this Expert Advisor, so this robot that trades gold. I looked at it briefly and I thought, "That looks okay," and it had some quite good success. It was up 22% by taking these buy trades automatically on gold. Now this morning my time, which is now Friday, the 4th of June, gold has crashed. It's dropped quite a lot overnight, had a big fall. Biggest fall it's had in quite a long time. I looked at the results of this Expert Advisor this morning, it's now on its equity at 3.4% from mid-20s just yesterday. So, it's had about a 19% drawdown just today.

Now the reality is, is you cannot absorb that, and so unfortunately most people won't see that, they'll just see it as ... they won't see it's an equity drawdown, and so they won't understand what they're looking for. So they think they can pay their $200 and off they go and this thing's going to magically trade for them, but there's no work involved in that, there's no understanding involved in that. That's the downside when you make things too easy.

So I just wanted to highlight that, because I've seen it just an hour ago. Looked at the updated results and it's crashed. So, the problem is with that is they are not understanding the basic principles of trading, they're not understanding controlled risk, because those trades on that Expert Advisor, they're still open. If gold crashes again today and next week when you're watching this video, that 19% drawdown could be 20%, 30%, 40% drawdown, who knows. That's the problem when you don't know what you're doing or you're relying on someone else and you don't know how their system works.

You need to understand the market

So, the whole let's get real thing, you've got to understand the market. Now to be perfectly honest, we've had a pretty tough last few weeks on most of our charts. The market has not been kind to us, but we have very low controlled drawdowns and we have low-risk on our trades. We've seen personally the longer timeframes, the weekly and the monthly charts and the short timeframes, the one, two hour charts, four hour charts had some great trades on those, but in between, the six, eight, 12 hour charts and the daily charts have not been that good in the last few weeks, but we're real about that.

Not every trade will be profitable, not every week will be profitable.