Upper Timeframes as a Stress Relief Tool in Trading
Exhausted by scalping and intra-day trading: What’s next?
I’ve been earning my living by trading various financial instruments for three years. Not so long ago, my full-time job was the only source of income for me. I had to pityingly observe the same days following one another. Routine things make our lives predictable, and some people appreciate it. However, they can also make it dull, boring, and extremely exhausting. That’s what I felt executing my duties.
Fortunately, a friend of mine advised me to try my hand at trading. Forex helped him to quit the job, and his experience was persuasive. So, I decided to try.
I gathered up enough courage and dared to break into financial markets. From the very beginning, I realized that being involved in trading on a daily basis has nothing in common with a brisk image shown in numerous ads.
You can become financially independent by opening and closing trading positions in the foreign exchange market. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy. Ads picture happy yuppies earning tons of ever-green bucks by clicking on buttons in their trading platforms, but you don’t see what’s behind this.
As follows from my personal experience, the very secret of successful trading is all about psychology and not knowledge. You need to grasp the basics of trading, but you can hardly succeed in this field if you are psychologically unprepared for this specific profession. In other words, even if you are a guru of technical and fundamental analysis, you simply need to have the balls to open a trading position, especially if its size is big relative to your trading deposit.
Like many other novice traders, I also started with small lots, such as 0,01. They are quite harmless, unable to bite you painfully. To some extent, they can even be compared with demo trading. In this case, you have small losses that can be easily compensated with your full-time job. You are not a trader at this stage, but a child exploring a new toy, and your earnings are ridiculously small if there are any.
You know, you can’t earn a lot with 0.01 lots. Sooner or later, you realize that you have to drastically increase your stakes to earn more. When you approach 0.5–1 lots, things change drastically. When trading 0.5, just one candlestick in a liquid currency pair such as EUR/USD can yield $100–150 on an 1-hour timeframe. On the contrary, it can instantly evaporate the same portion of your deposit, leaving you in despair. At this stage, it’s getting harder and harder to offset your losses at the cost of your wage. If you lack courage, you start being afraid of trading once you face a series of losing trades. So, every day, you find a reason not to enter the market. Instead, you passively observe where the trend goes.
After a while, you finally manage to take control of yourself, and this crucial achievement makes you a professional trader. You already know how to tame your emotions, and this skill helps you to coldly set a trap on an emerging local trend, hunting it down like a wild beast. You realize that it has nothing to do with a glamorous image presented in numerous ads but is a tough job, for your nerves first.
For the last three years, I have tried all typical roles in the Forex market. For example, I practiced day trading. So, I opened one or two trading positions and waited for the outcome. Certainly, I was under stress, but it turned out to be a relatively “relaxing” thing compared to scalping. I can hardly explain in simple words the enormous psychological pressure scalpers have to face. On the other hand, it’s possible for a human being to cope with it. Self-discipline, constant learning, and training, and you can do it. Trading is a big challenge, but you can overcome it if you dare. However, it’s very tiresome for an average person.
Is long term trading less stressful than intraday?
Well, I have tried nearly everything in trading, and now I just want to do it in a less stressful manner. In this regard, I’ve got big expectations on upper timeframes, at least H4. It gives me a hope that I can open a trading position and hold it for more than a day. If you somehow manage to enter the market at the right time, you can try holding it even for weeks, if it’s going to be a long-lasting trend, why not? No more nervous breakdown and other disgusting stuff but just a possibility to peacefully observe the upslope on your equity curve. It really makes sense to give it a try, doesn’t it?
The first thing I decided to explore is whether all trading platforms fit long-term trading equally well. For now I’ve been trading with FxPro that offers its own custom trading platform, MT4, MT5 and cTrader.
Considering I had no desire to transfer all the funds to some other brokerage (FxPro is rated as one of the top world-class brokers in all trading rankings, so there is no point) — I compared MT and cTrader in terms of their compatibility with swing trading on upper timeframes. I am not really much into custom trading platforms that brokers offer, so FxPro EDGE was not considered as an option. Yet, I’ve taken into consideration the trading conditions that vary depending on the platform you use at FxPro.
Stay tuned to learn what I’ve found!
