The world of foreign currency trading is a vast landscape filled with conflicting opinions, unsubstantiated (and sometimes unexamined) information, vague feelings and often just plain superstitions. Every trader I know wants to have a solid, logical basis to what they’re doing but the Forex world is so heavily laced with BS that it’s nearly impossible for most to have any sense of whether their path makes any sense or not. In my view, the key to solving this conundrum is to share information, examine it, discuss it, and when appropriate to put it to the test. Logically, scientifically and openly.
Some people feel that such openness is a violation of the basic concept of trading – that we’re competing against each other and therefore we shouldn’t be helping our competition by sharing our insights and ideas with them. I’ve got news for you: we’re not competing against each other at all. As retail traders (I doubt any professional, institutional traders will be reading this blog) we are competing with the market at large. It’s true that in a sense, we’re competing with the giant international banks that together make up the bulk of the Forex market, but they are all too large, too monolithic and too different from us for us to attempt to understand or deal with them on anything like a direct basis. That would be like a virus in your body attempting to compete with you by opposing your specific choice of medicines are trying to take advantage of your specific actions. The virus has no knowledge of these things and has no way of making sense of them or utilizing them anyway. It’s best strategy (and a very successful one, as the history of mankind’s diseases shows us) is to compete with the body as a whole, without understanding it, by simply applying the rules that work best.
That, in a nutshell, is how I believe we (the retail Forex trader) should view the market. It is large, more or less unfathomable and has no sense that we exist at all. It in pitiless, unemotional and unrelenting. The market moves without regard to us and it will inexorably move in whatever way it chooses despite what we do, think or feel. It is a cold, mindless environment in which we must pick our way. It is weather – we can’t control it and we don’t expect it to care about us but we can learn to survive and even proper within it’s ever-changing influence.
So why should we hide our secrets from each other? You knowing how I trade will have no effect whatsoever on whether I’m successful and vice versa. Our ’secrets’ are of no use nor interest to the international banking community that actually defines the landscape in which we must make our currency trading livings. They are Giants, locked in epic battles against each other and we are mice, scrambling about under their monstrous feet, trying to make good from the scraps that fall to the ground and to avoid being crushed by those who would never even not they had trodden on us. Let’s work together to help each other, and just maybe we can make a few bucks from this unfathomable maelstrom.
[...] currency on a continual basis. Businesses such as this and the banking institutions they employ to exchange the currency are the real market, and small time traders are not able to be involved in this sphere; we simply [...]