Trading the foreign currency markets takes a fair amount of time no matter what system you use. When I first started trading, I found that I wanted to create a system using Metatrader that will trade itself while I was either in the classroom or on the golf course.
Trading the foreign currency markets takes a fair amount of time no matter what system you use. When I first started trading, I found that I wanted to create a system using Metatrader that will trade itself while I was either in the classroom or on the golf course. I soon found out that I was spending more time writing code and tweaking my system than I would have done if I were manually trading my system and watching the markets with bated breath.
The real problem with my manual system was that during all of my tweaking and finally coming up with a system that worked moderately well, I was quickly learning to dispise trading. And I couldn’t even call this trading. I would go out for a coffee, go to work, come home and look at my profits or losses, with no real reason as to why the market was moving the way it did. Needless to say, trading this way was making me ignorant to what was really driving the foreign currency markets. Let me reiterate, I was still spending plenty of time trying to tweak my system with a new and improved set of indicators and triggers.
Through all of this ‘trading experience’ I thought I was giving myself, I was actually digging a huge hole which I soon found hard to get out of. By this I don’t mean losing gobs of money. I meant that I was confusing myself continually by trying out different systems that each had their distinct advantages. And one thing I never learned to control was how to program my system to be very careful around important news releases. Want to know why? Because that can’t be programmed! The only way to deal with this is to turn of your system during the news so it doesn’t trade. Well that is fine and dandy if you’re not in a trade. But what if you’re holding a pair and the news crushes it. If your system is off, then you can’t even trigger to close the trade if you have an automatic sell in the form of a stop-loss.
So what about the mental aspect of this? Have you ever been on a beautiful golf course with palmetto trees blowing in the wind, where you shouldn’t have a care in the world, and you can’t help but have this gut feeling that you are getting killed in the market. All of this free time that I was giving myself by creating this automatic trading system was making me a paranoid individual with a good chance at going crazy. Now you see what the title of this article is automatic systems take the fun out of trading forex.
Now don’t get me wrong, the main point of trading any market is to make money. But since we’re going to spend so much time trading and learning the market, the time you spend should not make you paranoid and miserable. I have come to grips with this, and spend a wonderful dinner with my new bride last night not worrying at all about anything forex related. And last week I played an entire golf tournament with a good friend and did not once think about the market even though it was open. For me, this is true bliss and close to personal evolution. This goes along with my last article on how to recover from a bad trade.
So make trading and learning from these markets fun. I think life is way to short to spend any amount of time achieving financial success for your golden from something that is going to make you miserable in your prime.
