The 100-Pip Traderpairs. So I’ll be somewhat diversified and I’ll be waiting on one
timeframe chart for the longer-term system to play out, and on the
short-term charts, I’ll have some activity that I can take advantage
of and everything else just gets blocked out. Like I said, I’m a back
tester as a career, so the majority of the time is spent verifying
that what I’m doing is falling within the statistical norm of what I
should be expecting.
I also experiment with new versions of the systems, all the time,
to make sure I’m getting the most out of each of them. And very
little time is actually spent in scanning the charts and hoping that
I see something that I like. I’ve always found it to be far more
detrimental to my trading to open up the charts in the morning
and just look around for some action than it is to say here’s the
timeframe I watch, here’s the system I use, and that’s it, that’s all
I am going to focus on. There could be a thousand pips out there
on every other timeframe chart, but I don’t care about it. When I
hear people say that they missed a trade on the U.S. dollar/South
African rand because they weren’t looking at that chart, and they’ve
got 25 currency pairs on their screen and they’re missing trades all
the time, I always tell them that I missed on dating Julia Roberts
in college, but then I never even met her. I never had a chance
anyway. We’re sometimes expecting to be able to take advantage
of opportunities that our schedule really doesn’t allow for, our
mental capacity really doesn’t allow for, and our trading capital
really doesn’t allow for. But we still get involved in it because we
want to have a piece of the action. This fear of “missing out” on
market action is what gets traders into trouble because we start to
make trades out of a desire to make money, instead of reasonable
analysis.
If you think of other professions, you can realize where
specialization and focus come into play. The best lawyers are spe-
cialists in one type of law. The same for doctors and accountants.
Successful traders are the same, so why should it be any different
for a retail Forex trader if I specialize in the British pound/U.S.
dollar in the long term and the euro/Canadian dollar in the short
term? If it does well and pays the bills then there shouldn’t really
be a whole lot of temptation to experiment with real money on
any other timeframe or currency pair.