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Best TimeFrame - Whats Your TimeFrame?


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You mean the timeframe to take trades on ?

It all boils down to what your risk strategy is. The lower timeframes will allow you to have a smaller stoploss and you will be able to increase your lot size, and the higher timeframe will require much wider stoplosses and you will need to decrease your lot sizes. Higher timeframes will also have less noise. How much time can you devote to watching the charts ?

So it boils down to your own money management, risk tolerance & screen time available to determine what is your best timeframe. It will of course, be different for each trader.

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I find it very very emotional trading higher time frame especially when the stop loss is huge and the trades goes the other way. I cannot see a drwadown of more than 20 pips with 1 standard lot equates to more than $200 and that is why I have been trying to trade 15 minutes with a drawdown of 1-10 pips but it requires a lot of monitoring the charts....I am able to get an average of 20 plus pips per trade....but want to know others feedback what they think....
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... 20 pips with 1 standard lot equates to more than $200 ...

 

Begs the question why use 1 lot why not use .01 lots and enjoy a 2000 if I calculated right...or 200 pip drawdown.

 

I think that I already know! I used .01 in demo but upped it to .1 because I wanted to trade in dollars.

 

But, to answer the original question: 15 min because that is what my system requires and working on a daily system because I have time between 'chart midnight' and London open.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Before you even place a single live trade, did you demo your system over a reasonable number of trades to determine what your ideal stoplosses are for the trading method and the trading timeframe ? Build a history of trades, winners as well as losers, this will give you stats about your system. Winning percentages, Drawdowns, Largest winners & largest losers.Consecutive winning & losing trades. Don't skip this step, why not paper trade ?

Treat paper trading as training, atheletes spend years training for one event. To be good at anything you need to train.

 

Write a Trading Plan for the system. This is a Business, treat it like one. Would you invest in any company that gave you no information, profits & loss accounts, or any idea of profitabilty ?

 

Now you have established what your risk capital is per trade, how much of your capital you are prepared to lose on a single trade or a number of trades on that day ? If it is painful then lower this figure. Is it $100, $50 or even $10 ?

Your stoploss placement will now control your lotsize, the larger the stoploss, the smaller the lot size. Do not have fixed lot sizes with fixed stoplosses, conditions change, what works one day will not necessarily work the next day.

 

Now once you know your ideal location of stoploss & risk capital, adjust your lot size accordingly, so you never lose more money than you planned, and you will not get nervous if price comes close to your stoploss. Don't place your stoploss just anywhere, this is a safety device to prevent calamities, once placed don't move it away to prevent it being hit. If you do this, this will lead to very bad habits.

Go back to demo accounts, if you face a number of losses, re-evaluate your trading method. You will know from your demo trades how much drawdown to expect.

 

With this re-evaluation - Re-write your trading Plan.

Treat trading losses as a cost of doing business, learn from the losses, all businesses make varying amounts of profits & losses at different times of the year, why should it be any different with this business ?

 

Trading is a marathon, not a sprint race. Make sure you don't blow your account by trading with bad money management.

Edited by shabz
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  • 2 weeks later...

I am exploring using the 8 hour time frame with the smallest position size my broker (Interactive Brokers) allows .25

 

The 8hr allows you to catch ALL signals as you can check the chart at midnight, 8am and 4pm.

 

That solves the problem I had with 4hr and 1hr. A lot of signals happened when I was asleep...

 

For 8hr chart use period converter script found on this forum...

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Dean of Compass FX suggests 15 minutes...he is a great guy....I think anything lower than that is very dangerous because it is hard to tell which way market goes.....I like getting into a trade where the trade only goes against me for a maximum of 10 pips.....trading 4 hr would mean a big stop loss...how do you take that loss???
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Dean of Compass FX suggests 15 minutes...he is a great guy....I think anything lower than that is very dangerous because it is hard to tell which way market goes.....I like getting into a trade where the trade only goes against me for a maximum of 10 pips.....trading 4 hr would mean a big stop loss...how do you take that loss???

 

Go smaller in position size accordingly to get the desired % of account balance risk on each trade. I'm usually at 1/2% or slightly less and try never to go over 1% in my trading account. Hope that helps...

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Interesting thread. I have just come to the conclusion that I must use the daily TF, look at my set-up once a day and 'cash them in' the next day.

Looking at inside bars and pending trades. I have not noticed any DDs over 100. Haven't noticed any losses over about 50.

 

I have been having trouble with the internet but it seems to be OK regularly at EOD which is 0600 for me. Tried to fund my account but they are having problems. Is this all just a warning from the gods of finance?

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What i have seen is that there is no favorite timeframe. its whatever you ahve time to trade. the only thing that might change is you SL an TP. what matters is that you know how to read the market as visual art. thats what its about. the visual art of peoples thoughts. if you can't do that, there isn't any time frame that will help at all
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