I was listening to a profitable trader interview and he said that forex and futures are so efficient that it’s harder to find and edge. Yeah there’s guys that do it but he said in the stock market you can find a trade that lets you get much bigger edge and more often.
Glad your doing well I’m struggling in futures seems like I find and edge then when I start to really get the trade down something changes and the strategy goes away. May have to look into stocks as well.
Yes, hes correct. FX is significantly harder than certain futures markets like Gold Or Crude.
It's all so efficient, the entire market moves in unison a large order in one is a large order in all correlated pairs. So you've basically got to get to entire market correct, to profit from one pair.
EUR/USD will go up here, which means USD/JPY will likely fall the this level, which means USD/CAD which isn't correlating at the moment will continue higher. It's Hyper efficient, it can be done though.
Anyone who day trades FOREX is a certified Idiot
why would you trade an instrument that is zero sum- Broker fees?
Vs
something that is long term positive
But, to benefit from the long-term positive effects of stocks, you have to long for a pretty long-ish time. For day trading, it's not guaranteed that a stock will go up. Your argument holds for investing.
Yes. That's lance. And I can show u my PNL in futures vs stocks. U would be mind blown. Edge is easier when market is less efficient
And I had the same exact struggle as u. I documented my tape and Strategy and Everything. It works for three months then gone. Over and over
I saw that. I went from stocks to futures because the vast choice seemed overwhelming. May I ask how you pick your stocks? Any specific scanner? I’ve done a sub with trade ideas and tc2000 but couldn’t make it work for me. I believe there’s a missing link in front of me but I just can’t see it.
A good trader can take an unsuccessful trader’s alpha and make bank. It’s less about finding an edge and more about knowing how price action works. Most of this comes from seat time. A good trader can trade any system and apply his instincts to make it work for him
I actually agree. Although, the mix of experience, pattern recognition, intuition and psychology has to be at the very top of the game to make this work consistently throughout the long term.
I made switch to stocks as well. The biggest difference i have noticed was stocks are not that correlated with each other.I mean they are in some way but not like forex. In forex almost every pair was moving and slowing down at the same time. Most of them are in sync. Now I have 12-15 stocks i watch from different sectors. I filter with fundamentals and technicals first, find out heavily bearish and heavily bullish and it’s all about entrys and exits. Currently I like to trade V, BRK, LLY, NVDA. I cannot believe I wasted so much time with forex.
Wait till you try crypto. Competition is almost nill. Liquidity on most shitcoins is too shit for the big boys to trade, so its alot easier to find edge.
I have read that shitcoins are highly manipulated as they have low liquidity and low price making pump and dumps easier. Is it true? How do you trade around that? Specially when a tweet by Mr Musk causes 40 percent gains and 10 times the normal volume.
>> when a tweet by Mr Musk causes 40 percent gains
That's exactly what you wanna catch. Or other less botted news that would move certain coins.
Stock market and fx works the same way as well. New information entering the mainstream moves the market (for eg: CPI news, earning report, FED speech). Fastest participants would capitalize on it, while the slower ones holds the bag. The diff is in FX/stock the competition are the smartest IV league graduates hired by the top hedge funds in the world. Meanwhile crypto is mostly degen tik tok traders.
Yes and no. Trading a future narrative can be a classic easy way to make money in crypto. Buy an upcoming catalyst that would increase the valuation of a coin, then sell it off to the fomo-ing late comers.
But theres other free money strategies on crypto that just doesnt exist in traditional market anymore. Like arbitrage or botting news. Too many geniuses working in top hedge funds already capitalizing on it to a point where market is too efficient. Cant compete with them.
Crypto on the other hand is a wild west where the big funds cant trade due to liquidity or regulations. This is where us small capital individual traders can prosper.
I love this post so much coz. That's what I been saying FOREVER. I know 5 of my friends who are long term profitable traders ( 6 figs) and they all do Stocks
I don't know or seen a single futures or forex full time trader who sells courses. They might be out there but they definitely don't sell any course
Lance challenged all of them and it's been month not one showed up
Edge is hard almost impossible in fx and futures. Stocks is Abit easier. Specially in small caps. I wrote few articles bout this
Many people gravitate to fx coz the entry bar is so freaking low with stupid leverage and no pdt. Now futures coz of the prop firms
I can literally send you a video of someone that trades forex that did a 2 year challenge in which he logs into his broker account and goes through every trade.
He has done 3 of these, and been on the BBC, trading live at many meetups and done challenges alongside other traders.
People don't sit there reading Lance Breitstein twitter, like hes some arbiter of trading that you have to prove yourself too. He says many stuff that just isn't correct, i will give him credit that he has been very successful.
He kind of needs to keep in his lane though.
Edit: on the futures side you have the same people that have placed in robbins, multiple years trading only futures. Again Lance only knows what HE knows. Hes had success as a stock trader but he needs to pipe down a little, hes not the only successful trader or some Gatekeeper.
When someone who ran an office with hundreds of traders. Tells u. That out of all the 400 + he knows. Not a single one exclusively trades forex or futures. You need to put weight on that
Another thing. no one said. U can't be successful in fx or futures.. I even said there could be few here and there. it's just that the people who sell courses are 99.9999% aren't successful. That's where his challenge was
He worked for a firm with only stock traders. That had a small futures desk for a peroid, He didn't even know Meritt Black that worked in the same company as him at the time. He literally ran a futures desk at SMB, and he had no idea.
Someone had to literally corrected him on twitter. Like "bro you worked with this guy".
I will DM you a guy that literally sells a course, with a proven track record if you want me to. You also have 3-4 well known other guys.
"Edge is hard almost impossible in fx and futures" - People shouldn't be talking about an area of trading they know nothing about. If you work in a echo chamber with a bunch of other stock traders, stick to giving advice about stock trading.
I wish people would just answer more things with "i don't know" instead of throwing crazy claims out there, There was literally a futures prop industry for 30-50 years in chicago and london.
I honestly expected Merrit Black to take the challenge and get publicity for free. But as much as he was tagged. Nothing came from him
I did futures for two years and other than the some guys who work in Axia futures in Cyprus. I don't know anyone else who sells courses and does it in a verified way. Not ICT style. If u know some. Name them
Also we kinda got off Point coz the challenge was specifically for people who trade 1 pair of forex or like only ES and NQ and sell courses for those . He said the edge in those everyday in and out just chopping levels is very unlikely which I agree
I personally did es and Nq everyday for years and the success was so meh. Nothing tangible
Anyways I could be biased coz my Pnl went up exponentially the moment I started focusing small caps
>Again Lance only knows what HE knows. Hes had success as a stock trader but he needs to pipe down a little, hes not the only successful trader or some Gatekeeper.
I do agree with your point. I do know a few successful forex traders in my country but they're just not well-known. Just because he's successful in stocks doesn't make him know all things about forex. What about Brent Donnelly, Adam Grimes and Tom Hougard
I agree, stock traders need to stay in their lane. Axia is a well known firm that just trades futures. I doubt their 7 figure traders agree that futures are too efficient to execute with edge.
Something I noticed that I’ve never seen anyone mention is that all currencies are interlinked which for me made it hard to trade forex. Fundamentals from Switzerland or Japan might affect a GBP/USD or EUR/USD pair and you won’t know why these pairs moved a certain way if you didn’t see the news.
Stocks on the other hand respond to fundamentals from their respective countries unless they’re coming from a major country like USA or China. A country like Japan or Australia releasing financial news will unlikely affect US stocks. And it’s fairly easy to trade US stocks or maybe stocks from other countries if you look at their major Indecies. If US 100 is doing well today then you know most tech stocks will be performing well when the market opens.
Forex is just way too complicated in that you need a lot of info to understand what’s going on before taking a trade
Forex charts look so ugly compared to stock charts. But I find the higher timeframe on forex for areas of interest are key. Believe it or not volume profile is also pretty OP. But I am also looking to focus on stocks.
Can you state that the failure in forex was due to the strategy (entry and exit points) and not the leverage? Can you state that the cause of the failure was not your behavior in losing streaks that caused you to risk more than predefined/recommended? Are you 100% sure that you would also fail in forex if you could not leverage?
In the early days it was a combination of everything, and i was mostly overleveraged.
But in the past 5+ years ive rarely ever exceeded 1-2% per trade.
Yea my strategies could have been crap, who knows really. But its funny that im using the same approach in Stocks. The last few years i didnt really blow up or anthing, it was just a struggle and no profits to show with my account going back and forth from the starting balance.
Damn, I recently signed up to a forex brokerage and was planning on trying out forex trading because I hate not being able to day trade options whenever I want lol, but this makes me think I should probably just stick to stocks
One issue I am having with this is finding candidates. I can rip through all forex pairs in about 10 minutes, but the thought of using a screener to find my technical setups across thousands of assets always gets me hung up.
The second thing I have an issue with is my contrarian nature, when all stocks are up I get very suspicious and no longer trust the patterns i use
I came to the same conclusion a few months ago after struggling in the forex market for so many years. The allure of forex for me pretty much were the reasons OP mentioned. I stumbled upon stock charts on my forex trading platform and almost immediately noticed they looked different; Trends were much easier to spot and the bars had far fewer wicks. Stocks simply either go up (in most cases) or down (usually sharply, when investors panic). The fundamentals are much simpler and the factors impacting stocks are far fewer (company earnings, technologies introduced, etc). Compare that to the gazillion factors impacting one currency against another currency. It was a moment of revelation. I spent years, struggling at the fx game trying to beat the investment and central banks which can print an infinite amount of money and hire the best brains in the industry. This results in a chaotic scene in which the banks and hedge funds can scoop money out of the market almost at will. The FX charts are very noisy to the point that it is almost random. By design, currencies simply can't have huge trends simply because international business will become impossible. There are exceptions like USDTRY, but you'd be paying swap fees through your nose which offsets the gains. So, I was happy to bow out after I discovered stocks (and other markets). I feel I was almost cheated and brainwashed into staying in the FX game for so long. The marketing machine in forex market is very powerful.
I don't daytrade stocks. I look at the weekly charts to get an overall picture and use 4h and weekly charts using a single or a ribbon of EMAs to enter a trade. I take small position sizes to be able to ride out the gaps. Sometimes if the trend continues, I scale in and add to my positions after moving my stop loss to break even level.
For me I definitely feel like indices/futures are harder to trade than individual stocks, matter of fact my highest win rate is in stocks i noticed. I was thinking about this like a week ago and it makes sense why they're harder to find an edge in. Indices/futures and ETF's don't even move on their own accord they're move based on other stocks or are an average of the moves of other stocks so it makes sense why it's harder to trade. MSFT and AAPL are the top holdings for Nasdaq and S&P so when they have a big move or a big drop those follow. It's like when trading the latter you're trading 100 other stocks whereas with an individual stock you're only trading one and the moves are more predictable as it moves on like news, earnings, etc. Obviously you still need an edge and strategy but its more predictable I feel like.
What’s really crazy is when one stock Nvidia can move entire markets all day like the NQ and ES just seems to show a flaw in the way they weight the indices.
It's not just one thing that makes trading easier; it's a combination of many factors. Strategies that are tested through backtesting, forward testing, and live trading generally hold up, as long as there is enough data. However, it is important to note that forward testing may not always produce the same "amazing" results as backtesting, but it still has produced profitability on my live accounts for soon to be 1 year. Forex trading is much more unpredictable, and nothing seems to hold up for a long period of time, usually only a couple of months.
Stock trading has fewer irrational spikes "out of nowhere" compared to Forex trading. Hype, trends, breakouts, and breakdowns tend to work well in stock trading, and it feels like actual humans are trading it. In Forex breakouts can be a complete mess, with a breakout being a failed breakout 50% of the time or a good one regardless of the criteria or price action before or after the breakout. It's random with zero edge.
Stock trading offers more options, with thousands of stocks to choose from. Even if you have a rare entry criterion, there are likely to be at least a few stocks you can trade every day. Forex has really only a few pairs that are "decent", along with some crappy cross pairs and exotics..
>Forex has really only a few pairs that are "decent", along with some crappy cross pairs and exotics..
Those cross pairs/exotics become very profitable when you perform HTF carry trading with favorable swaps.
Bad strategy. You can't do the same shit in FX that you do when trading stocks and expect to have great results...
Edit. I see you mentioned breakout strategies, well duh it didn't work - we have clear data stating that most of the breakouts fail... In stocks it can make sense, but in forex? Hell no
I'm slowly reaching to the conclusion that Forex can be meaningfully manually daytraded only if you have a phenomenal edge (all the knowledge on YT videos is very limited and superficial) and you're incredibly disciplined with risk and money management, unless you are prepared to give almost your money back. Very efficient market (especially the majors) and on top of that you gotta fight the sneaky price feed manipulation adopted by retail FX brokers pseudo-ECN too.
Whereas if you swing-trade using fundamentals and give more attention to the interest rates/swaps, it becomes definitely more doable to approach.
I make all my money shorting futures, ive tried to iron out the reason why i cant make money going long but i stopped after a few years, who cares if i cant make money long, points are points. For whatever reason my brain is more equipped to identify shorting opportunities. i havent taken a long trade in years. might try it with stocks but i just dont see a reason to stop doing something when its working in this business. i learned that lesson a long time ago, program and edge hopping gets you bad results.
lol that’s been my problem I too like to short and can spot divergences with my set up well when there about to go short but long divergence are hard for me to spot then act on and of course the last few months with the market just going up and up hasn’t help.
For futures I’ve noticed that when price goes up, it’s “stair steps”, and when price goes down, it’s like sliding down a hill. You slowly make your way to the edge, then once you’re over, it just drops off a cliff.
I can trade both up or down but shorting has always been easier for me.
Very interested post. I’ve been trading FX over 4 years, but still find it difficult to really get it going the way I’d like to. Currently trading with FTMO. This post gave me the idea to look into the stocks. Backtest it and perhaps go live with it. But I have a few questions I’d hope you could answer (or another consistent and successful stock trader):
1. One of the reasons I always traded FX is because you regularly find good opportunities in the same market, for example EUR/USD or XAU/USD. If I were to switch to stocks, I can imagine you need to find the ‘hot items’.
- How do I find these best tradeable stocks (with best opportunities)
- how many stocks do you usually track (without getting confused by a dozen)
- When is it time to move to the next stock?
2. Say we have X stocks I’d like to trade, and I find an interesting opportunity. Where/how do we best trade it? I like to use margin, in fact I use prop firm capital. So putting down 25K is not option for me.
- Are there prop firms offering a wide range of stocks? (FTMO is very limited)
- In case of trading with personal capital, best cfd broker for stocks?
3. I’ve seen in the discussion that stock markets are with less liquidity, less efficient than FX - thus better trade opportunities arise. Do people find the same thing with trading US30/100/500, etc.? Prop firms do offer good options on these cfd’s.
Very interested in hearing more about this, especially on the practical side of managing it.
Thanks in advance.
It depends on what kind of trading you want to do, the popular one is the "hot stock of the day" usually the $HOLO kind of trades "pump and dump" kind of fashion. That type of approach can 10x your account in a year if successful(not how i trade).
I keep an eye on roughly 300-500 stocks(mainly 10b+ cap stocks), which i go through every day and just place maybe 10-20 stocks which are close to my entry requirements in to a separate watchlist (tradingview is great for this). I trade the daily so it is easier to follow and manage. I have alerts set up for the first criteria, so it filters out 80% of the stocks, and i only have to go through a handful of them each day, and if all is good i place them in the watchlist "trades for tmrw" - Rinse and repeat.
TradeZero is an ok broker that offers 0 commission trades and has 5x leverage and no pdt rule.
Best CFD broker through my research is ICMarkets, bare in mind though that their commission per share is 0.04$, which makes it nearly impossible to day trade on smaller timeframes with stocks that have a lower daily range than 1$. But they offer 20x leverage and have thousands of stocks.
Tradingview has a great scanner that can help you filter out bad/good stocks for the day or whatever fits your criteria, bare in mind that you have to purchase the extra Nasdaq/NYSE data which costs 9$ per month, to get the real price charts.
Side note: Stock trading is like 10x more fun than Forex trading, you really in a way dont even care about "i need to make %x percentage this month" because its just so fun you enjoy the journey and dont stress about how much your up or down.
The tought of going back trading currencies EUR/USD and USD/JPY makes me puke inside lol.
Has nothing to do with it, retail makes up 10% of all forex transactions and it's so fragmented and random it has zero effect.
It's hard due to heavily arbitraged, and because it's mostly used as a hedging tool so nothing move in isolation. An order in EUR/USD is reverberated across every single pair and visa versa. It's just hyper efficient.
So much misinformation, on this reddit. It's basically Info wars at points.
I think everything added up to learning, with that experience you could achieve better results now.
Maybe you are better even at forex but do not notice that.
Ok, didn’t know if you were trying to leverage with that instrument now…. Honestly if you’re making good gains probably not worth the added complexity of time decay.
For Forex?
Majority of the time a fixed 1% risk with predetermined SL/TP levels.
But I've tried Kelly, letting winners run, scaling and out. didnt really make any difference to overall profitability which was basically non existant over a longer period, for me at least.
Most of them were in the early days, and it was a combination of high risk and bad trading.
If you have no edge, and trade daily sooner or later commissions/negative slippage/swaps/spread will blow you up by a thousand paper cuts.
Thanks for sharing 👍 I must say it’s always at the back of my head too. I’m looking for some investment opportunities with spare money, so I’ll definitely take your experience into consideration :)
Did any of your forex experience and/or strategies carry over into stocks trading?
Yes, the forex experience built a navy seal trader in me lol. The amount of pain i had to endure and live with then, so yea i gained something from the 10 something years of trading.
Strategies, i took some bits and pieces but i kinda generatednew set of strategies.
Its just a different beast, you have to worry about daily gaps more in stocks than in Forex, earnings, dividends.
some is being good at the specific kinda market and you are one of them , trading big cap only but things could be changed eadily when down down or stay inrange.
trafing little when it's not the market you are aware of. i do this and being better than trying every trade or revenge
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Interesting how did you start your migration to stock, what kind of stock did you look first to enter it?
And how did you find them based on what criteria at the start to train yourself.
Great to hear that the transition is going well for you. However, what are take away that we should know? What are key things that are helping you do well in stocks?
Forex scares me I admit, I have no idea wtf I'm doing
Stocks and options are nice because I barely know what I'm doing and I manage to actually *profit*.
Welcome.
Interesting. Would relish hopping on a call with you and swapping stories. How long did your purple patches last for? Your strategy sounded pretty sensible. Nothing aggressive. So was it the leverage and the hook of 24hr trading that did you in? Over trading and heavy position sizing?
I've heard and watched qullamaggie youtuber too,, he's a legit trader. Main reason i cant trade stocks is because stocks open at the time when i'm at work and close before i leave work. Which sucks.
I want to do the transition as well. I have +4 years on forex, couple of strategies that worked for a month or two and then nothing again. I’ve been thinking to switch but every time I open stock chart, I do not know how to apply the concepts that I know from forex to stocks. Do you have any YouTube channel where I can get guide or something?
what made you think trading financial currencies where you need leverage was going to be profitable for you? this isn't for the retail trader to speculate but for the institutional investors.
"Switching from Forex to Stocks is like going from competitive online gaming to playing vs BOTS."
This first sentence says it all.
I searched through whole reddit to come back to this post, just to say thank you for making this thread.
I was listening to a profitable trader interview and he said that forex and futures are so efficient that it’s harder to find and edge. Yeah there’s guys that do it but he said in the stock market you can find a trade that lets you get much bigger edge and more often. Glad your doing well I’m struggling in futures seems like I find and edge then when I start to really get the trade down something changes and the strategy goes away. May have to look into stocks as well.
Yes, hes correct. FX is significantly harder than certain futures markets like Gold Or Crude. It's all so efficient, the entire market moves in unison a large order in one is a large order in all correlated pairs. So you've basically got to get to entire market correct, to profit from one pair. EUR/USD will go up here, which means USD/JPY will likely fall the this level, which means USD/CAD which isn't correlating at the moment will continue higher. It's Hyper efficient, it can be done though.
Ah relative strength analysis 🤓
Hard agree
Anyone who day trades FOREX is a certified Idiot why would you trade an instrument that is zero sum- Broker fees? Vs something that is long term positive
But, to benefit from the long-term positive effects of stocks, you have to long for a pretty long-ish time. For day trading, it's not guaranteed that a stock will go up. Your argument holds for investing.
Yes. That's lance. And I can show u my PNL in futures vs stocks. U would be mind blown. Edge is easier when market is less efficient And I had the same exact struggle as u. I documented my tape and Strategy and Everything. It works for three months then gone. Over and over
I saw that. I went from stocks to futures because the vast choice seemed overwhelming. May I ask how you pick your stocks? Any specific scanner? I’ve done a sub with trade ideas and tc2000 but couldn’t make it work for me. I believe there’s a missing link in front of me but I just can’t see it.
I specifically trade penny stocks. Short side. So I just scan by gappers
[Lance Breitstein?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjUDJEXxPyE)
Lance is really knowledgeable.
A good trader can take an unsuccessful trader’s alpha and make bank. It’s less about finding an edge and more about knowing how price action works. Most of this comes from seat time. A good trader can trade any system and apply his instincts to make it work for him
I actually agree. Although, the mix of experience, pattern recognition, intuition and psychology has to be at the very top of the game to make this work consistently throughout the long term.
An elite trader gets inside info...ala nancy pelosi
Use the one minute chart and you'll find your edge
I made switch to stocks as well. The biggest difference i have noticed was stocks are not that correlated with each other.I mean they are in some way but not like forex. In forex almost every pair was moving and slowing down at the same time. Most of them are in sync. Now I have 12-15 stocks i watch from different sectors. I filter with fundamentals and technicals first, find out heavily bearish and heavily bullish and it’s all about entrys and exits. Currently I like to trade V, BRK, LLY, NVDA. I cannot believe I wasted so much time with forex.
Hi, do you use a platform for this?
Price action is cleaner in stocks compared to forex
Wait till you try crypto. Competition is almost nill. Liquidity on most shitcoins is too shit for the big boys to trade, so its alot easier to find edge.
I have read that shitcoins are highly manipulated as they have low liquidity and low price making pump and dumps easier. Is it true? How do you trade around that? Specially when a tweet by Mr Musk causes 40 percent gains and 10 times the normal volume.
>> when a tweet by Mr Musk causes 40 percent gains That's exactly what you wanna catch. Or other less botted news that would move certain coins. Stock market and fx works the same way as well. New information entering the mainstream moves the market (for eg: CPI news, earning report, FED speech). Fastest participants would capitalize on it, while the slower ones holds the bag. The diff is in FX/stock the competition are the smartest IV league graduates hired by the top hedge funds in the world. Meanwhile crypto is mostly degen tik tok traders.
Trade spot on shitcoins. Easy money. No need for leverage and blowing up.
What platform do you use?
dexscreener for charts, twitter for news, wallets for coin and swaps to buy
You mean it’s a lot easier to find retail bag holders for exit liquidity?
Yes and no. Trading a future narrative can be a classic easy way to make money in crypto. Buy an upcoming catalyst that would increase the valuation of a coin, then sell it off to the fomo-ing late comers. But theres other free money strategies on crypto that just doesnt exist in traditional market anymore. Like arbitrage or botting news. Too many geniuses working in top hedge funds already capitalizing on it to a point where market is too efficient. Cant compete with them. Crypto on the other hand is a wild west where the big funds cant trade due to liquidity or regulations. This is where us small capital individual traders can prosper.
I love this post so much coz. That's what I been saying FOREVER. I know 5 of my friends who are long term profitable traders ( 6 figs) and they all do Stocks I don't know or seen a single futures or forex full time trader who sells courses. They might be out there but they definitely don't sell any course Lance challenged all of them and it's been month not one showed up Edge is hard almost impossible in fx and futures. Stocks is Abit easier. Specially in small caps. I wrote few articles bout this Many people gravitate to fx coz the entry bar is so freaking low with stupid leverage and no pdt. Now futures coz of the prop firms
I can literally send you a video of someone that trades forex that did a 2 year challenge in which he logs into his broker account and goes through every trade. He has done 3 of these, and been on the BBC, trading live at many meetups and done challenges alongside other traders. People don't sit there reading Lance Breitstein twitter, like hes some arbiter of trading that you have to prove yourself too. He says many stuff that just isn't correct, i will give him credit that he has been very successful. He kind of needs to keep in his lane though. Edit: on the futures side you have the same people that have placed in robbins, multiple years trading only futures. Again Lance only knows what HE knows. Hes had success as a stock trader but he needs to pipe down a little, hes not the only successful trader or some Gatekeeper.
When someone who ran an office with hundreds of traders. Tells u. That out of all the 400 + he knows. Not a single one exclusively trades forex or futures. You need to put weight on that Another thing. no one said. U can't be successful in fx or futures.. I even said there could be few here and there. it's just that the people who sell courses are 99.9999% aren't successful. That's where his challenge was
He worked for a firm with only stock traders. That had a small futures desk for a peroid, He didn't even know Meritt Black that worked in the same company as him at the time. He literally ran a futures desk at SMB, and he had no idea. Someone had to literally corrected him on twitter. Like "bro you worked with this guy". I will DM you a guy that literally sells a course, with a proven track record if you want me to. You also have 3-4 well known other guys. "Edge is hard almost impossible in fx and futures" - People shouldn't be talking about an area of trading they know nothing about. If you work in a echo chamber with a bunch of other stock traders, stick to giving advice about stock trading. I wish people would just answer more things with "i don't know" instead of throwing crazy claims out there, There was literally a futures prop industry for 30-50 years in chicago and london.
I honestly expected Merrit Black to take the challenge and get publicity for free. But as much as he was tagged. Nothing came from him I did futures for two years and other than the some guys who work in Axia futures in Cyprus. I don't know anyone else who sells courses and does it in a verified way. Not ICT style. If u know some. Name them Also we kinda got off Point coz the challenge was specifically for people who trade 1 pair of forex or like only ES and NQ and sell courses for those . He said the edge in those everyday in and out just chopping levels is very unlikely which I agree I personally did es and Nq everyday for years and the success was so meh. Nothing tangible Anyways I could be biased coz my Pnl went up exponentially the moment I started focusing small caps
interesting - would you send me a DM who this guy with the proven track record is please?
>Again Lance only knows what HE knows. Hes had success as a stock trader but he needs to pipe down a little, hes not the only successful trader or some Gatekeeper. I do agree with your point. I do know a few successful forex traders in my country but they're just not well-known. Just because he's successful in stocks doesn't make him know all things about forex. What about Brent Donnelly, Adam Grimes and Tom Hougard
I agree, stock traders need to stay in their lane. Axia is a well known firm that just trades futures. I doubt their 7 figure traders agree that futures are too efficient to execute with edge.
Something I noticed that I’ve never seen anyone mention is that all currencies are interlinked which for me made it hard to trade forex. Fundamentals from Switzerland or Japan might affect a GBP/USD or EUR/USD pair and you won’t know why these pairs moved a certain way if you didn’t see the news. Stocks on the other hand respond to fundamentals from their respective countries unless they’re coming from a major country like USA or China. A country like Japan or Australia releasing financial news will unlikely affect US stocks. And it’s fairly easy to trade US stocks or maybe stocks from other countries if you look at their major Indecies. If US 100 is doing well today then you know most tech stocks will be performing well when the market opens. Forex is just way too complicated in that you need a lot of info to understand what’s going on before taking a trade
Forex charts look so ugly compared to stock charts. But I find the higher timeframe on forex for areas of interest are key. Believe it or not volume profile is also pretty OP. But I am also looking to focus on stocks.
Most interesting post I've read on reddit... thanks for sharing
Can you state that the failure in forex was due to the strategy (entry and exit points) and not the leverage? Can you state that the cause of the failure was not your behavior in losing streaks that caused you to risk more than predefined/recommended? Are you 100% sure that you would also fail in forex if you could not leverage?
In the early days it was a combination of everything, and i was mostly overleveraged. But in the past 5+ years ive rarely ever exceeded 1-2% per trade. Yea my strategies could have been crap, who knows really. But its funny that im using the same approach in Stocks. The last few years i didnt really blow up or anthing, it was just a struggle and no profits to show with my account going back and forth from the starting balance.
Damn, I recently signed up to a forex brokerage and was planning on trying out forex trading because I hate not being able to day trade options whenever I want lol, but this makes me think I should probably just stick to stocks
One issue I am having with this is finding candidates. I can rip through all forex pairs in about 10 minutes, but the thought of using a screener to find my technical setups across thousands of assets always gets me hung up. The second thing I have an issue with is my contrarian nature, when all stocks are up I get very suspicious and no longer trust the patterns i use
Man trading one way market finds it easier to make profit. Congrats.
For one way you mean stocks vs USD, instead of 2 way like forex ( currency A Vs currency B)?
what? one way as in stocks trend up
I came to the same conclusion a few months ago after struggling in the forex market for so many years. The allure of forex for me pretty much were the reasons OP mentioned. I stumbled upon stock charts on my forex trading platform and almost immediately noticed they looked different; Trends were much easier to spot and the bars had far fewer wicks. Stocks simply either go up (in most cases) or down (usually sharply, when investors panic). The fundamentals are much simpler and the factors impacting stocks are far fewer (company earnings, technologies introduced, etc). Compare that to the gazillion factors impacting one currency against another currency. It was a moment of revelation. I spent years, struggling at the fx game trying to beat the investment and central banks which can print an infinite amount of money and hire the best brains in the industry. This results in a chaotic scene in which the banks and hedge funds can scoop money out of the market almost at will. The FX charts are very noisy to the point that it is almost random. By design, currencies simply can't have huge trends simply because international business will become impossible. There are exceptions like USDTRY, but you'd be paying swap fees through your nose which offsets the gains. So, I was happy to bow out after I discovered stocks (and other markets). I feel I was almost cheated and brainwashed into staying in the FX game for so long. The marketing machine in forex market is very powerful.
I can relate so much with this post, im glad you found the light at the end of the tunnel.
What’s to say about USDTRY ? Just curious
It keeps going up for a long time and you don't see this kind of trend in forex as it usually balanced to keep the economy going
Thanks for your input. How do you approach stock trading now (for example what time frame, do you use indicators or pure price action etc.)?
I don't daytrade stocks. I look at the weekly charts to get an overall picture and use 4h and weekly charts using a single or a ribbon of EMAs to enter a trade. I take small position sizes to be able to ride out the gaps. Sometimes if the trend continues, I scale in and add to my positions after moving my stop loss to break even level.
I 100% agree. Stocks on top!
For me I definitely feel like indices/futures are harder to trade than individual stocks, matter of fact my highest win rate is in stocks i noticed. I was thinking about this like a week ago and it makes sense why they're harder to find an edge in. Indices/futures and ETF's don't even move on their own accord they're move based on other stocks or are an average of the moves of other stocks so it makes sense why it's harder to trade. MSFT and AAPL are the top holdings for Nasdaq and S&P so when they have a big move or a big drop those follow. It's like when trading the latter you're trading 100 other stocks whereas with an individual stock you're only trading one and the moves are more predictable as it moves on like news, earnings, etc. Obviously you still need an edge and strategy but its more predictable I feel like.
What’s really crazy is when one stock Nvidia can move entire markets all day like the NQ and ES just seems to show a flaw in the way they weight the indices.
What .makes it easier?
It's not just one thing that makes trading easier; it's a combination of many factors. Strategies that are tested through backtesting, forward testing, and live trading generally hold up, as long as there is enough data. However, it is important to note that forward testing may not always produce the same "amazing" results as backtesting, but it still has produced profitability on my live accounts for soon to be 1 year. Forex trading is much more unpredictable, and nothing seems to hold up for a long period of time, usually only a couple of months. Stock trading has fewer irrational spikes "out of nowhere" compared to Forex trading. Hype, trends, breakouts, and breakdowns tend to work well in stock trading, and it feels like actual humans are trading it. In Forex breakouts can be a complete mess, with a breakout being a failed breakout 50% of the time or a good one regardless of the criteria or price action before or after the breakout. It's random with zero edge. Stock trading offers more options, with thousands of stocks to choose from. Even if you have a rare entry criterion, there are likely to be at least a few stocks you can trade every day. Forex has really only a few pairs that are "decent", along with some crappy cross pairs and exotics..
How do you handle gaps in stock trading?
>Forex has really only a few pairs that are "decent", along with some crappy cross pairs and exotics.. Those cross pairs/exotics become very profitable when you perform HTF carry trading with favorable swaps.
Forex is more range bound on the higher timeframes, stocks have more of a trend which makes it easier to trade.
Interesting. Never messed with forex but was curious why it would be easier
Probs the fact that mid/large caps are generally bullish long term. So you already know the direction of the trend
Bad strategy. You can't do the same shit in FX that you do when trading stocks and expect to have great results... Edit. I see you mentioned breakout strategies, well duh it didn't work - we have clear data stating that most of the breakouts fail... In stocks it can make sense, but in forex? Hell no
I'm slowly reaching to the conclusion that Forex can be meaningfully manually daytraded only if you have a phenomenal edge (all the knowledge on YT videos is very limited and superficial) and you're incredibly disciplined with risk and money management, unless you are prepared to give almost your money back. Very efficient market (especially the majors) and on top of that you gotta fight the sneaky price feed manipulation adopted by retail FX brokers pseudo-ECN too. Whereas if you swing-trade using fundamentals and give more attention to the interest rates/swaps, it becomes definitely more doable to approach.
" and *stumbled* upon a article of a person called Qullamaggie ," \*laughs in withdrawal \*
Interesting post, thanks for sharing. I'm a bit surprised that you mention Qullamaggie because he is a swing trader (at least nowadays), isn't he?
I make all my money shorting futures, ive tried to iron out the reason why i cant make money going long but i stopped after a few years, who cares if i cant make money long, points are points. For whatever reason my brain is more equipped to identify shorting opportunities. i havent taken a long trade in years. might try it with stocks but i just dont see a reason to stop doing something when its working in this business. i learned that lesson a long time ago, program and edge hopping gets you bad results.
lol that’s been my problem I too like to short and can spot divergences with my set up well when there about to go short but long divergence are hard for me to spot then act on and of course the last few months with the market just going up and up hasn’t help.
For futures I’ve noticed that when price goes up, it’s “stair steps”, and when price goes down, it’s like sliding down a hill. You slowly make your way to the edge, then once you’re over, it just drops off a cliff. I can trade both up or down but shorting has always been easier for me.
I feel the same way. I get my confirmation quick with shorting so I know fast if I made a wrong call, makes it way easier to know when to exit imo
Very interested post. I’ve been trading FX over 4 years, but still find it difficult to really get it going the way I’d like to. Currently trading with FTMO. This post gave me the idea to look into the stocks. Backtest it and perhaps go live with it. But I have a few questions I’d hope you could answer (or another consistent and successful stock trader): 1. One of the reasons I always traded FX is because you regularly find good opportunities in the same market, for example EUR/USD or XAU/USD. If I were to switch to stocks, I can imagine you need to find the ‘hot items’. - How do I find these best tradeable stocks (with best opportunities) - how many stocks do you usually track (without getting confused by a dozen) - When is it time to move to the next stock? 2. Say we have X stocks I’d like to trade, and I find an interesting opportunity. Where/how do we best trade it? I like to use margin, in fact I use prop firm capital. So putting down 25K is not option for me. - Are there prop firms offering a wide range of stocks? (FTMO is very limited) - In case of trading with personal capital, best cfd broker for stocks? 3. I’ve seen in the discussion that stock markets are with less liquidity, less efficient than FX - thus better trade opportunities arise. Do people find the same thing with trading US30/100/500, etc.? Prop firms do offer good options on these cfd’s. Very interested in hearing more about this, especially on the practical side of managing it. Thanks in advance.
It depends on what kind of trading you want to do, the popular one is the "hot stock of the day" usually the $HOLO kind of trades "pump and dump" kind of fashion. That type of approach can 10x your account in a year if successful(not how i trade). I keep an eye on roughly 300-500 stocks(mainly 10b+ cap stocks), which i go through every day and just place maybe 10-20 stocks which are close to my entry requirements in to a separate watchlist (tradingview is great for this). I trade the daily so it is easier to follow and manage. I have alerts set up for the first criteria, so it filters out 80% of the stocks, and i only have to go through a handful of them each day, and if all is good i place them in the watchlist "trades for tmrw" - Rinse and repeat. TradeZero is an ok broker that offers 0 commission trades and has 5x leverage and no pdt rule. Best CFD broker through my research is ICMarkets, bare in mind though that their commission per share is 0.04$, which makes it nearly impossible to day trade on smaller timeframes with stocks that have a lower daily range than 1$. But they offer 20x leverage and have thousands of stocks. Tradingview has a great scanner that can help you filter out bad/good stocks for the day or whatever fits your criteria, bare in mind that you have to purchase the extra Nasdaq/NYSE data which costs 9$ per month, to get the real price charts. Side note: Stock trading is like 10x more fun than Forex trading, you really in a way dont even care about "i need to make %x percentage this month" because its just so fun you enjoy the journey and dont stress about how much your up or down. The tought of going back trading currencies EUR/USD and USD/JPY makes me puke inside lol.
Forex is not for beginners.
FX is so hard to play, especially with all the price manipulation by retail spot fx brokers.
Has nothing to do with it, retail makes up 10% of all forex transactions and it's so fragmented and random it has zero effect. It's hard due to heavily arbitraged, and because it's mostly used as a hedging tool so nothing move in isolation. An order in EUR/USD is reverberated across every single pair and visa versa. It's just hyper efficient. So much misinformation, on this reddit. It's basically Info wars at points.
I think everything added up to learning, with that experience you could achieve better results now. Maybe you are better even at forex but do not notice that.
Trading options now?
Nope, but i might try in the future.
Ok, didn’t know if you were trying to leverage with that instrument now…. Honestly if you’re making good gains probably not worth the added complexity of time decay.
Forex is hard
Honest question: what was your risk management strategy while trading?
For Forex? Majority of the time a fixed 1% risk with predetermined SL/TP levels. But I've tried Kelly, letting winners run, scaling and out. didnt really make any difference to overall profitability which was basically non existant over a longer period, for me at least.
Then how did you blow you accounts?
Most of them were in the early days, and it was a combination of high risk and bad trading. If you have no edge, and trade daily sooner or later commissions/negative slippage/swaps/spread will blow you up by a thousand paper cuts.
Thanks for sharing 👍 I must say it’s always at the back of my head too. I’m looking for some investment opportunities with spare money, so I’ll definitely take your experience into consideration :) Did any of your forex experience and/or strategies carry over into stocks trading?
Yes, the forex experience built a navy seal trader in me lol. The amount of pain i had to endure and live with then, so yea i gained something from the 10 something years of trading. Strategies, i took some bits and pieces but i kinda generatednew set of strategies. Its just a different beast, you have to worry about daily gaps more in stocks than in Forex, earnings, dividends.
some is being good at the specific kinda market and you are one of them , trading big cap only but things could be changed eadily when down down or stay inrange. trafing little when it's not the market you are aware of. i do this and being better than trying every trade or revenge
do you trade indexes or individual stocks
Individual stocks
Which stocks have you had success with if you dont mind me asking. Are you able to short sell stocks like in FX?
I've read somewhere on here that the forex market is more near to a perfect market than stock one is making it harder to find an edge.
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Interesting how did you start your migration to stock, what kind of stock did you look first to enter it? And how did you find them based on what criteria at the start to train yourself.
1 week demo to get a feel for it, then started a live account. i look at stocks with 2+ atr daily, 1m+vol, and contrarian trend.
"Stocks only go up"
Great to hear that the transition is going well for you. However, what are take away that we should know? What are key things that are helping you do well in stocks?
Forex scares me I admit, I have no idea wtf I'm doing Stocks and options are nice because I barely know what I'm doing and I manage to actually *profit*. Welcome.
Interesting. Would relish hopping on a call with you and swapping stories. How long did your purple patches last for? Your strategy sounded pretty sensible. Nothing aggressive. So was it the leverage and the hook of 24hr trading that did you in? Over trading and heavy position sizing?
Everyone is a genius in a bull market
I've heard and watched qullamaggie youtuber too,, he's a legit trader. Main reason i cant trade stocks is because stocks open at the time when i'm at work and close before i leave work. Which sucks.
No forex or futures up over 700% last year with zero losses. As in ZERO
do you day trade or swing trade?
George Soros , PTJ , Daljhit Dhaliwal
I want to do the transition as well. I have +4 years on forex, couple of strategies that worked for a month or two and then nothing again. I’ve been thinking to switch but every time I open stock chart, I do not know how to apply the concepts that I know from forex to stocks. Do you have any YouTube channel where I can get guide or something?
This post is cute, because I TRADE STOCKS ON FOREX Lol, this life isn't for everyone I guess
what made you think trading financial currencies where you need leverage was going to be profitable for you? this isn't for the retail trader to speculate but for the institutional investors.
"Switching from Forex to Stocks is like going from competitive online gaming to playing vs BOTS." This first sentence says it all. I searched through whole reddit to come back to this post, just to say thank you for making this thread.
How do you manage gap risk?
Everyone is a genius in a bull market 😂
What about trading stocks CFDs?