A few words before we start...

Is this another BS forex blog ?

No it ain't. I can imagine that you found this blog and you're thinking this is yet another wannabe "finance" blog by some ignorant guy who day-dreams about being a Wall Street big shot. My answer to this is: wrong.

I'm not a Wall Street guy, nor do I think that I am. I'm just a regular dude with some understanding of the financial markets, some trading experience to share, and a taste for writing.
Even though I'm not a quant or a trader, I've been trading currencies for a little bit more than 5 years, and my job got me involved with banks and other financial institutions. And most important, I've started making some profits with trading a couple of years ago, after a lot of time and hopes wasted, and I can help you not waste yours (just because I'm a nice guy!).

So what is this blog ?

What I'd like with this blog is to help people start trading efficiently without wasting their time with all the BS that you find on the internet, and enjoy this both as hobby and a possible new revenue stream. Because that's what it is for me: an additional revenue stream that buys flowers for my wife, a dinner at the restaurant here and there, and maybe a week-end trip when times are good. Plus writing this gives me a practical and useful reason to spent time on the Bloomberg app on my tablet.
To put it shortly: I'm not making a living with my trading activity. My yearly profits for 2013 are about 17% and this year will be better only because the markets have been going in one direction since January, making things a lot more simple.

How is it different from the 1 000 000s blogs that claim they can teach me something ?

Let's be honest, most of the people on internet/Twitter who claim to make thousands of $$ to sell you a trading signal service are liars. I know that for a fact. I've followed a lot of self proclaimed market-savvy people who tweet very smart things, and very very few were ahead of the curve when the wind turns (I'll make a post about the real good people out there on Twitter). Those guys are easily spotted because they are not consistent in what they say, and because they always claim that they "told you so" when something happens on the markets.
And in my quest for the holy grail, I've tested a dozen of forex signals with demo accounts and none of them was profitable. I repeat: none.
Let's not even talk about robots, automatic trading or mirror trading. One word for those: scam (I could also write a post to describe the mechanics of those scams, but later). So run, you fools.

Making it short: if you trade currencies with a 10 000$ account, you can expect to make, at the maximum, around 100$ per month. Sometimes a lot less, sometimes a little more.
This is possible if you know some simple rules and that you stick to it (and this is the most difficult part of this activity). 

Who am I (and what am I to you) ?

I started my trading "career" with no knowledge of technical analysis or charts. I have a College degree in economics, so my first thought was that I should trade based on a macro-economic analysis. I was unexperienced (and maybe a bit stupid too), so I gave up that idea and convinced myself that I'd be better off scalping and booking daily profits on short term time-frames, like they recommended on those blogs I was reading. I wanted to be a "day trader", so I needed to do my homework : pivot points, trendlines, fibonacci, ichimoku and all. That seems straightforward, but still for some reason I was not able to book 100 pips every day like I was planning !

Beginner's luck did let me book some profits here and there, but the reality of market physics always took back my hardly earned pips. After a few months, my P/L was something like 8 dollars, for hundreds of hours spent in front of my charts (even at the office, in bed, while eating...).
I never went in the red because I traded small. Very small. Never more than 2% of my account was at stake. And that's the only thing that I did right at that time.

While wasting my time on this profit see-saw, I was trying hard to understand what I was doing wrong. Finance is complicated, so you need to read a lot, learn new words and concepts, spend your day on Bloomberg/Reuters, follow some trading guru on Twitter, and always question what you're doing. That's why I thought at least. Also, one difficult thing was the language: I'm not an American, so all the lingo was a bit of a trouble for me. Like this article published by the New Yorker says, financial jargon is tricky. And it gets worse if you're from a non Anglo-saxon country where people don't use credit, loans, mortgages, and pension funds at every point of their lives.

Ok, but what's the point of all that ?

It's only with time and a little experience that I realized that simple is always better. Don't ever complicate things that can be simple. So here are some rules that I apply to my trading that have allowed me to book more profits than losses:

• trading on financial markets is just like trading physical goods: buy low, sell high. That sounds stupid to say, but I guarantee you that when your trading is not doing good and you're looking for answers everywhere it is good to remind you that. Put a post-it on your computer screen if necessary.
• you can never guess the market direction of the day. Never. What you can do is check what the direction has been for the last few weeks and months. Always follow long-term trends because they are hard to invert. Day-trade will kill you.
• don't try to chase the big boys. They have lots of cash, algorithms and insider information so you'll always lose if you try to catch a sudden move: don't trade the news, don't trade on the short term, and don't panic-trade if you see the markets move suddenly. 
• don't try to understand why. The Fed announces more QE and USD rises, and the next day the Fed cuts QE and USD rises while you expected it to fall: you're pissed and ask why. I know you do, because I did. Don't trade your expectations and what you'd like markets to do, that will drive you crazy. Trade USD long until proven wrong, i.e. until a lower low is made on a daily chart.
• don't ever spend more than 10 minutes on a chart! Even if you like to have many indicators/oscillators, just check the only important thing: is it rising or falling? That takes a few seconds and then you know if you're looking for a buy or sell opportunity.
• trade a trend only when it is a strong one: use ADX and trade only when it is above 25 and rising. 
• manage your risks like they teach you in the textbooks. Risk management is one of the few things that is taught right, so pick up your subject matter expert and read, but keep it simple: place stops under previous low on a long trade/above previous high on a short trade, and move them using SAR.

That's pretty much it. Then all you have is to determine what is a low price to buy in a rising market or a high price to sell in a falling market. Trendlines and oscillators are meant for that.

But this blog is not a trading signal and I won't be giving buying/selling prices. All I do is giving a straight up market trend analysis. I tell what the market direction is, how strong the trend is, and whether I think the market is tradable or not, day-to-day.

And I hope that this will help you focus on what's important. I hope that it will be useful to all the people out there that think that forex is either a scam or a way to get rich. It is neither, but there is some cheddar to make if you know the rules.