COMPLETE TRADER WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW, AND WHY OUR COMPETITORS DON T LIKE US Whether or not you decide to train with us, this document has very useful information to help you get started and so you know what to look for.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents Introduction 1 What we are about 1 Company goals 1 Goals for our students 1 How do we achieve this 1 Dispelling the myths around Forex Trading 2 Forex Trading is easy 2 I can make money just following someone else s signals 2 I need an extremely complicated strategy to be successful in Forex 2 I need to predict market movements EXACTLY every time 2 I need a lot of starting capital to get profit in Forex 2 If I can trade stocks succesfully, I can trade Forex 3 I can make money any time if I want, the Forex market is open 24 hours a day 3 The never losing Holy Grail strategy 3 Forex is a scam, the markets work against me 3 My broker is better because it is cheaper 3 How much can you earn? 4 The common misconception 4 What is a realistic goal? 4 Greed vs Level Headedness 4 Protect yourself and your investment 5 Traders offering unrealistic returns to trade for you 5 AutoTrading, how to do it right 5 The Complete Trader Program Course Content 6 Getting a good overview of the Forex market 6 Learn by paper/demo trading 6 Looking at Scalping and other systems 6 Price Action and Pattern Trading System 6
TABLE OF CONTENTS Psychology of TRADING, robot trading vs trading like a robot 6 Complete Trader After the course 7 Online Course Access even for classroom students 7 12 WEek Follow Up program 7 Online Traders Community 7 Contact Information 8 Partners with www.tradingcentral.co.za
INTRODUCTION Introduction WHAT WE ARE ABOUT Complete Trader is more than just a Forex training provider. We understand that while it s relatively fast to learn the mechanics behind becoming a successful Forex trader, there are several key areas that need to be covered besides just the actual trading. Our course is designed to be a proper series of lessons and tasks to help people avoid the pit falls that causes many new traders to fail by addressing not just the mechanical side of trading, and giving a much fuller understanding of the Retail Forex market. COMPANY GOALS We aim to be the premier Forex training institution in South Africa, as well as creating a sustainable Forex trading community where novice and professional traders can share ideas and get advice. We would also like to educate the general public with regards to the Forex market, and dispel many of the myths about unrealistic growth which some institutions promise just to close the deal. GOALS FOR OUR STUDENTS As the name Complete Trader implies, we want our students to become well rounded and complete traders. There are plenty of trading strategies that will work for a month or two if you follow them perfectly, but in order to be a long term trader you need to understand more than just one or two systems. We want you to be profitable for years to come. HOW DO WE ACHIEVE THIS This is broken down in to three main categories which we believe is the key to success in this industry 1) Offer the most comprehensive Forex training course available at a competitive price, so students learn from genuine traders and have a great foundation for their trading career. Have a follow up course by email to assist with practice trading, setting goals and overcoming the psychological problems often associated with trading real money. 2) Keep students (past and present) motivated and kept in the loop by running a membership, and building an online Forex community for South African traders where they can freely discuss strategies and trade ideas 3) Never offer unrealistic growth just to close the deal. Traders need to know the truth from day 1 if they are to become successful traders in the long run. To assist people with the first step, the actual hands on training, we offer Day courses, Evening courses, online training, 1 on 1 training in class or through Skype. Page 1
DISPELLING THE MYTHS AROUND FOREX TRADING Dispelling the myths around Forex Trading FOREX TRADING IS EASY Many people believe they can purchase a book and learn how to trade and make money within a few days, and then trade 1 or 2 hours a day. This is a popular advertising tool as well. The cold reality is that this is a myth. It may not be a good sales pitch, but I prefer people to know the truth upfront. Becoming a profitable trader is much like other professions. It takes time, money and practice. You can t go out and buy a hammer and nails and immediately become a professional cabinet maker. I CAN MAKE MONEY JUST FOLLOWING SOMEONE ELSE S SIGNALS Signal generators often show great results for a month or even two, but they also have days where they will burn an account out completely. You can t blindly follow signal generators and expect to make money in the long run, it sounds like a good idea but in the end you end up with huge losses. You need to learn how to trade yourself so the decision when to place the trade is always yours and not a robot. If you must use signal generators, use them just to highlight potential trades and not to automatically trade for you I NEED AN EXTREMELY COMPLICATED STRATEGY TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN FOREX Thankfully this is also a complete myth. All you need is a strategy that works for you, and in most cases these are rather unimpressive looking. Don t be fooled by traders who use 20 indicators to make them look smart, most of the time they are not even using half the indicators on the screen, they re just there to look more professional. The most important ingredient to be a successful trader is self-discipline and proper money management. I NEED TO PREDICT MARKET MOVEMENTS EXACTLY EVERY TIME There is no way we can predict the market to a 100% certainty. If there was, we would just need $1000 to become a millionaire in a month. Forex Trading is not a game of certainties, but rather a game of odds. One of the most important things to learn before you put in real money, is understanding risk to reward ratio and to analyze your success ratio. As long as you are winning more than you are losing, you are profitable. I NEED A LOT OF STARTING CAPITAL TO GET PROFIT IN FOREX You don t need a lot of capital to trade multiple currencies, and even if you had a lot of capital the market is simply too big for you to control it. You can actually trade the market with very little capital, and this is a great way to start even if you are able to invest large amounts. Page 2
DISPELLING THE MYTHS AROUND FOREX TRADING IF I CAN TRADE STOCKS SUCCESFULLY, I CAN TRADE FOREX While several of the key elements are shared between the two, like understanding risk and the psychology of trading, Forex and stocks are two different beasts entirely. The Forex market dwarfs the stock market, is available 24 hours a day and due to the amount of money traded in the market on a daily basis it responds quite differently to news events. You can definitely apply many of the skills you learn as a stock trader, but if you assume you can simply walk in to the Forex market and make money from the word go you could land in a lot of trouble. I CAN MAKE MONEY ANY TIME IF I WANT, THE FOREX MARKET IS OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY Yes, the markets are open 24 hours a day, but are you? Also, different currencies are more traded during certain trading hours than others. You cannot sit in front of your computer 24 hours a day, even if you could it defeats the purpose of learning how to trade Forex and get more free time. You need to highlight the times you are able to trade, look at the currencies to see which pairs are best to trade and work around setting up a routine with that information. If you need more hours to trade, it requires a bit of planning and practice to do it properly. THE NEVER LOSING HOLY GRAIL STRATEGY This does not exist. There is no one strategy that if followed exactly will always yield profit. There are some impressive success stories out there, some of them are true, but that does not mean the strategy they used will still work in today s conditions. There is simply no replacement for human involvement and decision making when it comes to Forex trading. I have yet to find a robot trader that can beat my own growth. FOREX IS A SCAM, THE MARKETS WORK AGAINST ME I m glad to say this is not true. It may feel like the markets move against you personally, but not even Bill Gates has enough money to move the markets any considerable amount. The Forex market trades on average 4 Trillion USD every day, that s more than 10 times the amount of the largest stock exchanges combined. There have been some brokers in the past who were not playing by the rules, and they have been punished severely. It is important to make sure that whichever broker you go to is properly regulated internationally and in your own country as well. MY BROKER IS BETTER BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER The cost of your spread is an important factor when trading Forex. You need to look at what the broker is offering and their legitimacy. If you are planning on trading the Forex market for years to come, you should not be basing your decision on who is the cheapest?. Fast food is cheap, but in the long run you ll pay for it. Page 3
HOW MUCH CAN YOU EARN? How much can you earn? THE COMMON MISCONCEPTION This is by far the most asked of the difficult answers. I attribute this to the tactics of many fly-by-night Forex training companies out there advertising Earn $$$ s and work 1 hour a day or double your money type adverts. The problem comes in that it is technically possible to double your money in a day or two, but it is extremely unlikely. You would be risking so much per trade, that just one bad trade and you re gone. Many traders setup multiple trading accounts and go for high risk strategies so they can publish their results. They only publish the 1 out of 10 or more accounts that didn t burn out. So let s look at a more realistic strategy. WHAT IS A REALISTIC GOAL? I teach my students to target 10% growth per month. We don t risk more than 1% per trade, and we target 2% to 3% profit per trade (average 2.5%). Even if your win to lose ratio is only 50%, out of 10 trades you would be up 7.5%. If you find your average profit is only 2% with the risk of 1%, and you only have a 50% win ratio, you should average out at 5% growth every 10 trades. 20 trades a month, and you re in that golden 10% growth per month. This is a realistic goal, and can be achieved part time with the right dedication on a good scalping strategy. GREED VS LEVEL HEADEDNESS The number 1 reason new traders burn out their Forex account is greed, shortly followed by frustration. If you only have a $200 account, and you ve traded well and hit your 10% people look at the profit as only being $20. So they start risking more, and wipe out their accounts. Here s a quick chart showing what $200 becomes in 4 years if you stick to the growth plan. TABLE HEADING YEAR STARTING CAPITAL GROWTH PER MONTH YEAR END CAPITAL PROFIT USD 200 10 % USD 627 USD 427 USD 427 10 % USD 1969 USD 1542 USD 1969 10% USD 6179 USD 4210 USD 6179 10% USD 19392 USD 13213 You can quickly see that the tortoise wins the race. So many smart people, who have set out to start trading and have small accounts don t look at the growth in %, and only in USD. They lose sight of the bigger picture, or get greedy and want more now. Page 4
PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR INVESTMENT Protect yourself and your investment TRADERS OFFERING UNREALISTIC RETURNS TO TRADE FOR YOU I need to make this abundantly clear. Please excuse my use of bold and capitals. DO NOT GIVE SOMEONE YOUR MONEY TO TRADE WITH. Just don t do it, ever. In my company, we chat to 100 s of new traders every week on the phone, through email and Skype. And we hear the horror stories of people in desperate circumstances handing over their money with the promise of high returns every month. It is simply not worth taking the risk. If you are looking for a way to put some money down and not have to trade yourself then look at Mirror Trading. AUTOTRADING, HOW TO DO IT RIGHT Auto Trading robots, getting people to trade for you and following signal providers blindly will wipe you out. It might not be today, or even tomorrow, but it does happen and it happens to everyone. However, for those of you who do want someone to trade for them I suggest you look at Mirror Trading. Here are the benefits in point form You retain complete control of your account. The account is in your name, and only you have access to deposit and withdraw from the account. You link this trading account to other profitable traders, and can limit the amount of risk per trader. If at any time you re not happy with a particular trader, you can unlink your account in seconds. If at any time you decide you re not happy with Forex trading in general, you can close your account and get your outstanding balance back within 3 days. You can diversify your portfolio by risking small amounts across several traders instead of backing just one. This smooths out the profit to loss, and if someone has a bad day you have other traders making up for it. There is not enough space in this document to give all the features of Mirror Trading and how to get it started. If you are interested and want to setup a demo or live account then email us at info@completetrader.co.za with your details. Please let us know in the email you re interested in learning more about Mirror Trading. Page 5
THE COMPLETE TRADER PROGRAM COURSE CONTENT The Complete Trader Program Course Content GETTING A GOOD OVERVIEW OF THE FOREX MARKET A wide variety of aspects are looked at on the forex market, broken down in to the following sections Brief History of the Forex Market Forex vs Stocks, pros and cons What is traded and how? Market size and liquidity When are the good times to trade? Different types of Forex trading, and why we use ours What to consider when choosing currency pairs How is money traded in the market? How to read a Forex quote Long vs Short / Bid vs Ask First look at a Forex chart and how to read it o What is a pip o Time frames o Candles 101 (just four for trend reversals) Lots, leverage, profit and loss Types of orders (pending orders, immediate etc) LEARN BY PAPER/DEMO TRADING Today we open demo accounts together and start looking at various indicators and more details on candlesticks. We will be using MetaTrader 4 for this course. o Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) More on Candles o Candle Stick Cheat Sheet LOOKING AT SCALPING AND OTHER SYSTEMS After going through some of the more popular indicators, we will go through a few Forex systems and explain how they are put together. The end goal being that you learn enough to find or even make your own systems that suit your trading style. We aim to introduce you to 3 different Forex systems, and we will demo trade them on the day. PRICE ACTION AND PATTERN TRADING SYSTEM Price Action and Pattern Trading is the most successful system I have used. It is a lower stress system and requires less monitoring so suits the part time traders as well as full time traders very well. In essence, Price Action Trading is based around finding important historical price levels and trend lines then using this information to predict future market movements. It is a complete system on its own, and can also be applied to almost any other system as it requires no indicators Choosing the right broker (for demo account we ll use Markets.com Basic MetaTrader 4 functions o Add new graph o Change Time Frames o Create/save/load graph templates o Placing a trade o Modifying a trade o Closing a trade Most common indicators and how to apply them o Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) o Stochastic o Moving Averages (EMA and SMA) PSYCHOLOGY OF TRADING, ROBOT TRADING VS TRADING LIKE A ROBOT If there was such a thing as the holy grail of systems, it could still easily fail because of human intervention. This section will touch on a few aspects of what to expect when you open a real account. We will also run through the basic concept of robot trading and how these things work (or don t). The summary of the course will work more like a Q&A time on the final day. We will go through each section, and you can bring along any unanswered questions. Page 6
COMPLETE TRADER AFTER THE COURSE Complete Trader After the course Once you have completed the course, and you have the knowledge it s time to work on the wisdom. ONLINE COURSE ACCESS EVEN FOR CLASSROOM STUDENTS The best possible tool to use as a refresher is access to my online class. I give free access to people who have attended my classroom training or 1 on 1 sessions. You have lifetime access 24/7 to the entire online course series to watch the videos and go through the notes. This is ideal for people who may have forgotten something, want to reinforce what they ve learned or if they ve taken a break between the course and knuckling down to trade. 12 WEEK FOLLOW UP PROGRAM Once you are finished with the actual training, you will be armed with enough information to start getting experience on the platform itself. So now we need to get some real practice in, so when you do finally invest real money you have enough experience. You will receive weekly tasks, suggestions and information to enhance what was discussed in the class. The tasks are all designed with the knowledge that 99% of participants are busy people so they do not take up too much time and you can continue working. The program will assist you with real experience, practicing your money management skills, learning how to trade news events and more importantly it will assist you learn what type of trader you are. ONLINE TRADERS COMMUNITY We have setup a forum at www.tradingcentral.co.za with a hidden member s area for past and present students. The majority of the forum is open and available to the public, and we encourage people to get involved. The member s section is where our professional traders will answer every trade related question personally, and not rely on the community. This way, if you have questions, you get professional advice. Once a question is answered, it can be moved to the public forums for other people. We use the member s area specifically to make sure that our students get the right answers and assistance. Page 7
CONTACT INFORMATION Contact Information If you d like to know more, or you d like to discuss your own path to successful Forex trading then give us a call. Complete Trader Office 202 Blaauwberg Mall Marine Circle Blouberg Tel : 021 556 8561 Email : info@completetrader.co.za www.completetrader.co.za Want to open a demo account? Click here to open with Markets.com A Practical Application of the Retail Forex Market Page 8