Thanks for your input. Sound advice. I noticed some of your pieces on the ‘Donkeys’ threads, but don’t read them as gambling leaves me cold. I used to belong to various tipsters services, but having always blown up my accounts, I don’t do it any more. I am retired and have the time to be patient with Forex and I agree patience is the key and as I have said several times on this thread, I refuse more trades than I take. Belt, braces and a piece of string, that’s my style.

Some people say trading is all about big pips, not money but I don’t agree. I think it is about consistency. If you can regularly and reliably pull in a certain amount of pips, then the money obviously follows. For example, if you had sufficient capital to allow a 2 percent risk and trade say £100 per pip and could guarantee to just get 5 pips per week you would get, obviously £500 profit. Try doing that with a smaller account at £1 a pip and you need 500 pips to do the same – a different (impossible) ball game altogether. This, I think is where it goes wrong for amateurs – they try to force more pips out of the market than are there, in an effort to get rich quick. Can’t be done. Be happy with a profit, whatever it may be. Some day it will be bigger. Just like sportsmen, we can’t all be big winners, but we CAN all be big losers. This is why I say small number of pips, regularly obtained and compounded over a long period must be the way. I understand pro traders working for the big banks are happy with small number of pips but trade millions of pounds at a time, so their profits are enormous. Obviously they are supremely confident of their ability, have the equipment and knowledge. Some traders even have computers with that trade in and out faster than humans can, hundreds of times per second, grabbing fractions of a pip at a time. They don’t go for the 100 pip runs. What chance do we have with a pc and internet connection? We have to take a different route – the slow one.

Whether 5 percent or 10 percent are successful, I don’t know – only the broker/spread companies know that, but I seriously doubt it is anywhere near 30 percent. I doubt JW knows either. By their constant special offers, I conclude they need to keep getting new punters to replace their failures. If 30 percent keep trading profitably, they would grow their businesses easily. As it is IG for instance are losing millions at the moment according to their last set of accounts.

Anyway, keep posting your experiences and we look forward to Pete’s record as well. Looks like this thread is down to just 3 of us now.

Good luck.

George.

Hope it helps. There are very few successful Traders out there. When i said there were only 5 to 10% John Wheatland said it was an ‘urban myth’ and reckons its more like 30%. What do YOU think?? What i do know is that whatever the truth is it’s therefore definitely ODDS – ON between 1/20 to 3/10 at best that Newbies WILL FAIL. PLEASE DON’T BE ONE OF THEM!
All the best to everyone! John

Thanks for that – very grateful. At last some proper info. Look forward to your posts later on.

As far as 100 pips per week goes, I have never been able to achieve that, although it is the default on TESS. I have found that just trying for 10 pips per day is achievable, as you say and when using 2 percent bank and compounding it will give great results long term.

For myself, I am plodding along o.k. without TESS, although for the first couple of weeks I did miss it terribly and made a few big mistakes. Whatever anyone says about it, mechanically TESS is superb software, so easy to use. If you go on to MT4 like I have done, for all its worldwide use, it is much more difficult to use, and you do need a calculator and pencil to make the calculations but as with all things, with practice it gets easier, so maybe if you do work out something on TESS, you may be able to transfer the knowledge to save the data feed costs, if that’s what you want to do, but if you do, I’d advise running both for a while.

I need to get some kind of little calculator like Neil produced for ATM to ease things a little, but that’s further down the line. Maybe, at my age, I should just keep doing the calculations to keep my brain active and ward off old age problems!

Thanks again, Pete.

Look forward to hearing from you in due course.

George

Just to update you on my last 4 weeks using Tess with JS’s system let’s just say that I’m more hopeful.

JS’s system itself only gets 30-50 pips per week in the mornings, according to him, but this isn’t enough for me to be happy with as 100 per week minimum has always been my target.

However he uses a variation on an indicator that, when questioned, is a reverse of how you would look at it and is based around something from FX-180. In giving this a good testing over 4 weeks morning and afternoon I can confirm that it has merit but it’s lacking in certain areas.

The upshot is, without going into detail, I’ve used a whole host of info I’ve been testing these past two years almost daily and I feel confident on a few breakthroughs with some additional indicators I’ve been using and also on a rather unusual chart.

Gimme another month George and I’ll upload my IG results somewhere, as at the moment what I’ve changed JS’s system to is breaking even.

And yes, I agree, TESS is the bees knees. We just gotta all find a way of making it work for us. You’ll be able to use what I’ve come up with without TESS though no sweat. It’s just easier for marking up trades, measuring, putting on fibbs and a whole host of other stuff.

Keep smiling! Catch you again in another month.

Not worth doing then?

10% per annum?

I reckon that’s 3 pips per week. You are suffering aren’t you?

Better put your 15 grand in the new NS&I savings bond where you will get about 5 percent p.a. at the moment with no risk and no effort.

The system is massively expensive and can be difficult to make work, but people do. On the other hand the software is immaculate and has obviously taken a lot of time effort and expensive code writing to achieve. This should not be seen just as a manual and a few discs – it is education and a good foundation for understanding forex. I’ve seen many courses on sale that cost $5000 or more and offer less. You need to put in the screen time and treat it as a PART of your learning. Just waiting for signals will not do it, although the sales blurb does give the impression that this is all you do. Microsoft Windows is similar – a book and a disc worth maybe a fiver, but sold for hundreds of pounds. It is not the intrinsic worth that counts, but the use you can make of it.

I am now trading using the TUFXP principles, (but without the software, of course), on MT4 and it works fine. No more data feeds costs. I would not have been able to do that from scratch, even with Babypips and would have given up long ago.

Neil still does the market overviews and you can see from that, the opportunities there are in trading, even though of course it is necessarily retrospective. If you cannot see those opportunities in the charts, then you have not learned well enough. Put in the time and effort and you can do it.

Whilst i have Traded, pretty unsuccessfully to be honest, over the past 3 years i have a friend who , with 6 years Trading experiences combines his own approaches with the excellent TUFXP software and for the past 6 months he has been very successful with it. So SOME PEOPLE have gained from, and like the product as my friend does!

My own take is that TUFXP is like an Aircraft Cockpit and with so many variables it is not surprising so many people ‘crash’.

That said i feel it is a masssively expensive Product, that the majority of people have not made money, and that the Training was far too basic and there has been much criticism of the ‘support’ or lack of it.

BUT, i don’t think the wordused above are fair, balanced or appropriate!

Thanks for the reply. Glad to hear you are prepared to give a view on the JS method when you’ve tried it for a while. Shouldn’t think Jack will make a problem, after all it is still about TUFXP and anyway, this thread seems to be dying out, probably like the active users.

Even with the JS method, from what you say, 2 out of 10 successful users does not seem to be a great advert. There again, I do believe that most people will never be able to trade forex with any system – it does, as you say, require a certain mindset. Probably that’s where John Wheatland scores – he seems to babysit his fans.

As far as copyright issues are concerned, there are none for individual users to make any alterations they like – no doubt most successful users do that, because it certainly does not seem work straight out of the box. Where I think there could be problems is in publishing a system (even on here) based on TUFXP which has copyright, and which could be to the detriment of the originator, i.e. getting people to leave IQ. That’s why I don’t think JW will give you a reply and anyway as I said it is none of his business. He just opined, correctly that Keith did not need to tie this in to a subscription feed, but saw it as a way to make more money. Keith actually says so in his adverts. John wants to sell his own system, not make Keith Cotterill’s one work.

Anyway, that’s the way I see it, but I am a belt, braces and piece of string kind of guy, so maybe worry unnecessarily, but I’m not getting into the publishing business – my blood pressure would not stand it.

Once again, good luck – it certainly is there for the taking.