Gerard increased his account in June by 47.56% ROI.

Hi, my name is Gerard DeJager and I’ve been a member of LTG Goldrock since June 2009.

I have my own business and work as a Sourcing / Procurement consultant on projects in Australia and Asia.  I have been living with my wife and 2 young kids in Melbourne since 2006 after having lived in The Netherlands, Malaysia, China and South-Korea and definitely don’t want to move anywhere else……. Australia is the place to be !!!!

I have gone through the learning curve of trading, lost and won loads of money by taking too much risk and finally after a year I think I am getting the hang of it and trade beyond the calls made in the room.

Thanks to LTG GoldRock I have learned to settle for a disciplined and responsible way of trading that will pay off in the end but not as quick as I thought a year ago. There is no wonder recipe that makes you wealthy overnight. I am spending maybe 20 hours a week trading, mainly mobile trading and my target is 1% ROI per day. My favorite trades are the range and trend trades, but I love to scalp at least 3-4 times a day on the EUR/USD. If I can achieve that consistently I will stop working in 2011.

Daniel Fitzgerald made 7.74% ROI last month and will no doubt keep growing his Nett Profit.

Dr Daniel Fitzgerald is a 28 year old Aerospace Engineer, graduating from the Queensland University of Technology in 2002.

He followed for the next 3.5 year completing a PhD in the autonomous aerial vehicle area, with particular focus on artificial intelligence and automated algorithms.  He has worked with the CSIRO and some other private companies in this area.  He is currently in a project manager role in Brisbane with a research centre.

He has a huge passion for the stockmarket, being introduced to it several years ago.  Since then he has focussed on learning as much as possible about the markets.  Initially focussing on eminis, he has in the past 9 months moved focus onto the forex market.   Having programmed computers since an early age, and being highly motivated and excited in working out patterns in the market, Daniel spends a lot of time backtesting his strategies on historical data.

“My basic approach is to develop a strategy on different timeframes, allow sufficient enough data to ensure that the results are statistically significant, so as to hopefully produce a strategy that has a positive expectancy when traded live in the market.”

“I have recently released my first live strategy in the Forex market which resulted in profits in the first month which I’m pleased with.  I will be continuing to develop strategies so that over the coming months I can have multiple strategies running in the market.”

“My advice for other traders is that entry signals can be quite simple, it’s in the exit strategy which you protect and make you money.  For example, I have learnt now, that on any particular strategy I have a number of exits – eg: a hard fixed stop loss (at your worst loss point, ie: 2% of your capital), a breakeven point (where you move your stop loss higher) and a time based stop – to exit the market if the trend you though was happening didn’t happen”

“My primary goal is to be investing in Forex full time and property developing within 2 years.”

Daniel is passionate about trading and is currently developing technical indicators and testing various strategies for his future trading.

Richard Duncan is definitely a fan of the Risk Calculator

Congratulations to Richard Duncan who was our ‘Best Risked’ Account winner for June, he has won $1000 to add to his growing Trading Account.

Richard  joined LTG GoldRock in Oct 2009…

I have found LTG GoldRock’s education and training to be really great and it has been a huge learning curve for me. I made some big mistakes in the beginning, but when I made a plan for my trading things started to change for me.

You take small steps to start off  with and do not leap into it. I am really looking forward to the journey. I use my mobile phone to trade with as I work outside which is a great tool.

Risk Management and not trading beyond his means is an essential part of Richard’s Trading Plan. If you are yet to download and learn how to use the Risk Calculator then I strongly urge you to do so.

So what systems can you put in place to have a ‘well risked’ Trading Account?

• Manage the amount of capital you trade with the Risk Calculator or some other tool to ensure you are not trading beyond your means as lot sizes can alter between the different currency pairs.
• Learn how to manage your Wins and Losses – take a look over last month’s trading account are your average wins bigger than your average losses?
• Always trade with a Stop Loss and try to stick to your Trading Plan.

Thank-you to everyone who entered the competition last month, it’s great to see so many traders growing and evolving into successful traders. I look forward to receiving your entry into the competition this month! We will have some new and exciting prizes so stay tuned!

Trading is a funny game and often goes against the grain of human thinking. Generally speaking if you study something long enough and research it using the latest techniques and professional tools available you have a good chance of being right. This is the very type of mindset thinking that people bring into the trading arena and lose.

A few years ago I knew a trader who lost over $50,000 in 3 hours trading futures and dinted his confidence in a big way.  He  employed a friend  who he’d worked with who is an incredibly bright guy. He had previously designed extremely sophisticated town planning systems throughout the world. A very bright guy indeed. The trader that had lost the money said to me one day that his opinion was that his mate had the perfect skills and technical ability to develop a system to get all the money back he’d lost. It was at a relatively early stage in my trading career and I didn’t know much better but all I kept thinking was, I hope he shares it with me if it works.   Needless to say it didn’t, but the talent assembled to research and put together a trading system that showed incredible returns when back tested never materialised when traded live.  Their opinion was wrong.

I have also had countless computer programmers approach me and tell me that they can automate the way I trade and have such strong opinions on their ability to make fortunes if I would only show them how I trade exactly. Their opinion is that it’s able to be automated. You can’t automate human intuition and experience and this is why banks use humans to make decisions and not computers.

The bottom line is when you are a trader your opinion about the market does not matter, what matters is the opinions of millions of others and the opinions of the large institutional investors and banks who will buy or sell after you. You may have an opinion but what really matters  is do the major players have the same opinion as you. You have to be prepared to be wrong a lot when you first learn to trade and accepting losses as part of the learning curve can be tuff, especially if you are not managing your money well, which 90%  of amateur traders don’t.

You just went to a seminar, read a book, joined a trading company and they taught you a strategy that supposedly works. So what happens next? Your start to form an opinion about the trades and that raises your expectation levels.

In reality if you are a buyer the only way price can move higher is if people come in after you and are prepared to buy at a high price. Unless you know who those people are and exactly the time they will buy and how much, it is of little use to you to form an opinion on what is going to happen, because that opinion will raise an expectation and if that expectation is not met, you take it personally and often can’t accept the fact you were wrong. How can I be wrong? It always goes up, they said it did and I saw it with my own two eyes.

What you need to do is learn a to trade a system and forget about forming opinions in the market. Just trade your system and if you have an opinion, leave it at the front door because in most cases when you are learning to trade your opinion is going to be wrong, but if it is a solid system, if you just continue to trade the system the chance of you making money is significantly higher than forming opinions and expectations. These opinions and expectations also cause traders to jump out early for their profit or loss, skip trades or worse remove a stop loss because their opinion says it’s going back up.

GBP JPY Short 06-05-2010

As part of the Trader of the Month Competition we ask for the winners to share their trading journey and advice with their fellow traders. Michael Horneman was 10th on last month’s Trader of the Month Leaderboard and I have no doubt that we will be hearing more from him in the future.

Keep reading to learn about Michael’s Trading Journey and we are also lucky enough to have him share his advice as he offers an insight into his own Trading Plan.

Michael’s Story…

I began trading around 2 1/2 years ago, I first started with learning to trade Eminis. This initial experience is what first got my mindset and phsycology ready for trading financial markets.
I didn’t trade for very long as I had limited capital to begin with, and like most beginner traders lost money, but I learned some great lessons about managing risk and preserving capital. I was also very risky and too willing to trade, I still had in my head a “get rich quick” mentality and was looking to take every trade I could. Looking back this has also been the pattern for the first 6 months I was trading forex with LTG GoldRock.

To make the change from a mindset of working for money and selling my time for money was not easy, and it has taken around 2 years to really begin to understand this in a way that helps you view money differently.

Initially I was unable to change my mind from “get rich quick” to a managable “get rich slow” but over time have been able to, and this made a huge impact on my daily trading habits. I used to be glued to the screen and really beat myself up if I missed a trade, but this was only because I was greedy for profit, and also didn’t grasp the concept of probability, meaning that even though I missed a winning trade, the next trade is just as likely to be a winner, not more likely to be a loser due to the previous winner. The light switched on for me when I cancelled my trading room subscriptions for trade calls, and then took the knowledge I had gained over the last 2 years and looked at my own set of charts and asked myself the question, I know how this trade trade sets up, now why don’t I beleive it is profitable.

I decided to learn 1 trade back to front, back test it myself for 2 years, calculate the best stop to profit targets, and then once I had done this I was able to see clearly why this trade setup worked, how it worked and how I could profit from it. I now have a simple yet workable trading plan that actually suits my lifestyle, and is proven to be profitable.

My trading plan is so simple and uncluttered now, it used to be so long I couldn’t even understand it let alone follow it. Simple really is better, for both trading and discipline, it is easy to follow a few rules all the time than many rules all the time.

My plan basically is:

1. Take all zingo trades that occur on the chosen pairs CHF/JPY, USD/JPY, AUD/JPY, GBP/JPY and EUR/JPY.

2. Once I check the charts I look at the next possible occurance of a signal and then I list this in a desktop file and put a note on my phone and do not look at the charts until this time. This means I check the charts twice a day at most for 10 minutes.(easy as….)

3. Once a trade confirms take it with the stop and loss targets set out from backtesting, most are the same with a couple of small alterations to help maximise profit without complicating the system. I also leave the trades to run, I do not check them I simply wait for the stop or profit target to be hit. I also use the same account % for stop and profit each time regardles of trade pip size.

4. For each trade that confirms take a screen shot and save as a record of all trade, and also to look back on at end of month to see how each trade set up, and also as a record for backtesting.

This plan has helped me be able to approach trading as a business, and from an outside point of view, rather than of frustration and obsession with profits that were never materialising. I hope to add to this plan as I get comfortable with another signal and have backtested it myself I will then add it to my plan.

So, I guess this has been a long paragraph, but my simply lesson learned would be to get familiar with a few trade setups, even 1 is enough, backtest it yourself to build your own confidence in your ability to place these trade, and personalise the rules surrounding the trade so that you are following your own plan and not trying to learn something that works for someone else. We are all different and so this should come through in our trading, it is not really the specific approach that counts but simply your faith in your own ability to place a trade, and that trade being tested to be a high probability trade. This, and the discipline to continue to do this over the long term will give you success as a trader. I have also learned to be patient, and look to the long term rather than stress over a missed trade, I now look forward to them, especially when they are not profitable….

Above is a screen shot of one of my favourite recent trades, I am now trying to work out a strategy to take advantage of market moves such as this, the trade is the second red arrow from the right, and you can see the significant move that occurred straight after the entry. Looks great in my trade record folder…

Thanks for you help LTG, and happy trading.

Mike Horneman

One thing that I have learnt through the school of hard knocks is that there is no question all budding Forex traders who join LTG GoldRock have a high expectation on their success in the first 12 months. The most common question I get asked is. “How long till I can make my educational investment back”. Ok a fair question however the answer lies in your commitment to learn to trade and becoming a student of the markets. Traders always overestimate how much money they are going to make in the first 12 months however underestimate what they can achieve over 3 to 5 years if they actually learn the skill and art of trading. A high expectation (which is a healthy thing if the expectation is realistic) is often met by disappointment in the first 3 months which dampens the long term opportunity as the money is not coming fast enough. Especially if they are joining to fix a financial situation. If you are considering joining LTG GoldRock for this reason then please don’t join.

I met one of my absolute very best graduates for coffee at my local coffee shop here in Noosa today. His name is Jimmy and he is honestly today living the life of his dreams. I am so proud of him!!  He trades for a few hours in the evening when he wants too, he relocated his family to the Sunshine Coast from Melbourne 12 months ago this week and he told me today he is so happy and loves his new life. He does what he wants, when he wants and is now truly financially independent and has the skill and knowledge to be anywhere in the world and create a recession proof income for himself and his family for the rest of his life. Now that’s a skill most of you would love to have I am sure. Here’s what he did.

Jimmy was a student of the markets for over 12 months before he began earning in some weeks, more than he use to make in 3 months driving his courier van. For the first 12 months he learnt to trade, studied hard and became a dedicated sponge for learning how to trade, without the expectation of huge profits. What he did was set himself up for long term success. You see most traders give up inside 12 months because they are not making the money they expected, and most of the time also not following the rules that apply to successful trading. However those traders who “make it” are prepared to put the money in the back seat and the knowledge and skill firmly in the front seat and learn how to use it professionally to their long term benefit. Their profits may be small in the first 6 months and some make no profit at all, however so long as they are not losing money consistently they are learning the skill of trading. The question will be, will they continue to refine their performance so as they continue to improve their results as Jimmy did.  Have you heard of any household name major brands in the world that have done this? There are dozens and dozens of them.

Let me ask you a quick question. If you could be given an opportunity to learn how to potentially replace a full time income, spending 4 to 6 hours a week for the next 12 months to 18 months learning part time how to do trade, would you take that opportunity? Before you answer yes or no let me remind you of the benefits of getting it right.

No staff, live anywhere in the world, have a recession proof business that requires no overhead to run, no marketing and advertising to do, no money or customers to chase, work what days you want,  keep your risk and money management to 1% or less, build your cash flow at your own pace.    Ok now answer Yes or No? If you answered No then I don’t think trading is for you.

Getting the expectation right from day #1 is critical as it will set you up for long term success and when you hit the hurdles and bumps in the first 6 months that you MUST power through, you are actually able to do it. The realistic expectation for a trader for the first 3, 6 and 12 months is to learn the skill of trading, have a heck of a fun time doing it, make a nice small profit that outstrips what capital could have been made in a bank or managed fund. If they can achieve better than a managed fund in the first 12 months then they are on the right track to being able to join the likes of Jimmy and others who are truly living a wonderful rich and fulfilling life as a trader, 2 and 3 years on from when they started. Where are you going to be in 2 to 3 years from now? Are you prepared to spend the first 12 months learning or don’t you have the time? I know you have the time, it’s whether you really have the commitment.

All the best.

Trading can be rollercoaster, but it's important to have the nerve to sit back and enjoy the ride.

The Freak Out Trader can be both a winning and losing trader, but is always a newbie trader as a Freak Out Trader NEVER makes it to professional status with consistent profits.

The Freak Out Traders emotions are let loose to the extent that when they have wins their excitement drives them to freak out and get so excited they think they are bullet proof. The Freak Out Trader also experiences depression and freaks out on the losses too. What is going on subconsciously is that they don’t realise it yet, but the reason why they are freaking out is because they are not in control. The market is in control. They are usually trading too much money, trading too often and don’t really understand the system they are using. These examples usually come down to inexperience and their attachment to money and certainty we all have when we start trading. As a trader you need to have a detachment to the money and learn to trade the probability rather than the expected certainty that humans have when we enter the trading arena.

If a new trader experiences a few winning trades to begin with they are lulled into a false sense of security. They begin to think that “this is too easy” and begin to trade larger sums or over trade and take multiple positions. This false sense of security often happens in simulation as traders rarely lose in simulation. They trade probability well but don’t know they are doing it, they follow the system as there is no fear of loss. They don’t know it yet, but  they have gotten lucky and truthfully have no real idea about what they are doing, especially when they trade real money. Any mistakes are magnified 10 fold with real money. The first few trades a newbie trader makes with real money there is a 90% chance they got out of the trade before the profit target was reached or they altered the stop loss or profit target a number of times. They rarely did this in simulation as they felt comfortable, because there was no fear of loss and they followed the rules.  Now of course if they do get lucky and their trades are successful while they are fiddling, this can be one of the worst things to happen, as it creates a false sense of security. They think they are in control, when the real truth is they are far from it. The Freak Out Trader is steadily growing inside and will shortly explode.

They are about to experience what it is like to be ambushed as a trader from within your own mind. When the short winning streak comes to an end they lose control emotionally and freak out. I have seen this happen time and time again and unless you are prepared to learn to trade probability and learn to manage risk of 0.05% of your trading account and learn to build up your mindset muscle, you will fall victim and likely become A Freak Out Trader.

To test right now if you are a Freak Out Trader ask yourself these questions…

1. Do you get out of trades early whether for the profit or stop?
2. Do you adjust your profit and stop loss levels?
3. When you look at your trading statement are the wins always smaller than the losses?

If each win you have is not bigger than the average loss, if you don’t use a risk calculator, if you don’t learn to trade probability for months first and learn to experience winning streaks and losing streaks and build up your trading mindset muscle, you will fall victim to becoming A Freak Out Trader.

The only way to avoid becoming A Freak Out Trader (who usually lasts less than 6 months trading a live account) is to do the following.

1. Trade 0.5% on each trade and trade with a small account.
2. Learn to master one signal and own it emotionally and understand it’s probability through your own hard work learning the signal.
3. You must feel comfortable with each trade and be totally at ease win or loss, and have faith you know the probability.
4. Trade it consistently each time it presents itself with real money maintaining your risk vs reward and make sure the winners are always bigger than the losses.

If you apply the above 4 points you will put yourself in the class of trader who is not likely to fall victim to the Freak Out Trader mentality.

All the best

One aspect of trading that you must understand and take on board RIGHT NOW is this. The market is only a two horse race. Buyers and Sellers are the only horses in this race and the price is either going up or down. How simple is that. Yeah I know what you are thinking, it has to be more complicated than that, ITS NOT!   Simply looking at a trend and placing a trade with a trend has the probability of continuing in the direction of the trend rather than reverse and go the other way. But why is it humans consistently try and build systems and indicators that over complicate things. The more complicated you make things the less likely you will make money, period.

What you need to do is find a simple system that has the balance of probability on its side and simply play it with great money management. The worst case scenario will likely be that you will not lose money. But if you try and over complicated things, jump from one strategy to the next and don’t work your way through the losing and winning streaks of the simple system, you will never make money trading Forex consistently.

The KISS principle is not taught often enough (keep it simple stupid) and if most traders simply committed to a simple system that trades with the trend, managed their risk to a minimum, ensured their profits are always bigger than their losses (even if it is by only 5%) you chances of making money are significantly improved.

It’s important to review your results and try to be as honest as possible with yourself. Run through each trade you took and make sure it actually is inline with your Trading Plan. It’s human nature to make excuses for those trades that you jumped out of early or took because you had a gut feeling, but unfortunately the only person you are deceiving is yourself.

As you may have read about in Narelle’s bio, some trader’s like to keep their partners involved with their trading results for Accountability. This is great advice to find yourself a Trading Buddy, and can be a very productive excercise. So if you don’t yet have a Trading Buddy to review your trades with, then reach out to someone you know and include them in your trading evaluation.

Here in a nut shell are my two opinions and hunches for the next 3 months.

1. The aussie dollar to continue to steadily rise
2. We will also see a steady increase in the price of gold.

As Traders it’s important to stay up to date with the latest Forex News and global market movements. It would be ignorant to be in the business of Trading Currencies and not know what is happening around the world to each of the currency pairs.