Forex Short Term Trading

Forex Short Term Trading

I love forex short term trading. I know and often preach about not trading short term for beginners but I do know that you will trade short term anyway. Short term trading is fun, it's high energy, and it's exciting. I love to do it and I love the game of trying to outsmart the market. The problem with trading is that boring trading is good trading. Yes, if you've read my posts before you know that I always say that. What we gain the excitement of short term trading, we lose in profitability and stability. My goal with this article is to give you a short term trading method  that will be more profitable that anything that you are currently doing.

The technique that I will show you is very simple and easy. Because it is so simple, we will first focus on the extra things that will make you profitable. The extra thing that will help you is having the right mindset. The thing about day trading and intrday trading is that it should be done infrequently. The setups that give you daytrading plays do not occur that often. Guys who are always in a trade are making low probability gambles. We want high probability trades to maximize our forex profits.

So realize that you will not have many trades with this system. You have to mentally accept this fact to understand this form of trading. You will need to find peace in trading less often to be happy using most profitable trading methods in forex. For me it was a hard transition to make because I was a forex scalper. I was making around 100 trades a day. I was in and out of trades at such a high frequency. I was a speed trader.

Follow The Leader

Follow the leader is a technique that I learned when I worked at a prop trading house. We only traded short term. One of our methods consisted of the following things:


(1) Add the 20 SMA to your chart

(2) Add the 08 SMA to your chart

(3) Open the 5 minute chart


We will only make trades along the 08/20 SMA. We are using the 5 minute chart so that we will have more trades. We call this method follow the leader because past data has shown that price tends to follow a direct process. When you see 3 bars going all in the same direction, you can guess that price will continue to go in that same direction. We are look for 3 bar all going in the same direction and we will make a trade in that direction.

We will set our stop loss below the bar that got us in the trade and we will seek a take profit equal to the previous bar. This is a method that is very successful but you have to follow the system. It can also be used on higher time frames for more accurate forex trades.