Forex Systems And Their Time Frames

On this page, I have a guest writer with me: Jamie who has been learning a new forex system based on trading 5 minutely charts and telling us about his experiences:

Hi everyone, my name is Jamie, and I'd like to just share my experiences with learning a forex system.

I'd like to share this as I feel it's helpful for people to understand the reality of trying to learn a forex system because it does take hard work.

It's not just something you pick up overnight. And so I think this will help people understnad better what it means to learn a trading system so they can decide for themselves whether they want to trade or not.

I've been learning a system based on 5 minutely charts. I can't reveal the system but I want to just talk about what it's like to learn it, and what the challenges are.

I've found that the 5 minute time frame was good in these areas:

1. You get to trade for 3 hours a day and that's it. There's no looking at the chart every 2 hours over the whole day to see if you;re still in the position.

2. You learn the system, and also what you don't know about the system (and hence you should find out and learn!) very quickly. Why? Because the candles or bars happen every 5 minutes so you experience in real time several trade set ups in a session, rather than a set up every week or so with say daily time frames.

3. It suits my temperament because I like to get the trading done in one session.

The challenges with learning a forex system were these:

1. It may look good on paper, but when you actually paper trade it to learn it, you realise that you don't know what todo in over 10 different situations! So it's time to find out from the teacher. No excuses, you've got ot learn the system properly or you could be trading a not very successful system!

2. You need a lot of practice. When the candles tick over every 5 minutes, it's faster than you think because if you're new to recognizing a set up, you have to think and this could take minutes, by which time guess what...? Another candle has come up and you have to think again.

3. You have to have no distractions because the 3 hours you're concentrating. So you have to treat it as learning time and when you have questions, as I said, ou have to get the answer.

So I think I'm still learning.

There are things to clear up.

But overall the time frame is an interesting one as my forex trades are out by the end of the day so I don't have the overnight risk.