Newbie question. Help needed!

[omidlk]

Hi mates,

I'm a newbie trader and have been learning about the Forex market for the past 5 months on a demo account with oanda. I have a couple of questions for experienced traders on the forum.

FYI, I'm currently studying day-trading strategies to be used in the early hours of the Japan session. I'm located in Toronto but since I have a day-time job, I can catch only the first few hours of Japan. Also I wont be able to start with more than $5000 when I go live.

1- In the Japan session (7-11 EST), market is moving pretty slowly and trendless most of the time (I get the trend from 30min chart and trade in 5min chart) and as a result of low volatility, indicators are not as reliable. I'm getting a little frustrated with this, so I was wondering if anybody else in my situation can make reasonable winning trades/pips within these hours. Also I can't go for short term trading due to the size of my account and the fact that I won't be able to watch the market in the daytime Europe and New York. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

2- I would like to backtest my strategies but I don't know programming. well I know the basics as I used to write simple programs in Pascal but I haven't touched that for a few years. So for someone with little programming experience who is still doing demo to learn, what provider do you guys think is the best for backtesting.

thanks,
Omid

[dot]

In your situation consider using an expert advisor (mechanical system) as a second strategy.

Which pairs do you trade? during japanese session us/european currencies are slow but yen, aud/nzd and sometimes gbp/jpy are moving pretty well.

consider also strategies requiring only 15 min of work daily - for example simple daily breakouts, you put orders at 17-20 est and thats all.

[omidlk]

Hi dot.

I watch USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, AUD/USD and GBP/JPY. but haven't looked at NZD pairs yet. Also I'm learning MQL4 to automate my trades when I can't watch the market.

thanks for your advice. I'll look into break out techniques for this time frame. BTW, do you know any decent book or course about MQL4 for beginners? I have googled but didn't find anything but a few so-called courses which are more like a dictionary than an educational course.

Omid