When you think of trading stocks, futures, or options, odds are that the term “trading” conjures up images of sweaty traders hunched over dossiers on their computer screens. The reality is that most day Traders remain in the background, making occasional trade while working towards becoming one of the moneyed class. You see, back in the good old days when everyone had a stock picker and hangman was a word processor, everyone got into trading because they liked to make money. It was something they could do full time. But now? The tech has advanced to the point where almost anyone with an internet connection and an interest in finance can set up a live account and start making money from it. Today, most people trade because it’s how they make money. And if you’re looking at making money from trading in MetaTrader 4 (MT4), then there are some very specific strategies that need to be employed if you want to succeed. Let’s take a look at 5 strategies that will help you make the most of MT4:
Be an active trader
As you might have gathered from the above, being an active trader is key in making money in MetaTrader 4. This means that you need to be seeking out buy and sell opportunities on the trading computer itself. In other words, you’re not going to sit in your favorite trading seat at your favorite broker and wait for an opportunity to pounce. Instead, you need to be front-facing the computer, actively seeking out opportunities to make money. One strategy that you can use to help you stay focused is to create a trading journal. Every time you buy or sell a stock, futures contract, or other financial asset, write it down in your trading journal. You can then refer to this journal when you’re researching trades and see if you can improve on your record-setting performance. This can help you stay focused and avoid getting overwhelmed by the immense amounts of information present in MT4.
Be disciplined and stick to your trading plan
While it’s always a good idea to experiment with new strategies and techniques at first, you need to be disciplined enough to stick to your trading plan. This means that you need to ensure that you’re actively seeking out opportunities to make money and not getting drawn into buying and running with false trades. There are a number of strategies to help you with this. One that we’ve covered previously is “Sell in May and walk away in June.” In this strategy, you put on a trade in May that you expect to make a profit in June. You then walk away from that trade in June, and the money that you would have lost is profit for you. This is pretty much a no-lose situation because you walk away from the trade with no risk of losing any money.
Identify bottoming and topping trades
One of the best ways to start making money in MT4 is to identify bottoming and topping trades. These are defined as trades that initiate a trade at your buy price and then wait for the market to continue its upward trend before closing the trade. This is one of the most common strategies used to make money in MT4 and it has a few things going for it. You are likely to make more money in the short-term. Traditionally, these have been one-off trading strategies that work well when you’re just getting started in trading. However, with the immense number of tools and features available in MT4, it’s not difficult to find situations where you can use this strategy. Your risk management is solid: Traditionally, this has been the Achilles’ heel of the stock picker. However, with the rise of high-frequency trading, the much vaunted “predictive trade” that Google and others are currently marketing, the risk of human-induced market bias is very small.