(stock speculator) - a person who enters into transactions in financial markets in order to make a profit.
Sign of a successful trader- the ability to steadily accumulate capital.
Trader statistics
The harsh reality is something like this:- 10% traders trade at a profit.
- 5% of traders consistently earn good money in the market year after year
- 80% of beginners will leave the exchange within a year.
- 10% of traders make money on the stock market
- 5% of traders consistently earn money on futures
- less than 1% of traders consistently earn money on Forex (see)
Why do people become traders?
The only correct motive trader- this is a stable income.Newcomers come to the stock exchange with the goal of earning money and gaining independence from paid work. People who have achieved success in life come to the stock exchange to manage their own savings. It seems to many beginners that the stock exchange and trading are easy money out of thin air, so many people want to try the taste of easy money. But not many succeed. The unconscious motives of a trader are excitement and thrill-seeking. In the end, many people forget that they came to the market with the goal of making a stable profit, and continue trading for the thrill. But few people are aware of this.
Trader classification
By degree of freedom:
- private trader- a trader who works mainly with his own small funds. Sometimes, a private trader can manage the accounts of his client investors. Advantages: independence; full participation in the earned profits. Disadvantage: limited funds, lack of a permanent source of income, lack of centralized risk management, illegal work with investors.
- a trader working in a management company (MC). As a rule, this is a professional certified manager. Advantages: salary, risk manager, large amount of funds under management, legally formalized relations with the investor. Disadvantages: regulated working hours, receives a small share of earned profits.
- Scalper - from a few seconds to a few minutes
- Day trader - positions open and close within 1 day
- Swing Trader - position can be held for up to several days
- Investment trader - holding a position for several weeks
- Investor - position holding time - several years
Trader- scalable profession. This means that in order to earn 100 or even 1000 times more money, you need to put in exactly the same effort as working with less money. At the same time, not everything is so simple: scalable professions are only good for the lucky ones; there is very fierce competition, monstrous inequality and a gigantic discrepancy between effort and reward: a few grab huge pieces of the pie, leaving other innocent people with nothing.
Qualities of a successful trader
Intelligence is not the biggest part of the equation that makes a good trader. Mental toughness and discipline play a more important role in becoming a good trader than intelligence.This informer displays the current market sentiment. Position ratio data is collected from several brokers.
Analyze traders' open positions not only at the current moment, but also in the form of a chart.
In this article we want to briefly tell you what they are and describe the basic principles of their analysis. In addition, we present you with our own developed tools (services) for convenient analysis of the position ratio.
The service is an aggregator that combines data from various brokers. With it you can analyze open positions of traders online, not only at the current moment, but also by looking at the history of changes in this indicator over the previous few months. In addition, the tool can be configured to display one or several brokers at once. If you understand what we are talking about, you can immediately proceed to study.
What are open positions of Forex traders?
EUR/USD Example of position ratio
Open interest, or open positions– this is a percentage value that displays the current difference between the number of traders who opened a deal to buy and sell a currency. However, already closed transactions do not affect this indicator.
Forex traders positions is a great indicator of market sentiment and allows you to look at.
Most brokers, in pursuit of the loyalty of their clients, try to provide data on open positions of traders. But for the end user, analyzing, let alone comparing, this data from a dozen different sites is difficult and inconvenient. Hence the idea of creating a single tool for analyzing the ratio of short and long positions of all brokers together.
How to analyze the ratio of short and long positions?
First of all, you should not rush to open trades. First, study the data on the chart, watch it for a while until you find several price actions. In order to reduce the time of your search, we will give you a hint of what to look for:
- Almost an axiom of the market: “ The price always goes against the majority", accordingly, by opening a deal “against the crowd”, you get an additional percentage that your deal will be successful.
- Moreover, personal experience shows: when there is a strong trend in the market, most traders open positions against it. Accordingly, the statement that by opening a position against the crowd, you open a position with the trend will also be true.
- Sometimes you can see how they “gained passengers” or “threw away extra passengers,” as in this case. Example.
Now let's move on to considering the tools.
How to use the tools
Let's clarify one thing: the chart shows the percentage of long positions, but since the total value of long and short positions is 100%, you can easily calculate the value of short positions by subtracting the percentage of long positions from 100%.
How is the average calculated?
Considering that the volume of transactions is different for each broker, it would be incorrect to calculate the average value of open positions using the simple arithmetic average method. For example, the volume of open positions on Oanda is several times higher than the volume on myfxbook.
To take into account the difference in volumes, each broker is assigned a “weight”, and the higher it is, the greater its influence on the average value of open positions. The approximate “weight” of each broker is indicated in the picture on the right.
Conclusion
You should not take the information received as a guide to action; there is always a possibility that the price will go against your signals. The market is often like a tug of war, where five people compete with ten.
It will be interesting to hear your methods of analysis traders' open positions. We will also be happy to answer questions in the comments to the article. 
In this article we will try to deal with the opinion that the metatrader is a scam and this trading platform was invented only for scams.
From this article you will learn:
- Manipulation of quotes in metatrader.
- Requotes to metatrader.
- Ping to the server in metatrader.
Introduction.
In the VKontakte group, I published a certain post with the hot keys that are in Meta Trader 4. Many people began to get bombed because of MetaTrader, supposedly it is a platform for scams and a terminal for fraudulent tricks. Today I will tell you about Meta Trader4 and why it was considered a scam, and what is true and what is fiction. Let’s ignore the fact that there are certain plugins that you download or the broker installs for you. There are brokerage companies that are scammers, hiding behind legitimate Forex, but broker ratings play a big role and if the company is normal, then nothing like that happens.
Quote manipulation.
In general, the whole claim against the metatrader arises because the broker supposedly can control quotes, and the following is given as arguments: you see schedule, This is the CAD\CHF currency pair
, and with the help of simple manipulations a huge spike appears on the chart
and then the cries begin that the broker can control your quotes, that he is deliberately knocking out your stops.
However, this function of editing quotes was originally included in Meta Trader in order to remove these very studs. If you look at the same CAD\CHF pair and in order to remove this gap, you had to dig into the quotes, now these quotes have already been removed automatically. Also, I cannot view the entire chart in its entirety, because this very candle prevents me from doing so. If I take a regular ATAS terminal, then when I expand the chart, I can expand it as I please
and at the same time I don’t see this pin, that is, regardless of the size of the candles, I can rotate this chart in a way that is convenient for me. And here there is no need to implement this function, which would allow removing the quote for a more adequate display of prices, and I cannot do this in the metatrader. If you think that the broker is deliberately losing your positions by arranging such spikes, then this is simply stupidity, this one is simply very flawed. If you have an account of several thousand dollars, then the first thing you will do is screen all this and immediately run to the forum with the words: “I have a hairpin, under no circumstances invest in the Alfa Forex or Alpari company.”
But in this case, most often such transactions are usually canceled with a profit, because the essence of a broker is to take our money and it doesn’t matter what kind of broker it is - Russian, non-Russian, all brokers are interested in making a profit, and they all work against us, against traders. And naturally, the broker is not interested in spoiling its reputation because of your $100-200 in your trading account. But this applies to large companies, if the company is small and if the company has a lack of liquidity, then it will drain you, but this is done in completely different ways, this is done with the help of requotes and slippages.
Requotes.
That is, this is when the broker starts writing to you in the terminal: “The prices have changed, do you want to come in?” Well of course you want to come in! Or maybe you changed your mind in these couple of seconds, maybe the price no longer suits you. But this is most often determined by banality - not by the fact that the broker is intentionally draining you, but by your poor Internet connection to the server of this exchange. This can all be solved very simply – by clicking the “Rescan servers” button in the lower right corner
and in this case, a server will be selected for which you have the optimal ping and connection, and you will not have any requotes. That's why everyone says that Instaforex is a terrible broker, including me? Yes, because they have constant requotes, and if you search “Requotes” on YouTube, you will find such shocking videos where guys execute orders in 20 minutes, by the hour.
Trader – broker – exchange?
But it happens that you have a normal Internet connection and still requotes appear, here you can talk about the greedy nature of the broker with whom you trade. We always remember that there is the following picture
From left to right – you, your company and the exchange, and exchanges take place between them. And accordingly, if your broker is a fool, then it is at the stage of interaction with him that you have problems (requotes, slippages). And do not forget that any Forex (mostly offshore) closes the chain, that is, transactions are not withdrawn anywhere. And if you think that this is not the case on the Russian stock exchange, then you are deeply mistaken, because there is always this scheme - trader - broker - stock exchange. And if the broker has a server from the times of Pre-Revolutionary Russia, then you will have slippages.
What is slippage? This doesn’t happen on Forex, but on the Russian stock exchange this is what happens:
you open a position, you will always be executed, there have never been any requotes on the real exchange, if you entered a sell position in position 1, then you will be executed in position 2, this is called slippage. Moreover, on a real exchange there is a concept of buyers and sellers - you pressed the sell button, and the nearest buyer is lower, say, in position 2, and you were executed much lower, which is not the case in Forex.
And now let’s imagine that your brokerage company turns out to be a bunch of scoundrels and wants to put a spoke in your wheels in order to drain you. Let's say you started a conflict on a grandiose scale with a manager and showed him your place. In response, they will simply switch you to another server with a huge ping, which they can do easily, and as a result you end up with huge slippages - you are executed God knows where, when you should have left the market altogether. Therefore, in this case we are not talking about a platform, but about a normal, adequate broker. I repeat once again - the largest broker in your country is often the most reliable.
I welcome it if you can trade in normal, adequate software, if you are able to buy high-quality software - Volfix, ATAS. But unfortunately, many of my listeners don’t even have the money to replenish the deposit, let alone give $74 a month, but sooner or later you will have to do this. Do you think the toad didn’t choke me when I paid $2000 for the terminal? But I understand perfectly well that these are my expenses - I run a business on the stock exchange, the same thing that absolutely all traders do, they earn money here. Trading is a business, there is no trading, there is no business without certain investments. There are both pros and cons from your trading - this includes certain trade security, taxes and a lot of operational expenses. And, unfortunately, it is impossible without minuses. Therefore, invest in software! You will have to do this sooner or later, if not today, then tomorrow.
Provided you have an adequate broker, trade and analyze in Meta Trader 4, although analyzing charts here is a pain in the ass. And don’t be afraid of ANYTHING, and no one will put a spoke in your wheels, even with your $500 - it makes no sense. 96% of traders lose money and if I myself am a broker, then all I need to do is wait 2 weeks until you merge and I will remain clean and out of business. Another question is that when people merge, then anyone but themselves is to blame. I very often heard this: “Artem, very often, when I enter a position, the broker makes quotes against me.” He sends me a screenshot with this currency pair, I open this currency pair in another terminal and there is exactly the same price, that is, the person thinks that the broker is playing against him, although in fact the market is playing against him. If you have money, then immediately buy normal, high-quality software. I welcome the purchase of software, books, courses, articles, various access to forums, always invest in your education and technical equipment as well. Because in trading this is one of the most important factors. Metatrader has a lot of disadvantages, starting with the fact that, with 4 monitors, I can’t display a window, and running it from different users is a hemorrhoid. Everything is done very clumsily, poorly, the same volumes
The difference between the volume of the total number of open buy and sell orders is called the open position ratio. On this page you will find the ratio of all available information on traders' positions in various brokerage companies and dealing centers.
You need to be able to use this information correctly and not enter into a trade based solely on where the most positions are currently open. Trading like this doesn't always work out. It is necessary to combine this analysis with additional indicators and filters. Use information on open positions only as an additional factor in the analysis.
How to use this information:
1. Toward the largest number of open positions. If you see that on most brokers at the moment for a certain pair the number of buy orders is greater than the number of sell orders, then you decide to open a buy order. Example: Currency pair EUR/USD, buy orders 75%, sell orders 15%. It is best to consider buy orders only in this situation.
2. Toward the smallest number of open positions. Many traders believe that if everyone expects the price to go up, it must go against everyone, at least by a small number of points, or completely reverse, since the market cannot allow all traders to make money at the same time. And this theory is partly correct, but like the first method, there may be failures.
Choose the style that suits you best, make observations and do your own analysis on .
Open positions of Forex traders from 8 brokerage companies
(Alpari, Dukascopy, FiboGroup, FXFactory, Oanda, InstaForex, MyFxBook, Saxo Bank)
The ratio of open positions of traders of the XTRADE broker
*Above shows the average ratio of the number of open positions for the instruments: AUDUSD, EURUSD, GBPUSD, NZDUSD, USDCAD, USDCHF, USDJPY, Oil, Gold.
Open positions of Forex traders with broker InstaForex
Open positions of traders from the myfxbook service for all currency pairs and indices