Buy the ASK Sell the BID

Here are some helpful visitor comments received in the last 24 hours.

The first relates to the confusion regarding bid and ask prices experienced by beginner traders.

Posted by Nik 

"This is the line I used to use when I first started."

"Buy the ASK , Sell the BID"

The second is an observation regarding trading systems offered by others and backtesting.

Posted by Dropout

Anyone offering a new system should be able–at minimum–to say that
they've manually backtested it for at least a year's worth of data,
resulting in "x" number of winning trades and "y" losing trades, for a
profit of "z."

However,
99.9% of the time, experts selling systems, and those posting their
systems on message boards, say, basically, "Here's a system I've been
fooling around with. I looked back at a few trades I could have made
with it, and it looks really good." Then, they and others who follow
their advice start trading the system with live accounts.

As you can probably tell from my tone, I think this is a bad idea.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Comments

One Response to “Buy the ASK Sell the BID”

  1. Wynne on November 14th, 2010 12:01 pm

    Totally agree with Dropout… Most EA and trading systems available for sale just plain DO NOT WORK. Yet, novice traders are too eager to part with their money even though the EA vendors are not able to provide solid proof that their EA works. In fact, it is so easy to code and optimize an EA to work extremely well for a short period of time, but fail miserably when tested on a broader time period… I coded such an EA to prove the point… http://www.guchialeng.com/2010/11/11/profitable-ea-for-sale-earns-170-in-7-months/

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