#594: Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Online Forex Trading Course

Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them Podcast: Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now Click Here to Watch Prop Firm Masterclass #594: Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them In this video: 00:12 – Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading. 08:18 – Become a better trader and have a check list. 15:00 – Trading Gold and Silver. 20:53 – Trading Bots and brokers widening spreads. 29:30 – Riding a bike is like learning to trade. 34:00 – Marc’s average day and setting up the new trading week. 39:15 – Trading keeps you mentally active. 44:50 – How can you monetise your knowledge. 50:33 – Trading and living where we want to. Andrew Mitchem: Alrighty! Hi, everybody! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach. I'm really excited today to be joined by Marc Walton from Forex Mentor Pro. Good day, Marc! Nice to see you. Marc Walton: Good day. How are you. Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading. Andrew Mitchem: Very very well thank you. I thought Marc, we'd just, spend half an hour. So I just have a bit of a chat two people been trading. Sounds like similar amount of time, some backgrounds. And, just give people a bit of a insight of what we've done over the years and, and, the pros and cons of what we've done and how we're trading today and the changes we've seen. Marc Walton: Yeah. I was just saying just saying your path is very similar to mine. We neither of us came from finance. I actually failed math. So level three times. Andrew Mitchem: Right? Marc Walton: It's ironic. I also have something called dyspraxia, which I never realized until, like, one of my kids had it. But the only way really affects me is I'm not very. I'm kind of number blind, which is bizarre considering what we do for a living. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. But then again, it's to me it's all about pattern recognition. Marc Walton: And so I think the main thing is for folks not to get too stressed with, the math side of things, as long as you can control the risk and, and work a simple calculator for it to get the risk right, then maths is not important. I was saying to you earlier, I left the UK. When I left the UK early 2000. Marc Walton: Went to live on a little island off the coast of Africa, the Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, which was which is a beautiful place to live. And, I went to sing and play guitar in a band for five years and, thought I'd semi-retired at 40. And then you realize when you retire, you spend more money than you ever did, because. Marc Walton: Right. Well, kids in school did now and then, you've got so much free time. So I started looking at trying to make money online. Stumbled on forex, which 20 years ago there was hardly any of it. We we have the other extreme nowadays, as we know with, with YouTube, where there's millions of people stood next to their mates, Ferrari or whatever in Dubai and, and pitching this and the other and they said that, I mean, I paid $4,000, I think, for a course, 20 years ago and, struggled like everybody else. Marc Walton: And, and I did a webinar with the other day with my mentor, Rich, who's a psychologist, and I have the list here of things that went wrong in my trading. And when he put this slide up for the benefit of people in the webinar, it was like, oh crikey, it's me again. So I'll just read a few. Marc Walton: It's yeah, I see this. They repeat the same errors over and over again over trading. I've tried to pull the trigger over a leveraging retrench, revenge trading, afraid to lose money. Room by emotions, cook win is short. Let loose his run not disciplined. Jump from system to system. And there's many more. And, I did all of them and, I, I know from your background with farming and things, you probably. I'm guessing, did the same thing. Is that your reason for getting involved? Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. Trading. So, I got into trading, actually, as a result of having a young child at the time and going through divorce, it was. It was forced on me. So I was dairy farming and, which I was when my family had been dairy farming through England moved to New Zealand, you know, it was nearly 30 years ago. Andrew Mitchem: I had the dream. Well, I eventually did some work, you know, different companies actually bought a farm and it kind of all then imploded. It all went wrong. And and it was like, what do I do now? Marc Walton: Yeah. Andrew Mitchem: And I was looking after my son. Not full time, but fairly close at times. And yeah, I can't go and be a rep for a company. I can't go and work on another farm. What do I do that allows me to work from home and look after him? And I'm like yourself. Back in those days, it was unheard of to from a bloke from home by yourself. Andrew Mitchem: It was unheard of to do anything on the internet, pretty much because it was dial up. Still, you know, one gigabyte a month was like this May. Well, I remember when I went to ten and everybody was blown away. I got a dial up space. But and so I stumbled and I paid 5,000 NZD and went up to Auckland and did a weekend course up there. Andrew Mitchem: And although when I look at it, it wasn't great, I can't knock it because it got me into trading and it gave me the the buzz of this whole new world that I didn't know existed. Marc Walton: Yeah, yeah. Well, for me it was a necessity as well because I say we we semi-retired or sort of semi-retired and we were just burning through money. I budgeted that, let's say we were going to spend 25, 30 grand a year. I think the first year we're there, we went through 50 and it was okay, need to do something about this. Marc Walton: And it was born out of necessity. It's very similar to you because if if I hadn't been able to get forex to work, I would have ended up having to go back to the UK with my tail between my legs. Because the only, the only work in, Spain, Canary Islands for a foreigner would be in a bar. Marc Walton: Yes. And, my wife said if you ever buy a music bar, I will shoot you. So, so thankfully, I didn't do that and I got into forex. And the other thing is, I employed people all my life until that point, and I really didn't want to go through the hassle of employing people over again, which is great. This is why this is so good. Andrew Mitchem: That's right. So when you started in like what? Kind of like, how long did it take you to. I'm guessing you did like me. You people, ideas, systems, e-books, robots, backtesting, everything under the sun. And then suddenly something clicked to make it go from losing money to working the. Marc Walton: The course that I bought actually wasn't bad at all. It was. It's very similar to what I do now. In many ways. It was all about support and resistance and it it was huge. It was using a lot of EMA’s and I only use a few now, but in general it was support and resistance. The issue I had was it looked too easy. Andrew Mitchem: But You know, I'm a smart fellow. This is not difficult. I can do this. I actually believe most people can do this. But the problem that screwed me up was my head. And, I say I went through all the issues I've just mentioned revenge trading, etc., etc. but the biggest thing for me was that I would go through a period of time where I would win and then I could lose it all. Marc Walton: And you know, the last time I got to the point of quitting was I went five months consistently making money 3 to 5% a month on a big account. This is okay. Slow and steady wins the race. And I lost most of the five months profits in a week. So for me, the periods between meltdown got bigger. But the same result was that I took I took a few months off, to basically let it all settle in my brain. Marc Walton: And thankfully I found the retired trader to teach me because if I hadn't, I would have been. I don't think I would have ever made it. And then, for me, discipline has always been an issue. And I think when you come the background I had before I got I'd left the UK, I had frozen food company and so I had to cry, loss, cry a lot of stuff. Marc Walton: And you come under lots of rules. But we also supplied the Prison service with food, so we were highly regulated. And then when it got to trading, suddenly I've got the cash. There we go, you know. Andrew Mitchem: Do what you like. Marc Walton: Yeah. And it's ironic because within a year of meeting Rich and him ironing out the issues and half the issue with the psychology is making yourself self aware. And then the other the other part is the discipline. And, he introduced me to a fund in the, in the US. It wouldn't be allowed nowadays, but I was training remotely from Lanzarote for a fund in New York. Marc Walton: And they basically give you a book, This thick of rules. And if you break the rules, you're out. Right. So before you take a trade, every time you thinking, you go through the checklist, you make sure everything you've got, everything is spot on. And I say to people nowadays, always use a checklist. Yes, I tell folks to look for five reasons. Become a better trader and have a check list. Marc Walton: If you don't have five reasons to compromise, walk away. And so having a checklist and having somebody looking over your shoulder made me a better trader. And I worked for them for three years. Then in 2008, I started doing it for myself and doing it for my own clients. And the bad habits started creeping back in. Right. Marc Walton: Which is when I started posting on Twitter in the early days, Twitter in the early days wasn't the war zone it is now. And, people were genuinely helping each other. And I was just saying, oh, you know,