One of the most exciting and rewarding moments in a forex trader’s journey is when something finally clicks– that breakthrough realization that changes everything. It might come after weeks of frustration, a hard-earned lesson, a perfectly timed win that ties all the pieces together, or even the sting of yet another blown account.
No matter how it happens, these lightbulb moments often mark a turning point that inevitably reshapes your growth as a trader.
Hi Ms. @Penelopip,
It’s always my pleasure to answer your question. 
This is for you Ms. @Penelopip … 
My AHA moment was a long time ago. It was with AmiBroker. It also helped me to get my AHA faster in other instruments.
The AHA was triggered by observing the area of my loses and wins. When I bought on certain condition, I won instantly. While I hit my stop losses easily when the price had been overbought and oversold. All was realized when I looked into AmiBroker.
Since then, I understand, trader needs momentum. We have to find correct momentum to jump in and out. It becomes my current trading foundation.
For me the one thing that made the biggest difference was about risk/reward. I’d always believed what I’d seen online, in forums, on Youtube, in PDFs, on trading websites, that it was a good idea to use a risk/reward of 1:2 or even higher, so that you don’t have to be right so often, to trade profitably. It was like a total consensus. Stupidly, I just didn’t really question it.
Then a close friend of my wife’s married a guy who had traded professionally for a small fund, and to cut a long story short he told me that if I carried on doing what about 98% of retail traders do, and teach each other, and learn from each other, then I’d carry on getting the same results as about 98% of retail traders (not trading profitably), and that doing the exact opposite would be a better plan.
There was slightly more to it than that, but that was the one big issue over which the penny finally dropped and my trading quickly turned the corner into profit, after a very long wait and struggle.
Having a high win-rate really does make an enormous difference. Not just in the easily predictable ways, but to everything trading-related. It affects position sizes, risk management and all the rest, too.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had one single big aha moment. More like a series of smaller ones, maybe. Hopefully with more still to come.
One that improved my learning process a lot and helped to refocus my attention away from time-wasting stuff was appreciating that “confluence” and “confirmation” of multiple different indicators was a useless and silly approach for me. It was a way of trading less often with a slightly higher win rate and less overall profit.
Making an average of +$30 an average of 6 times per day, brings in twice as much money as making an average of $45, an average of twice per day.
Ir changed my approach by cutting down on my indicator reliance and increasing my trade frequency.
Mine was just realising and understanding that - in general - “the chances of asking the wrong people are absolutely enormous”.
It’s really obvious, when you think about it. But most people don’t, and I hadn’t, for too long.
I explained it in more detail here and can’t really add to what I said there (except perhaps to mention that I firmly agree with what @HenryWhyte has just said, just above).
My game-changing epiphany (or at least the nearest thing I’ve ever had to one) is a really, really boring one, because so many people have said it here so many times, and in so many other places, too. But it was simply learning the wisdom of cutting losses short and sometimes letting profits - or a proportion of them - run.
It helped me more than anything else. It was by acting on this that I learned through my own experience that the fact that using tighter stop-losses means that they get hit more often (which it does!) doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do!
For me, it was kind of counterintuitive, but you can get your stop-losses hit more often, if they’re small, and still do much better overall, out of it.
(I’d always imagined the opposite 
).
I’m still thinking about this one, and not quite clear whether I’ve misunderstood it: it does seem instinctively strange that you can benefit by being stopped out more often. 
Which is better, interspersed among the same proportion of winners: to get stopped out 6 times for 10 pips, or only 4 times for 20 pips each time? 
I can see that (4 x 20) > (6 x 10).
That’s the part I’m questioning. Why would it necessarily be interspersed among the same proportion of winners?
Nobody said that it necessarily would. I was simply giving one example - since you asked - of how you can actually sometimes benefit by being stopped out more often.
I agree, of course, that it’s counterintuitive, which was why it took me so long to learn! 
I realised an obvious thing a little late - no matter what I bought and for no matter what TA basis, price went better for me if I bought when there was already an uptrend in place.
Of course, it isn;t wrong to sell when an uptrend is running, but you need a damn good reason and some tactics to deal with this high-risk, low probability trade.
I’m in the same boat. My A-HA moments came during analysis of my losses.
I realised what I did wrong, and I made changes little by little.
They’re only “obvious” later, though, aren’t they?
That’s the rationale behind all my trades, now, too. I’m trying to buy the dips (in uptrends) and sell the rallies (in downtrends).
I just took something that I trusted at least to be sensible to start with.
I took it from an old textbook, not from a marketer or self-promoter, so I hoped that was probably about as good as a source as I could find.
Then I fiddled with it to try to make it fit my own risk parameters, availability and so on.
I didn’t backtest it properly (don’t really know how to) but played with it on a demo account until I thought there was at least a 75% chance that I could do 100+ trades with it without a net loss or a significant drawdown, and tried it.
It worked.
So my “Aha” moment was just learning that you don’t have to invent anything clever, to get a system that works: you just have to be very careful where you get it from.
I agree with all the members here saying (and I’ve seen it said 100 times) that it’s all about deciding who you trust, to learn from - and making sure that it isn’t anyone whose motivation is to try to sell you anything.
As I keep saying to other members, here, you should start off a Journal, preferably with charts! 
That’s a big problem, for many people. The people who started only recently and feel most in need of something to “find and copy” will always be the people with the least experience and therefore judgment about how to take that care.
The aha moment comes when you have tried every strategy on the internet, listened to every 10 figure trader, every podcast, every Youtuber, read every book and every mentor and your results are not changing.
Then you get it… Trading is just simple math. It’s a 50/50 gamble. Your risk and reward must be asymmetric. Lastly, remember this phrase “law of large numbers”. Trade small, trade often. The end…
Hi, could you please elaborate on what you mean. I thought you said everybody was yapping about how important it is to have a 1:2, or 1:3 r:r and then you concluded by saying that having a good R:R is the key of a higher win rate. Aren’t we supposed to not just follow, believe, and apply everything everybody is suggesting ?in this case regarding R:R? I do apologize if I didn’t comprehend your point.
Where did Henry say that? I think you may have misread his post?
I’m not sure what you mean by a “good” R:R, but R:R is obviously in inverse proportion, overall, to win-rate. Henry says (clearly, and rightly, I think?) that a high win-rate has great advantages. So his idea of a “good” R:R must be a low one? Sorry if I’m interfering.
It was when I was introduced to price action. Before that, thing were quite vague.