Whether your current strategy does not bring satisfactory results, or you need to complement a short-term trading system with a medium-term one, or you simply got tired of following the same boring rules, you will need an idea for your new trading strategy. There are many ways to develop a new strategy. While the whole process has much to do with trader’s own preferences, style, experience, research and trial and error iterations, the strategy’s core idea is often reused from somewhere else.

Imagination. A trader that is creative enough may get ideas for the entry & exit system just from his head. This method is the one that has the biggest potential, yet it frequently leads to disappointments.

Books and journals on trading. There are plenty of trading ideas available in Forex books and financial journals (both magazines and academic ones). The main advantage here is that they are usually thoroughly tested and described in great detail. As a drawback, they usually require a lot of adaptation as they imply a lot of assumptions and rarely fit the reader’s own trading style exactly.

Informational websites. Sites like Wikipedia and Investopedia are great for learning about trading in general, technical indicators, charting ideas, etc. Although they seem to be an endless source of ideas, the knowledge base presented there is quite limited in fact.

Online communities. Traders’ interaction often ends up quite fruitfully. Specialized forums help them to form ideas resulting from the collective mind effort and brainstorming. Just do not get lost in a sea of ideas that can be overwhelming and full of worm-ridden apples. Blogs are more of a one-way interaction, but the advantage here their abundance and variety.

Webinars, conferences and expos. When people gather on something as big as an expo, they usually have something to share, to discuss and to come up with some collective opinion about. A trader seeking ideas for own strategy can learn tons of new stuff from his peers. Webinars, on the other hand, are less ‘communicative’ but offer a higher rate of information per unit of time than offline meetings.

The source code of expert advisors and indicators. With thousands free open-source indicators and expert advisors available for MetaTrader 4 and hundreds for MetaTrader 5 (not even mentioning dozens of other platforms), there is always something new to gain from them. You may not be satisfied with the EA’s overall performance or strategy’s nuances, but some of its details may give you a valuable hint or inspiration for modifying your own strategy or even developing a new one.

Watching the market closely. If you are a scalper, or just a frequent intraday trader, then constant market monitoring may bring up unexpected observations before you. Such observations, if systematized, can yield substantiation background for creation of a trading strategy.

Adapting stock and commodity trading systems. There are intrinsic differences between the stock market and the foreign exchange market. Commodity exchanges operate differently from the over-the-counter spot FX market, whole the whole-day nature of the currency trading adds extra level of separation from the traditional equity trading. Despite all that difference, the strategies used in stocks and commodities can sometimes be used in Forex. It just takes some non-trivial approach to adapt them.

If you would like to share some details about the places you are getting your trading ideas, please feel free to do so using the form below.