Trend trading, and what you actually trade on MetaTrader

Hello, greetings to all dear students. In this session, we will talk about the importance of trend trading. Why we need to learn trend trading very thoroughly and what applications it has for us. These are fundamental issues. Before we get to technical matters, you need to know these things and be aware of their importance so that you can understand where you should spend more time, where you need to work harder and if we are going to implement a certain style in trading, in which period that style is important specifically. That's why you need to learn these things. The importance of trend and focusing on trends starts right here. However, before we get into this topic, something from the previous session came to my mind that I need to explain here and that's the subject of mentorship. Many of the students I've had over the years have requested mentorship. They want someone to stand over them and tell them to trade here or not to trade there. Or there's the topic of live trading. Look, as long as you haven't entered this area yet, that is in the account we discussed in the previous session up to this point, watching someone else, having someone do live trading for you. None of this is not only unhelpful for you, but it will actually be harmful. I want to give you a very concrete example of this. Many of you are football spectators and you know a lot about its rules. You know how it works. You know the odds of the matches. You know how skilled the players are? You have access to a lot of this information. But are you really a football player after all these watching? Can you actually perform like them? No. You only need a coach when you are actually on the field yourself. when you have played and now to develop further you need someone to give you tips and guidance to improve and enhance the quality of your performance. So as long as you are at this stage if someone does live trading for you are basically just watching them trade or you might see my own trades but you keep wondering what they did there, how that happened there. I am explaining all of this in detail in these upcoming lessons. What is my trading style there? What does it look like? But as long as you don't practice it yourself and build your own psychology, even if someone does live trading for you over and over and keeps telling you to enter here, exit there, you will not become a trader and this will be like poison for you. So the important point is that as long as you are here, yes, your technical issues, your trading style problems and the difficulty in understanding where you are in the market, all of these can be addressed and resolved. But you have to do the actual execution yourself. This is the point where the difference between those who can move on to the next level, who can grow becomes clear. just watching someone else. You won't become a swimmer just by watching someone swim. Even if that person comes and swims in front of you dozens of times and you just watch from the platform and try to imitate their moves. Therefore, it is very important that in order to build your psychology, you must take action yourself. You need to experience the losses so that psychology is formed. You have to endure those stresses and pressures until you are left alone, until you are by yourself. Your psychology needs to become familiar with those stresses, that cortisol and that cortisol-filled environment. And the responsibility must fall entirely on your own shoulders for your psychology to grow and become strong. Therefore, whether you join our course or attend other courses, these live trades will not be beneficial for you. If you have a question, the best way is for you to execute the trade yourself. If you realize after the trade that you made a mistake, that's actually very good. You have identified the problem on your own. If you don't realize it or there isn't any particular point, then come and ask about those points later. This will help you much more than just watching someone else trade. This causes your development and growth to become very slow and sometimes it may not happen at all because during live trading you don't experience any stress if it's even going to come from your teacher or someone who is trading live trade from that person. This action adds nothing to your psychology because you will mostly learn the technique. It is executing it in a cortisol-filled stressful environment that will turn you into a trader. It was necessary to talk about this point here so that you understand the issue. Most of us who have been able to stay in the market consistently have generally experienced these same conditions. Therefore, it is very important that you pay special attention to this point. Let's move on to the next slide. So why should we even learn trend trading? Why is the importance of trend trading so significant?

Look, trend is the most important factor in the market that shows us the direction of movement. This is one of the basic principles of technical analysis. It doesn't matter which market you're in. When the price is moving upward, you see the market's momentum in that direction through the trend. So the first thing it shows you is the direction and momentum of the movement which you can observe. Prices move based on trends. Traders identify and follow the trend and that's when the flow of liquidity enters the market. So the importance of the first part lies in this. In fact, most people typically identify the movement through the trend and they try to maximize their profits by carefully taking advantage of the movement that forms as a trend. Our goal in this course is for you in addition to being able to capture short and small moves to also expand some of your positions using a type of entry called pyramid and super pyramid so you can go after bigger profits and grow your account more. This requires you to act very very skillfully in this area.

In fact, we don't want it to be the case that you only focus on a single short move. Meaning, your trading is just limited to one chart, one short move, and then you exit the market. Although this is part of our style, we want to expand this approach a bit. Let's broaden its scope a bit so that in addition to scalping and day trading, you also learn to recognize the type of movement. Even those small scalping moves you want to make should happen in the direction of this trend so that the number of your trades, the number of successful trades you make increases, allowing you to achieve a higher win rate. The second important point for us regarding the trend is that you should always try to minimize your personal and subjective choices as much as possible. Trend trading actually allows traders to identify the specific type of movement in the market and the particular parameters they need to learn. All based on observable data and information that you can visually see and analyze. Regardless of the trading style you want to use, you must first identify the trend itself and then carefully apply the various elements and factors of your chosen style to that trend, taking into account all relevant details. Therefore, once you identify the trend, there is no more guesswork or speculation about which direction it is going and you can't approach it based on personal preference. For example, if you want to apply an effect within an upward movement, let's say a movement that goes up like this, you would be working within that range. For instance, if you want to short the market, but you don't know where you are at this point, in which phase of the trend you are. For example, whether you are in the movement in an uptrend in the movement itself. If you don't know these things, even the effect you use might easily fail and you could incur a loss. When it comes to volume, you might see a very high volume at this point. Now, in its styles, you'll learn that, for example, you want to enter on the retest, but instead of retesting, it continues its move and kicks you out, and you wonder, "Hey, there was volume here, so why didn't the market stop and pause?" Therefore, it's important for you to know where your location is. This location is determined through a set of rules that we'll cover in the upcoming lessons. You'll learn the trend style, trend trading, and you won't need to rely on your personal intuition anymore. That means you can consider the overall structure and then apply the effects to it. If that effect aligns with the direction, you can trade. And if not, you set the trade aside and no longer impose your personal opinions or mindset on the movement because these can often lead to completely wrong or inaccurate judgments. Well, the next topic is risk management. The topic of risk management is this. In addition to the fact that before you want to start trading, you want to risk a certain amount of money, which is clear, and we'll get to that in its section, and how you want to move those stop-losses when you want to trail. All of this is based on the range that is obtained through trend trading. This helps us control risks and determine where we should exit,

maximize it. In fact, by understanding the direction of movement, traders can even determine the points for their stop-losses. For example, if a move like this has happened, I entered here and my stop is here. And I want to set the stop. In fact, my stop will be placed down here. I know exactly where I should set it. We will discuss these things in a more detailed and recommended way later. Here, the focus is more on its importance. Therefore, it helps us determine where to set our stop loss, gives us confidence about the type of movement and so on. We can also understand when this trend is about to reverse by analyzing this and we can control the risks here. The next point is actually the simplicity of the process. For example, if you have this kind of data, it doesn't really require any special tools at all. You can easily view this movement very easily from your phone or computer wherever you are. Trading also in fact truly needs to be simple if it becomes too complicated. For example, if you want to define a movement and set four different rules for it, if these four rules are met, the result is positive. If not, it's negative. But if these factors become 50, that trade is practically out of human reach. And it goes beyond human thinking. and there are too many lines. This requires that all these factors for example be managed by a software or a trading assistant for you and it tells you for instance that this number of factors have been met. Say 70% or 80% of these factors are fulfilled. Then at that point you decide whether to make that trade or not. So you solve this complexity with another tool. But the trend itself is actually simple

and it's this very simplicity that makes it appealing. The basic principle is that you buy at a low price and sell at a high price during an uptrend. And in the case of selling, you sell at a high price and buy back at a low price which would be in a downtrend. This gives you within the trend the ability to understand with the same simplicity that for example if an upward movement has occurred I let it correct for instance until it reaches my desired point using the techniques I have and then I come in and make a purchase here. Why? Because my trend is upward. I never buy in these areas when the price is moving up like this. Since then the price might reverse and I would incur a loss. So this simplicity and the visual nature of these movements helped me see that I can easily take advantage of them.

Section five is actually about adaptability. Trend trading can be applied across different time frames from minutes to months and in various markets such as forex, stocks, commodities and so on. This style is compatible with all other trading styles. As I mentioned, regardless of the style you use for entering trades, you need to learn about trends because all those other styles are also based on this concept. They are all built upon this part, the trend. As long as you can't accurately identify the direction, no matter which other style you use to enter trades, there's a high chance you'll get stopped out. The reason is that if when you apply those effects they align with your trend and your decision making you will mostly succeed. But if they go against your trend you will mostly incur losses. Therefore the adaptability of trends to various styles and different market conditions allows us to use them effectively for trading purposes regardless of the specific strategy being employed. This flexibility is what makes trends so valuable and it is precisely this shared characteristic that serves as their common ground. Now why is it even adaptable in this way? Look major financial movements we talked about this in the previous lesson. Those movements are created by those funds and when this money shapes the movement it appears to us as a trend. it becomes an uptrend or downtrend meaning the movement turns bullish or bearish. Therefore, by observing those movements, we understand the direction of the market. So, it doesn't matter whether this market is forex, commodities or the stock market. All of them display the same patterns because the behavior of that money is the same in each of them. The sixth part is actually the compound effect. You may have heard that for example if you initially invest a certain amount of money it can turn into a specific sum after 5 years or even one year if you take advantage of the power of the compound effect. When we want to apply this compound effect in trading we need to take steps in that direction. We will explain this further in the lessons on building positions, especially in the periods when major trends form and we will also tell you about its styles. But for you to build the compound effect, for example, in the direction of this movement, you need to know where you should reinvest the profits you've made and take on risk again or where the risk is too high and you should exit so that you don't let the efforts you've put in and the money that's moved with smart money in the market lose that profit. We need to protect it. Therefore, we also want to implement the compound effect through trend trading. The seventh part is its psychological benefits, which again relates back to this discussion of the compound effect.

In fact, dedicated traders who commit to a trend and the movement that occurs and have a clear trading strategy naturally experience less stress and uncertainty over time. Instead of constantly second-guessing their own decisions or frequently and repeatedly changing their approach, methods and way of operating. If we want to act based on the trend movement, especially at times when we are going to build positions by following the trend, we realize that the stress we experience when entering the trend at its beginning and investing money is different from the stress we feel when entering at these other points and trying to apply the power of compounding or the size of the stop-losses we use here in building positions. In fact, the distance of these stops, the amount of these stops changes here in a way that puts less pressure on our psychology. As we discussed in the previous session about psychology, this helps us a lot to make decisions more easily and with less stress in these situations. These are actually the benefits. These few points I mentioned here that we consider for our trend trading. There are other points as well, but these are of greater importance. In essence, trend trading allows traders to clearly and effectively see and understand market movements, the flow of money, smart money activity, the level of associated risks, and the specific type of management involved. all with a high degree of clarity of on a larger scale the trends that are driven by fundamental spread to smart money and the movements that form in the market. All of these create this transparency for us allowing us to make healthier longer term and more confident trades. Well, there's also a topic here that we need to examine. Look, we need to understand the range in which we want to trade. Where exactly do we call it trading and at what point do we move beyond the realm of trading? Consider the 1 to 5day window in the market which is typically a common time frame. Within this period, there are both recognizable patterns present as well as individual retail traders who engage in swing trading. Therefore, if someone is day trading or trading within a one-week period, they need to know that here they are dealing both with algorithms and with the broader moves that form over the course of the week, which we can take advantage of through swing trading. What we want to do is to operate within this 5-day window and also be able to extend our trades up to 20 days which amounts to a month of trading. And if we can even during trends that arise from global economic conditions, financial situations or health crisis like COVID which cause large movements and long-term corrections in the market. We can sit through those periods and execute long-term trades and we just need to build a framework which we will discuss in the framework section. So our focus for entry points is within these same time frames and for anything beyond 5 days we are essentially swing trading. We can do this in any time frame. We just need to know that the start of our movement is in these areas. That means we need to know where we are located in the week we want to trade, where we are in the trend and then look at the lower time frames and after that we are going to expand on this. If necessary we can extend the same trade for more than 20 days but throughout this week we will be trading continuously. We will plant more seeds in different types of trades and we keep trying to nurture them so they can grow and generate bigger profits for us. So this is the environment we are actually operating in. In the standard scenario, the periods during which trades are made are usually 1 month long. But for the style we work with, anything over 20 days, it's really good to start from a shorter period and then expand from there. However, there may be people who don't want to enter this time frame and prefer to trade over longer periods, which would be from 20 to 120 days covering almost 4 months. These four months — that's a period where the type and style of trading is somewhat different from ours. It is applied more to stocks. Its effectiveness is greater in that area where the type and style of trading and the trading volatility are different. You need to be able to buy stocks directly and it shouldn't be like leveraged markets, markets that have leverage. So this part is also considered trading. When we go beyond 120 days up to 250 days, that still means in other words 250 days is about 1 year of our trading. We're still more or less in the trading domain. But beyond that, meaning more than 250 days, more than 200 days, it's no longer called trading. At that point it actually becomes an income section where you start working with styles like valuation. You work with value stocks. You actually invest. So what you need to pay attention to is not to confuse these two with each other. If I am supposed to trade within 1 to 20 days, my risk management and my actions are all based on fundamental intervals and so on within these 20 days. and I execute and close the trade. If I'm going to expand, I'll expand part of it with more positions within a period of, for example, 2 or 3 months. I shouldn't take a trade that I opened with one lot or a tenth of a lot and plan to hold it for 2 years. That's not trading. In the long run, this will not benefit you because the market will fluctuate so much that the amount of swap you have to pay, that is the overnight interest you pay for your open position, will practically eat up the profit and you won't be able to get the performance you want from that kind of trade. In fact, most traders mistake in this regard is that they don't first clearly determine their trading style and the time frame they want to trade in. They often end up mixing trading with various volatility strategies or even with investing, which is really not the right approach at all. If I'm going to invest, I found that investing doesn't really work out well with leveraged markets because for example, when I want to look at a valuation for a particular stock, it becomes much more complicated and difficult to assess accurately. When I buy this stock, I'm buying it in cash. If the price drops further, naturally I have a strategy that if the valuation is still high, I'll buy more at the lower price to reduce my average cost, my average purchase price. Where does this happen in the cash market? That means you don't have a stop-loss anymore. The stop-loss is based on a different model.

It's not like a physical trading stop where you set it so that, for example, if it hits a certain leverage, your stop-loss gets triggered. In leveraged markets, you shouldn't be thinking about long-term investing because you'll inevitably be forced to use a stop-loss and that whole valuation discussion becomes irrelevant. So, the range we mostly work with is this green area which we try to focus on. If necessary, we'll take some trades at the times I mention when it becomes appropriate. You might have this mindset. For example, if you look at the charts from the time of COVID, you'll see how much the daily price movements have changed. There are times when we've moved from a cheap money period to an expensive money period and all of these have led to very large movements. In fact, during times when crisis like this occur, if we have enough knowledge, these are the best times to make big money. A stagnant and calm market usually doesn't make us much money. It's the volatile, unpredictable markets that can really make us big money. However, this volatility needs to be under the careful control of data so that we can accurately calculate it. This way we can recognize it and take full advantage of the wave that forms. So this point is also important here. You need to know which markets we are working in and we have to make this distinction between trading, volatility trading and investing. We shouldn't mix these up. If I enter here, I'm entering based on trend trading. My expected profit is clear. The extent of my movement is clear. In some parts, I enter through volatility trading. Again, look at this here. I've set spot trading for it, which is mostly a cash market. Meaning, I don't use leverage markets for volatility trading, and I don't use leveraged markets for investing either. So in order to achieve our goal, we need to carefully separate these from each other. Now the question is which specific instruments can we actually work with especially when using trend or trend trading strategies? Since as we discussed in the previous slide, there's a common aspect here. all markets such as stocks, forex, commodities, indices, cryptocurrencies, and actually bonds as well as exchange-traded funds or ETFs. Essentially, all of these financial instruments, regardless of their specific characteristics or market sector, can in fact be actively traded or invested in by using trend trading strategies, approaches, or methods. So you can see how beneficial this commonality is for us.

Well, therefore, as we have previously discussed, learning trend trading is absolutely highly important. In this course, we aim to increase the accuracy of this style by incorporating volume into trend trading. In this course, we will cover three major markets, commodities, indices, and forex. We will specifically look ahead to the topic of forex to understand what the forex market actually is. You might already have some prior information. Set that aside for now. Even if you think you know, just put it to one side for the moment. Here, we're going to look at it from a different perspective. So, be sure to watch this section on the forex market. It might be a bit different from what you think. Well, the forex market stands for the foreign exchange market. It's a global decentralized market or outside the exchange, which is also called over-the-counter or OTC for trading currencies, meaning you trade two currencies against each other. And it is decentralized, meaning it operates outside of the stock exchange. You can't see it physically. It covers all aspects of buying, selling, and exchanging currencies at current prices or whatever is determined. In terms of daily volume, forex is the largest financial market in the world with over $6 trillion traded daily. Participants in this market include banks and financial institutions, corporations, governments, and individual traders. Well, at this point a question should come to your mind here. A question should arise for you. Is what you're currently trading on your MetaTrader software actually the forex market? Look, governments are present here and so are companies. Those who want to participate in the forex market must go through identity verification. This identity verification is very important because the forex market is a cash market.

The main purpose of the forex market is to facilitate international trade and investment by allowing businesses and individuals look by allowing them. This is very important. It's not like you, me or just anyone else can connect to the forex market and trade.

So what exactly is it that we are trading? This is where you should start to question things. You see in this market there are big companies and governments involved. For example, imagine a government needs foreign currency. It has currency reserves. It wants to purchase goods or machinery from another company in Europe. In this market, it can for example convert its dollar reserves into the currency used in the forex market, say euros for Europe. Some European countries don't use the euro as their currency. So, it converts its currency into theirs and carries out its international payments. Or there are companies that have sold goods or services to another country and received foreign currency in return. Now they might want to convert that currency into another currency from a different country. If they want to import goods, they come to this market to make the exchange. So as you can see, this is all about currency control. It's about controlling the dollar. So it's not as simple as us just sitting here behind our screens trading forex. Are we really present in that market or are these MetaTraders just connecting us to a different market? We need to be aware of this.

All right. In this slide, I want to explain this topic so that you understand exactly what it is that we're trading. I'll also explain more in the following slides. Look, what we are actually trading is something called a CFD. That's what we are trading on MetaTrader platforms. Contract for difference. What we're actually trading is the difference in price.

The name has become common. It's known as the Forex market and that's what you keep hearing. But the forex we talked about is actually the currency market. So when the market is actually about currencies, but when you're trading gold, this gold isn't in the forex market. Or when you're trading oil, that oil isn't in the forex market either. Or if you're trading a commodity, or if you're trading bonds, these aren't in the forex market. or if you're trading indices, S&P, Dow Jones, these aren't in the forex market. Basically, the market you're trading in, the financial market, consists of pretty much these things from stocks to commodities to futures, indices, bonds, and the other things we've discussed. All of these have data that gets collected at a certain point. If you imagine this data as a central data point, you can see it's like a schematic. I just want you to understand what the structure and function are like so you know where you stand and can trade correctly. These data through

other data sources like those provided to you by brokers are delivered as a CFD meaning their chart is copied. The chart is copied and then appears for you on MetaTrader. Now, how does this mechanism work? This data is purchased by brokers, by banks or the charts available that are transferred to your platform through central data. You are viewing this platform. What kind of platform do you have? It's free. The MetaTrader you are using, the data you are receiving is also free. And they even give you credit. They give you loans or in other words, leverage. This part is the retail trading section. And I want you to understand exactly where you stand so you can better recognize your risks. For retail traders, they've made it possible to come in and profit from price differences. A place where, as you know, 90% are losing traders. They've created conditions so that many people can participate. But they don't actually own anything. They don't own that offer. They don't own the oil itself. It's just the price difference. They give you free data. They give you a free platform. They even give you loans. Are they in love with our beautiful eyes? No. They create conditions so that you lose more so they can profit. So how does this work? In this particular black market structure, it is usually the banks that act as the main liquidity providers and they often set up and manage a number of different brokers. That is brokers collaborate with banks and the banks become the broker backers. They provide the liquidity. The brokers offer you these services. They give you access and you start trading. And where are you as a retail trader learning about these topics from? Either you're searching on YouTube or you're looking for signals or you're after some indicators that you work with like RSI and so on and you learn many of these things from your friends. You copy something from somewhere and use it. In other words, you don't have a structured approach to learning. When there is no structure, no integration and no logic behind it, you are exactly at the point where you incur losses. If I were to charge you for these things as well, many of you might not get involved because of the costs. There are even tutorials available for you on YouTube. Oh, and many brokers also provide you with signals. They design objective indicators for you. You see it and you like it. Wow, what a great signal it gives. So you follow it and in the end you hand your money over to the banks. But how does this actually happen? It happens like this. When you go on MetaTrader and make a trade, you set your stop. Your entry point and all of this data are collected by brokers as retail trader order flow. it gets passed on to the liquidity provider. Now, there's an issue here. It's possible that the broker you're using is itself a market maker, meaning it both provides liquidity and doesn't pass your information onto the bank. As a result, orders that went long, orders that went short. It has all of this data. By manipulating the market, it can create those sudden shadows you often see, those unexpected events that happen in your broker and for which there's no explanation. In this way, it can hit your stop-losses or liquidate your positions and profit from it. But well, the number of such market makers is small. There is a very difficult process to obtain a legal market maker broker license. And there are really only two countries, Japan and the United States, that issue this license. And even then, they are still under strict supervision. Set aside those brokers that act as their own market makers and operate in countries under sanctions. That's a completely separate issue. These are illegal market makers because the residents of those sanctioned countries who due to restrictions don't have access to the global market can very easily get involved often unintentionally by setting up illegal market maker brokers in those countries. Now let's assume that this broker isn't even a legal market maker. Your data such as where you've opened positions, your stop losses, and so on is transferred to the liquidity provider, which is usually a bank. More than 90% of liquidity providers are banks. The other 10% can be other institutions. So, as you can see, when it's supposed to connect to a bank, a lot of your information like the amount, the size, and where your stop-loss is, how much the market needs to move for you to get liquidated or for your account to be wiped out or for you to get a margin call. All of this gets transferred to the bank. These banks are also connected to each other. They have data on millions of orders and know exactly where they are placed. and they can easily use this information by moving in the main market. This is just a simple example. Suppose in the futures market regarding positions, you'll learn about these later. The 6E is the euro/US dollar contract.

In this market with a temporary manipulation, for example, by moving the price 20 pips, they incur a certain cost, let's say a million dollars, but in return, they've already identified that point in advance. They know that if they push it down by 20 pips, a certain number of people's stop-losses will be triggered there. Those who are positioned against me are actually positioned against my bank. Here I might take a loss of 1 million but on the other side which is on my own book their data their accounts make a profit of $20 million. So you see they create very easy conditions here for themselves so they can take advantage of you. Now, in addition to these positions that the banks themselves have with each other, there is also the matter of dark pools, which we won't get into here. But to give you a glimpse of what dark pools are, it's about banks, hedge funds, and contracted banks sharing information with each other. For example, a certain bank wants to fill an order somewhere or a certain hedge fund wants to fill a forward order. They are also active in the market in coordination with each other. That was the CFD part. Now, what happens if you work directly in the futures market? The money you pay as a deposit no longer goes to the bank. In fact, it is deposited into your brokerage account. The type of trades you make, their data is only visible in this section which goes into the central data. That means banks or those institutions don't see how much money you have. These are the advantages on this side. But on this side where you are trading directly, the data flows from the central data to the data provider. The data provider in cooperation with level two brokers or in other words brokers who are licensed to connect you to this market provides you with level two data MBO and level three data which are mostly related to stocks. What you see in the futures market which is often referred to as level three data is actually MBO data market by order which we will discuss in more detail later. You connect to these through specific platforms other than MetaTrader and none of these are free. Your platform is not free. You have to pay monthly for the data and both the data and these services will cost you. So as you can see the approach is different but in return the information is not yours. That's why those who work very professionally are usually on this side. Now there's also a discussion about professional traders and retail traders. I've already explained what a retail trader is. You see professional traders are mostly on this side and work directly. Now it's possible that those countries under sanctions can't operate. But we want to find a solution for this. These people understand the order flow. They've learned what it is in terms of understanding fundamentals. They are completely proficient and they have professional trading plans. They've reached this stage by going through proper and principal training and that pyramid I mentioned. They have nothing to do with YouTube or signal channels and such. They're not looking for training in these places. personal study, deep research on fundamentals, and practicing with order flow data help them develop a professional plan and succeed in the market. So, what we're actually trading on MetaTrader isn't really the Forex market. It's a mirror of this segment, but Forex still influences this market. Now, why is it separated from the stock exchange? Imagine a government wants to provide a dollar budget for another country. This volume of large transactions can really shake up the market. If it were to happen in the way we trade, that's why it's been separated there. The rates are fixed, but the trading volume is high. Even though this volume doesn't have such a massive impact on the market, the effects of the forex market are present in all of these. that is the prices of currency pairs the differences in their prices all have an impact on these as well especially in the area we call forex that's where it will be useful for us I'll give more explanations in that section so now the question is can the volume of the forex market be observed is it observable therefore the volumes we see in MetaTrader are not useful for us but we realize that these data are coming from the exchange and Especially those currency pairs that we are trading are actually a copy of the futures exchange market which we'll learn more about as we go forward. In fact, we are learning about it. We are looking at its chart and these move together. It's not a chart that we see directly from the forex market or the volume that we observe from the forex market. Naturally, the spot forex market has an impact on the futures market, but it's not in a tangible way that we can directly see or observe its volume. Those effects manifest themselves in the futures market. The algorithms operate there. The market will move, but since our chart comes from the broker, which actually sources it from the futures market, we will be looking at futures volumes. The answer to this question is that the forex market is actually a decentralized over-the-counter market. This means that unlike the stock market, it does not have a centralized exchange. As a result, there is no official record of trading volume. However, certain platforms and brokers may provide volume indicators. These volume indicators are actually based on futures data. But these indicators only show the trading volume that there's also a very important point here. You might see a volume indicator in MetaTrader. This volume pertains to that specific broker itself. It's not the total volume of all trades. The broker's volume is actually the volume of trades being executed through that broker, not the entire market. So while you can get some indications of volume in the whole forex market, it's not actually accurate. It's not reliable data. Now, can retail traders trade directly in the forex market? This is another question we need to answer here. Yes, in fact, retail traders can also gain direct access to the forex market. However, there are entry barriers. That means you need a certain required deposit. This deposit isn't $2 or $3,000. The Forex market is a spot market. Keep this in mind. The Forex market is not a leverage market. The leverage market is actually the CFD market. The main forex market is spot. And to enter it, in other words, to have direct access to the market, you need DMA. Most retail traders actually don't have the capital or infrastructure required to trade directly with major banks or liquidity providers. That's why they usually do this through a series of brokers and those brokers also have their own specific conditions. There is a required deposit amount you need to make in order to be able to trade there and they have special identity verification procedures. You have to clearly identify who you are because the dollars you buy are actually being transferred for you. You need to be a recognized individual. This money must not be used for drug trafficking. It must not be part of the sanctions. In other words, their identity verification is not like the ones we have in MetaTrader or with those brokers that use MetaTrader. It is different. The individual must be fully identified and verified from a security standpoint. So rest assured that what you are trading in MetaTrader has nothing to do with the actual forex market. Your trading volumes are also not transferred to that market. I also talked about CFDs where they in fact created a way for you to buy and sell real currencies through price differences specifically in the financial markets. In fact, by speculating on the price difference or having a strategy, you can participate in this market. In this phase, you are required to provide a margin and in return, you are given credit or a loan which allows you to trade with leverage in these transactions. Therefore, what is actually happening is not that you are in the forex market. The next point I should briefly mention is that in theory it is important to note that retail traders currently have the possibility to access the direct forex market. However, in practice using forex brokers and trading CFDs or forex forward contracts which are actually offered by these brokers is much more common. Theoretically, you can enter directly, but in reality, I can say it is almost impossible for ordinary people. The minimum amount of capital you need to enter the forex market is somewhere around $10 million. So, that market is not for people like you and me. The market that you and I are working in is the CFD market. See, I've repeated this several times so you're aware of exactly where we are operating. Let me also give you an explanation about DMA. DMA actually stands for direct market access. Direct market access. This refers to traders being able to place buy and sell orders directly in the market bypassing intermediaries. DMA gives traders more control over their trades. You can see the market depth and such thing. It has an order book. It is different in its own way and in fact you execute your trades in real time because of the advantages of transparent pricing, fast execution and lower costs. It is usually used by institutional investors, banks and professional traders. I should also mention that DMA requires significant financial infrastructure. For this reason, it is almost inaccessible to retail traders. Here we've written that it's less accessible, but I can pretty much say it's not accessible at all. So, what we are actually trading are CFDs. These are financial derivatives that allow traders to profit from both rising and falling prices. And this is actually for recording the trade. And you can see this here in CFDs. have stocks, commodities, indices, basically everything is included. Considering the points I mentioned in the previous lesson slide, we have now understood the structure. Now we want to use order flow which we are learning to avoid being as exposed to these banks and we also understand what the market structure looks like. Now we will continue in the next session this topic of trend trading.