Jim Brown – Forex Trader

Jim Brown is an established forex trader, author, mentor, and EA designer. He became a full-time professional trader in 2013, though he had traded forex part-time for the previous eleven years.

He is a bit of a globe trotter, and according to LinkedIn, currently lives in Vietnam. Apart from trading, he has worked variously in safety and security, as a police officer in Queensland Police Service and the Northern Territory Police Force, and as an airline fitter.

Life as a Forex Trader

Jim Brown was first attracted to Forex markets in early 2002. The turning point was when he went to a private small stock trading meeting. One of the attendees boasted that he had been very successful over 18 months trading the Japanese Yen against the US dollar.

Back then, it was almost unheard of for an ordinary individual to trade currencies. Trading foreign currencies was very much the preserve of banks and a few high net worth individuals. What transpired from that and no doubt from similar meetings was the birth of a whole new industry.

Naturally, getting in on the act was challenging, even for someone as resourceful as Jim Brown. There was a distinct lack of both reliable brokers and trading platforms. Although the internet was generally available, it was very much in its infancy.

Internet connections tended to be dial-up and extremely slow, which is not suitable for trading forex markets with huge spreads. However, there was no shortage of traders who wanted in on the act, and various forums and self-established experts soon appeared on the scene.

Existing trading systems for options, stock and futures were rapidly modified to address the forex market. The markets were fundamentally different as forex trading didn’t rely on a central exchange.

Another significant difference was that forex could be traded 24 hours a day throughout the week. Jim Brown says that in the early days, if you were smart, it was relatively easy to make money, particularly by “straddling the news releases or exploiting the carry trade”. But, he says that brokers soon got smarter, killing these advantages and creating trading conditions that made it increasingly difficult for traders to profit from this.

Jim found it hard from the outset. He paid too much attention to self-styled gurus, assuming that they were far better than him as they used complex systems with the result that he had no real direction. Any profits that he made he rapidly returned, and he burned through numerous accounts.

As time went on, he improved, mainly through good money management and employing simple trading methods that were easy to understand and implement.

He also constructed some trading robots, though with mixed results. He has now more or less given up on robots as he thinks the human brain is much better. Well, at least his brain appears to be so.  He has spent much of the last fifteen years looking at forex charts and has developed an instinct for reading patterns. He claims that he can predict what will happen next on a chart far better than any robot.

A Roaming Trader

Jim says that today he can work anywhere in the world as long as he has an internet connection. He makes a regular income trading forex using mainly four hour and daily charts. He still believes in keeping his systems simple, which certainly works for him, given that they are generally profitable. He believes that anyone can profit from forex as long as they look after your money carefully and don’t use over-complicated systems.

Jim has also written several best sellers on various aspects of forex trading.

Publications

Jim has published three books on Forex trading:

• “Forex Trading – the basics explained in simple terms”, which includes a basic trading system
• “MT4/MT5 & Trading View High Probability Forex Trading Method”, which is based on the MetaTrader platform
• “Trading Forex with Divergence on MT4/MT5 & TradingView” which looks at divergence as an indicator.

All these books are rated highly on Amazon and consistently ranked as best sellers.