Where to Get Ideas for Trading Strategy?

Whether your current strategy doesn't 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 their 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 EarnForex.com 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 don't get lost in the 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 is 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 of free open-source indicators and expert advisors available for MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 (and let's not forget about other platforms too!), there is always something new to gain from them. You may not be satisfied with the EA's overall performance or its 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 to you. Such observations, if systematized, can yield substantial 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, while the whole-day nature of currency trading adds extra level of separation from the traditional equity trading. Despite all those differences, 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 from, you can do so by starting a discussion on our Forex forum.