One of the major problems with forex trading, particularly if you trade the longer time frames like I do, is that it can be incredibly frustrating sitting around for hours on end waiting for the perfect set-up. You already have your tried and tested system in place, and you are just waiting for the right opportunity to come along. Sometimes you can watch the markets all day and get no set-ups at all, and worse still is when one of these high probability set-ups occurs overnight, so you have no way of trading it.

Another time that I get particularly annoyed, and I'm sure you will have experienced this yourself, is when it looks like you have found the perfect set-up (that does occur during the day), but for one reason or another you cannot get a good entry point. This frustration is only magnified when the forex pair continues to move in the direction you expected, and therefore would have been a profitable trade.

This is exactly what happened to me yesterday afternoon. There looked to be a perfect set-up on the 4 hour chart of the GBP/USD pair. The Supertrend indicator was green on the daily chart (indicating an upward trend) and all the indicators that I use were looking good for a long position on the 4 hour chart.

We had the EMAs crossing upwards (which was the main signal), but we also had strong divergence on both the MACD and Smoothed Repulse indicators. So everything was in place, as you can see below:

However when the crossover candle did present itself yesterday afternoon, there was a big move upwards and no meaningful pull-back after this candle had closed (I was looking to enter a long position at around 1.5980, and certainly below 1.6000).

I don't like it when the crossover candle is really long like this one anyway, but I definitely will not open a position when there is no pull-back, which was the case here. So the end result was that I had to forget about this near-perfect set-up and watch from the sidelines as it continued heading higher.

The point I want to make is that forex trading can be a very frustrating business. On some occasions you can watch the markets all day every day, and not find any decent set-ups for the entire week, which has happened to me a few times.

So if you do want to become a profitable currency trader, the lesson to learn here is that you need a great deal of patience and discipline. If the right trading conditions are not met, then you simply have to stand aside and wait for the next set-up to come along.

The good thing about the forex markets is that there will always be decent set-ups coming your way soon. You just have to sit patiently and wait for them to come to you.. If you start entering impulsive trades and trying to force positions, then I'm afraid you are almost certain to fail in the long run.