Forex Trading can be a great investment vehicle, if you do it right. But forex trading success can be elusive to many traders. I’m not saying this based on reading some books or reading something online in a forex website.
I’m saying this based on my own trading experience. I’ve been trading forex for a while but I’m not succeeding at it yet.
Why? Well, I make money but I lose it.
How? This is how: I make money trading forex but when I’m starting to have a good run, I start getting greedy and start increasing my trading lot sizes and then suffer over-sized loses which tend to wipe out my trading account pretty quickly.
I go through a cycle of boom and bust…and believe me: it is frustrating but I’m not quitting yet. In a way, I am a foolish and stupid forex trader.
Forex Trading is an ideal business if you do it correctly and succeed at it:
- Work from home or anywhere in the world.
- No employees to worry about, no inventories.
- No boss to report to.
- No rush hour traffic to work daily.
I can list a lot here but you understand my point…
Steps to Get Started With Forex Trading
- Learn About Forex by studying the forex trading course and the forex price action trading course.
- Find A Reputable Forex Broker And Open A Trading Account
- Then Fund Your Forex Account
- Find one or two trading strategies that you will use to trade.
- Start trading Forex
The Secret To Success
- Is it finding the best forex trading strategy or the best forex indicator?
- Is it having an adequate amount of money to start with?
- Is it finding a reliable broker?
- Is it buying a forex software called expert advisor that automatically trades for you and makes money for you while you sleep?
Tell you what?
I have gone through all of those things listed above and I can tell you that forex trading success does not come from those. I will share my thoughts on what I believe is the the recipe for success in forex:
Best Way To Succeed In Forex Trading
I know what I need to do to succeed in forex trading… but you see, knowing does not equal to doing. It is like cigarette or any other drug addiction: those people taking them know precisely well that they are destroying their own bodies, but they still take them regardless.
Here’s the most interesting thing about what it means to be successful, and it is quite easy, but an extremely difficult thing to achieve.
- For you to succeed in trading Forex, you don’t need that “Secret” trading strategy or secret forex indicator or a forex expert advisor. Many traders start chasing the next shiny object and lose a lot of money in the process.
- What you really need is experience: first fund your live forex trading account, make or lose some money. Maybe lose all of it!
- Then once you’ve lost your first account, then sit down and carefully evaluate what you did wrong to bust your forex trading account.
- Now, fund your account and try it for the second time, and maybe you will lose all your money again. Then fund it for the third, fourth time etc. Maybe you will taste some short lived success and then you will blow your trading account again.
After some time of doing that, you will begin to understand what you need to change within yourself to succeed in forex trading. After many years of trading forex and not really succeeding yet, I have come down to only one conclusion of what one needs to succeed in forex trading. And its this:
- Forex trading success is largely based on mental/psychological strength, more than anything else.
Its only when a cigarette smoker truly makes up his mind to quit smoking then he quits smoking. That takes mental strength, similar in forex trading. Confused? Let me explain…
Your need to learn from what you did right as well as what you did wrong. Most important of all, eliminate what you did wrong and success will be closer than you think. You will discover that such things listed below will stop you from being successful:
- risking too much in a trade
- over-trading
- revenge trading
- greed
- fear
- overnight millionaire mentality
Those things listed above are what thousands of forex investors and traders do every time. I’ve done that time and time again. And guess what? The result is always the same: lose money in forex trading. If you can have the mental discipline to do the exact opposite of what most forex traders do wrong, then success will find you sooner than you think.
Why Is Forex Trading So Popular?
The popularity of forex trading is largely due to internet, making the forex market easily accessible to millions of people worldwide. All it takes its between 5-10 minutes to open an investment account online. You can literally trade the forex market from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection to your laptop, tablet or a mobile phone.
What is it about currency trading that drives thousands of people from all over the world to put their hard earned cash into it and as they say, if the statistics are right, 95% lose. And yet they keep coming…and coming.
So what is it about forex trading that appeals to thousands of traders and even if someone has lost a lot of money in forex trading, he would still find some money, somewhere to trade? What is it?
Well, I’ve cracked my brains (not literally off course, but as the saying goes) and I think I have a pretty firm understanding of why many of us would still be in this game of trading forex even if we are losing money or not.
When it all comes down to it, there’s one word that I believe represents forex trading, and that word is FREEDOM!
Thousand of people are tired of slaving away…working their lives away at low paid jobs while making only a few rich at the top. There’s a genuine frustration of not really being who you want to be or not really living up to the dreams that you have. We all want to live…and I mean really live without worrying about mortgage payments, food bills, rental bills…all the bills in life.
It is with such situations that one looks for alternative ways to make money. And Forex trading is one of them. It is NOT the only one. But is is one where is much quicker to get started on.
Now, if you can have the financial means to take care of all those bills and still left a lot to look after your family or have the means to generate that kind of income for many many years to come, then that certainly is something worth pursuing.
Some say, “money is not everything”, but I say, “money makes life easy.” No-one goes into forex trading to make their life harder, right? Now way! We all are into forex to make money. To make enough money so one can live comfortably. And you can do it, but there are rules to follow. Like all things in life, nothing really comes easy.
Can You Make Millions Trading Forex?
Everyone Has A Chance To Turn Something Small Into Big In Forex Trading: everyone has a chance to make a lot of money. Read the story of millionaire trader Michael Marcus.
It really doesn’t matter how much money you starting trading forex with. A stay at home mum with a $1,500 trading account, can really make a difference in her life and her family’s.
Forex trading is truly is a massive opportunity that is literally available at your finger tips. All you need is a laptop and internet connection and a few hundreds of dollars to open your live trading account to get started.
You may have read or seen stories of people who have started trading with only a few thousand dollars and have hundreds to millions of dollars in forex trading. Those stories may have wet your appetite in forex trading it may look easy but it is not really that easy.
In order to succeed in trading, you need a lot more than having a few hundred to thousands of dollars to open your live trading account.
You need to:
- Get educated about forex trading…you need to learn the common terminologies in forex, you need to learn how to open a forex trading account, how to use and trade with forex trading platform that the forex brokers provide.
- In addition to that, you need to know how to manage trading risks, how to calculate trading lot sizes based on your acceptable risk level etc.
- You need to find a suitable trading strategy to use.
- You need to be able to be disciplined in trading, learn to control your emotions, like greed and revenge.
You will know who you really are when you start trading forex and when your real money is being risked, you will do things differently. Forex trading success requires a lot more mental toughness than anything else. Everyone can have a few hundred or a thousand dollars to open a live trading account, but its only those few who have the mental toughness to follow what is required to succeed in forex that will succeed.
What Is The Forex Market?
Forex is short for foreign exchange. The forex market is where trading happens. So what is forex trading then?
It is the process of exchanging foreign currency for the purposes of either Business / Trade or Speculation with a view to profiting when when currency decreases or increases in value relative to the other. Forex Trading is the actual process of exchanging one currency pair for another.
Who is involved in forex trading then?
- individual traders like you and me, they call us “retail traders”.
- institutional traders…these are the traders with big pockets funded by big companies.
- banks
- business
When is the Forex Market Open?
There are two things in forex that are not like the share market:
- Forex market operates for 24 hours.
- Forex market does not have a central exchange.
The forex market follows the sun around the globe. Which means, even if you have a day job, when you get home, you can still trade the forex market. The important forex trading centers are London, New York and Tokyo. Others include Sydney, Zurich, Hong Kong, Paris.
In the stock market, all orders goes through an exchange and that’s where all the buy and selling is controlled. For example the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq. With forex, it is different… there is no central exchange.
Terminology
In order to start trading forex, you need to understand some terminologies used like the following below:
- Pip
- Spread
- Bid Price
- Ask Price
- Margin
- Leverage
- Long
- Short
- Order types
- Forex Charting
- Technical Analysis
- Fundamental Analysis
- Price Action Trading
- Forex Brokers & Exchanges
- Trading Platforms
- Forex Trading Strategies
- Risk Management
What Do I Need To Trade Forex?
When I started to get interested in forex trading, I followed the following 3 steps:
- First thing you need, is to educate yourself. There are many forex trading courses and information available online for free. You can make use of those, or you can learn on this website.
- After educating yourself, next thing you do is open a demo trading account with a forex broker. A demo trading account allows you to trade with virtual money. This allows you you get familiar with the trading platform as well as practice trading live forex markets, with zero risk and also practicing using any trading strategies you have.
- After demo trading stage, you open up a real live trading account with your broker and start trading.
Now you are trading forex live with your hard earned cash…
The next big question is: how to be successful in forex trading? What Does it take?