Learn How to Trade in Forex Market from the Basics

Forex trading is well known as a lucrative way to make money online. It has become an essential part for investor’s portfolio as you can gain thousands in minutes by trading currencies. For those who are new to the forex trading, Forex means Foreign Exchange Market where it involves buying and selling the different currencies of the world. Profits are made through the difference of selling and buying price - you earn when you buy-low and sell-high.

Forex market is a 24-hour market. The trade begins each day in Sydney, and moves around the globe to Tokyo, London, and then New York. Unlike any other financial market, investors can respond to money-value fluctuations caused by economic, social and political events at the time they occur - day or night. Major currencies traded nowadays are U.S. dollars, Australian Dollars, Japanese Yens, British Pounds, Swiss Francs, Canadian Dollars, and the Euro Dollars.

In the past, small speculators are not allowed to trade Forex freely as it is now. The minimum required business sizes are large and the financial requirements for trading foreign currencies are strict. Only huge multi-national cooperation and banks are able to fit into the business. In fact, large international banks are still the main players in currency exchange market. Deutsche Bank is one of the top currency traders; along with other major banks like UBS, Citi Group, HSBC, Barclays, J. P. Morgan Chase, Coldman Sachs, ABN Amro, Morgan Stanley, and Merril Lynch; these banks are said to be responsible for more than 70% trades in currency market. Forex trade is not open to the publics until year 1998, where big sized inter-bank units are sliced into smaller pieces and offered to individual traders.

It is simple to get started in Forex trading, an funded Forex account and a computer connected to the Internet is more than enough to get started. However, to start trading and become a successful Forex trader are totally different. Trading Forex is a high risks game and traders should always follow certain principals, listed below are a few of must-do’s when trading in Forex market.

1. Educate yourself before trading in Forex market

As in any trading markets, building up your trading skills and knowledge is the very first step that you must take. To further your learning in Forex trading, seminars, workshops, video tutorials, online learning, or even books are handful to help us learn from the professional.

2. Having a trading plans

A good trading plan is needed no matter you are a beginner or an expert in Forex trading. The Forex market itself is just a vehicle, to go to your desired destination, which is to gain profit and achieve financial freedom in our case, you have to drive your vehicle with maps and navigations. How much do you want to earn from the trades? How much you can afford to lose if things go wrong? What is the amount of capital you are putting in? Answer the questions to yourself when you are setting your trading plan. If you fail to plan, you are indeed plan to fail.

3. Mature mindsets and discipline trading

Trading Forex with discipline is very important. Success in Forex trading could not be achieved by only plotting out the best trading plan. It is also depends on implementing the trading plan. Be disciplined, trade according to your plan and never trade with your emotion. Greed will stop you from taking profit at predetermined level; while fear will stop you from making the nice kill in the market.

Without a doubt, Forex is getting more and more popular. There are less restrictions in FOREX market. No limited market access, no liquidity issues-after market hours, zero commission fees, low capital requirements, and no restrictions on short selling. However, the risks in Forex trading should not be taken for granted. As you can always trade in margin, you might lose a lot more than you can afford if you don’t plan your investment wisely. Seminars, e-Books, Internet, papers, plus video courses are all you need first before getting involved in the market.

Money Management

We get a lot of questions about various complex money management (MM) formulas and our preferences. We don’t comment on this subject very often because money management is such a personal issue that it would be impossible to give any universal advice that would be specific enough to have value. Everyone seems to have different goals and tolerances for risk, not to mention varying amounts of capital for trading.

However we do have some basic thoughts and opinions that might be helpful in picking a suitable MM strategy that will help you to become a winner.

Be careful about trying to use formulas that are designed to optimize the returns. In my experience I have found that the most successful traders, over the long run, are not seeking to maximize their returns. The best traders are always seeking to carefully control their risks and to achieve as much consistency as possible. They look for methods to achieve consistent returns with low drawdowns and they are willing to accept smaller returns in the process. My policy has always been to worry about the risk and the consistency first and then to accept whatever returns that prudent approach will allow. I’m sure I will never win any trading contests and I have never bothered to enter one. In my opinion, no one should ever trade like the winner of a trading contest. I apologize for getting off on a different subject here. Lets get back on track and talk about trading in the only contest that matters - the trading that you do every day.

In recent years the strategy of risking a small percentage of capital on each trade has become quite popular and deservedly so. This MM strategy, often referred to as fixed fractional trading, reduces our dollar amount of risk as we experience losses and increases our risk level as we earn profits. The possibility of ever going to zero with such a strategy is virtually nonexistent. However this strategy has an inherent weakness that tends to constantly work against us. If we assume an equal number of winners or losers in a sequence this popular strategy produces net losses if the winners are not larger than the losers. To keep things very simple lets just look at a series of five wins followed by five losses with the wins being equal to the amount we risk. Lets also keep the math really simple and begin with starting capital of 100 and risk 5% of our current capital on each trade. I think that most traders would assume that if they had five losers followed by five winners they would be even. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Here are the numbers: Risk is always 5% of current capital. (I’m going to round the numbers to two decimals.)

Capital $ Risk W/L Account balance
100.0 5.00 L 95.00
95.00 4.75 L 90.25
90.25 4.51 L 85.74
85.74 4.29 L 81.45
81.45 4.07 L 77.38

OK we are already tired of losing. Let’s have five winners in a row and see if we can get our money back.

Capital $ Risk W/L Account balance
77.38 3.87 W 81.25
81.25 4.06 W 85.31
85.31 4.27 W 89.58
89.58 4.48 W 94.06
94.06 4.70 W 98.76

As you can see we had an equal number of winners and losers yet somehow we lost money. Perhaps it is because we had bad luck and got started in the wrong direction. Lets reverse the sequence of trades so that we start out on a winning streak instead of losing. Maybe that will help.

Capital $ Risk W/L Account balance
100.00 5.00 W 105.00
105.00 5.25 W 110.25
110.25 5.51 W 115.76
115.76 5.79 W 121.55
121.55 6.08 W 127.63

Looks good so far. Starting off with winners looks much better than starting with losses. But now we have five losers coming up.

Capital $ Risk W/L Account balance
127.63 6.38 L 121.25
121.25 6.06 L 115.19
115.19 5.76 L 109.43
109.43 5.47 L 103.96
103.96 5.20 L 98.76

Hmmm. It doesn’t seem to matter if we start out with a string of winners or a string of losses. Somehow we wound up losing the same amount of money either way.

Obviously we don’t have a very good system at work here but it is not a losing system. With the proper MM strategy we should break even. Our winning trades are only equal to our risk and to have a winning system the winners need to be bigger than the losers. We are winning on only half of our trades and we would be profitable if we could win on more than half. Even though our system is not a good one you would think that it would at least be a breakeven proposition (we haven’t included any costs) because the winners are always equal to the amount at risk and we win 50% of the time. That sounds like a breakeven system, doesn’t it? But if we employ the popular money management strategy of risking a fixed percentage of our current capital we manage to turn the system into a loser. However, if we risked a fixed dollar amount on each trade the system results would improve and we would break even.

The fixed percentage of risk approach to MM is a good one because it keeps us from going broke and it compounds our profits rapidly. Both of those are desirable characteristics but we need to be aware that they come at a price. We should realize that our recovery from drawdowns might not be as fast as we would like and that we can give back profits even faster than we made them.

One strategy that can help solve the problem of giving back the profits too rapidly is to periodically sweep some of the profits out of the account and place them in some other place where they are adding to our diversification and reducing our risk. Now and then we should take some of the profits out and spend them on something that improves our quality of life. This important step gives the dollars at stake a new meaning and boosts our morale tremendously. What is the point of winning and losing and accumulating profits only to give them back at some later date? If we make it a practice to routinely sweep some of the profits our account will continue to grow but it will be compounding at a slower rate than if we left our profits at risk. However if we stumble into a losing streak we will be glad that we took out some of the profits and reduced our bet size.

If we are good traders and we make it a practice to withdraw some of our profits on a regular basis we will eventually reach the point where we have taken out more than we started with. There are very few traders, particularly in futures, who can claim that they have truly beaten the market. Until you have taken out more than you started with the market can still beat you. Trading futures is a zero sum game and winners are few and far between. Taking out profits now and then rather than getting carried away trying to optimize the gains to infinity is contrary to what is being taught these days. Everyone is obsessed with finding formulas to optimize the returns. We need to remember that the trader who has the optimum gains today could easily be tomorrow’s biggest loser. That is a game we don’t need to play.

I think we all need to take a step or two back and look at the big picture. Trading is not really just a game. The money is real. Lets make sure that we are true winners and not just habitual players. Take some profits now and then and put them out of harms way. When we have done this I can assure you that the game is a lot more fun and our trading will improve. Nothing builds confidence like knowing for sure that you are indeed a winner.

Risk Arbitrage

In economics, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a state of imbalance between two (or possibly more) markets: a combination of matching deals are struck that exploit the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. A person who engages in arbitrage is called an arbitrageur.

For example, if you can buy items at one price at a factory outlet and sell them for a higher price on an internet auction website such as eBay, you can exploit the imbalance between those two markets for those items. The term "arbitrage", however, is usually applied only to trading in money and investment instruments (such as stocks, bonds, and other securities), not to goods, and the difference in prices is usually referred to as "the spread", so arbitrage is often defined as "playing the spread" in the money market.

Arbitrage has the effect of causing prices in different markets to converge. As a result of arbitrage, the currency exchange rates, the price of commodities, and the price of securities in different markets all tend to converge to a fixed price. The speed at which the prices converge is one measure of the efficiency of a market. Arbitrage tends to reduce price discrimination by encouraging people to buy an item where the price is low and resell where the price is high. Sellers of goods and services often attempt to prohibit or discourage arbitrage.

Traditionally, arbitrage transactions in the securities markets involve high speed and low risk. At some moment a price difference exists, and the problem is to execute two or three balancing transactions while the difference persists (that is, before the other arbitrageurs act).

In the 1980s a practice with the oxymoronic name of "risk arbitrage" became common. In this form of speculation, one trades a security that is clearly undervalued or overvalued, when it is seen that the wrong valuation is about to be corrected by events. The standard example is the stock of a company, undervalued in the stock market, which is about to be the object of a takeover bid; the price of the takeover will more truly reflect the value of the company, giving a large profit to those who bought at the current price—if the merger goes through as predicted.

The transaction involves a delay of weeks or months and may entail considerable risk if borrowed money is used to magnify the reward through leverage. One way of reducing the risk is through the illegal use of inside information is obvious, and in fact risk arbitrage with regard to leveraged buyouts was associated with some of the famous financial scandals of the 1980s such as those involving Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

Examples
Here’s a theoretical example: Suppose that the exchange rates (after taking out the fees for making the exchange) in London are £5 = $10 = ¥1000 and the exchange rates in Tokyo are ¥1000 = £6 = $10. Converting $10 to £6 in Tokyo and converting that £6 into $12 in London, for a profit of $2, would be arbitrage.

One real-life example of arbitrage involves the stock market in New York and the futures market in Chicago. When the price of a stock in New York and its corresponding future in Chicago are out of sync, one can buy the less expensive one and sell the more expensive. Because the differences between the prices are likely to be small (and not to last very long), this can only be done profitably with computers examining a large number of prices and automatically exercising a trade when the prices are far enough out of balance. The activity of other arbitrageurs can make this risky. Those with the fastest computers and the smartest mathematicians take advantage of series of small differentials that would not be profitable if taken individually.

Risks
Arbitrage transactions in modern securities markets involve fairly low risks. Generally it is impossible to close two or three transactions at the same instant; therefore, there is the possibility that when one part of the deal is closed, a quick shift in prices makes it impossible to close the other at a profitable price. There is also counter-party risk, that the other party to one of the deals fails to deliver as agreed; though unlikely, this hazard is serious because of the large quantities one must trade in order to make a profit on small price differences. These risks become magnified when leverage or borrowed money is used.
Another risk occurs if the items being bought and sold are not identical and the arbitrage is conducted under the assumption that the prices of the items are correlated or predictable. In the extreme case this is risk arbitrage, described earlier. In comparison to the classical quick arbitrage transaction, such an operation can produce disastrous losses.

Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) lost $100 billion mis-managing this concept in September 1998. LTCM had attempted to make money on the difference between different bond instruments. For example, it would buy U.S treasury bonds and sell Italian bond futures. The concept was that because Italian bond futures had a less liquid market, in the short term Italian bond futures would have a higher return than U.S. bonds, but in the long term, the prices would converge. Because the difference was small, large amount of money had to be borrowed to make the buying and selling profitable.

The downfall in this system began on August 17, 1998, when Russia defaulted on its rouble debt and domestic dollar debt. Since the markets were already nervous due to the Asian crisis, investors began selling non-U.S. treasury debt and buying U.S. treasuries, which were considered a safe investment. As a result the return on U.S. treasuries began decreasing because there were many buyers, and the return on other bonds began to increase because there were many sellers. This caused the difference between the returns of U.S. treasuries and other bonds to increase, rather than to decrease as LTCM was expecting. Eventually this caused LTCM to fold, and a bailout had to be arranged to prevent a collapse in confidence in the economic system.

An ironic footnote is that they were right long-term (the LT in LTCM), and a few months after they folded their portfolio became very profitable. However the long-term does not matter if you cannot survive the short-term, and that they failed to do.

Some Advice before Entering Forex Trading

There is an ideal mindset, character, and mental attitude that traders need to acquire. I say “acquire” because few people have the innate personality that makes this mindset “natural” With respect to your trading, this involves being free of anxiety, fear, despair or regret. It also involves being able to remain calm, confident, focused and disciplined in the face of adverse trading outcomes.

Trade with a Disciplined Plan

The problem with many traders is that they take shopping more seriously than trading. The average shopper would not spend $500 without serious research and examination of the product he/she is about to purchase, yet the average trader would make a trade that could easily cost him/her $500 based on little more than a feeling or hunch. The plan must include stop and limit levels for the trade, as your analysis should encompass the expected downside as well as the expected upside. Be sure that you have a plan in place before you start to trade.

Good Execution Good Anticipation

Everybody knows that trading is a number game. I mean, our success is not depend on the outcome of the next trade, our success is depend on the overall profitability of many trades. So, while we are trading, whether the last trade we did was profitable or not is definitely not important. There is no point drawing conclusions on the outcome of just one –or even a few-trades. We can only access our anticipation skills when we have made a reasonable number of trades and see the longer-term result of our action. It is so important that when we are trading, our goal should be focus on executing our trades with ruthless efficiency and to judge only that. If you consider the ways that you lose money trading, you will find that it is down to poor execution, rather than poor anticipation.

Cut Your Losses Early and Let Your Profits Run

This simple concept is one of the most difficult to implement and is the cause of most traders demise. Most traders violate their predetermined plan and take their profits before reaching their profit target because they feel uncomfortable sitting on a profitable position. These same people will easily sit on losing positions, allowing the market to move against them for hundreds of points in hopes that the market will come back. In addition, traders who have had their stops hit a few times only to see the market go back in their favor once they are out, are quick to remove stops from their trading on the belief that this will always be the case. Stops are there to be hit, and to stop you from losing more then a predetermined amount. You simply allow your profits on the winners to run and make sure that your losses are minimal. What is it about cutting a loss that is so hard?

Do Not Over Trade

Do not bet on the farm. One of the most common mistakes that traders make is leveraging their account too high by trading much larger sizes than their account should prudently trade. Leverage is a double-edged sword. Just because one lot of currency only requires $1000 as a minimum margin deposit, it does not mean that a trader with $5000 in his account should be able to trade 5 lots. One lot is $100,000 and should be treated as a $100,000 investment and not the $1000 put up as margin. Most traders analyze the charts correctly and place sensible trades, yet they tend to over leverage themselves. As a consequence of this, they are often forced to exit a position at the wrong time. A good rule of thumb is to never use more than 10% of your account at any given time.

Do Not Marry Your Trades

The reason trading with a plan is the #1 tip is because most objective analysis is done before the trade is executed. Once a trader is in a position he/she tends to analyze the market differently in the hopes that the market will move in a favorable direction rather than objectively looking at the changing factors that may have turned against your original analysis. This is especially true of losses. Traders with a losing position tend to marry their position, which causes them to disregard the fact that all signs point towards continued losses.

So should you before you trade. In order to start the trading day in the optimum state of mind you should take 15 to 20 minutes to prepare. Treat each day like an elite athlete prepares for a competition. Here is how to do this:

1. Get yourself in a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes

2. Breathe in and out slowly, pushing your stomach out each time you breathe in

3. Consciously relax all your muscles

4. Focus your entire attention on your breathing

5. When your mind starts to wander (as it will) re-focus on your breathing so that you eliminate from your consciousness whatever your mind had started to think about -including bodily sensations

6. Become aware of being exclusively -in the present moment. Exclude memories or thoughts about past events, and worries or anticipation or planning about the future

7. Do this past the point of boredom, until your restless mind settles down and you enter a peaceful, relaxed state. This usually takes 15 to 20 minutes, but it can be longer for some people

Anybody interested in some more information about forex trading should check out high-quality course like Peter Bain at Forex Mentor. His course provide clear guidelines about when to enter a trade, what to expect in terms of market movement, when to exit a trade, how much loss can be accepted in case the deal moves against the trader, and some secret techniques that can be easily implemented. Following his simple guidelines can help you become a successful forex trader. Learn to make daily profits in the forex market. You would not believe how straightforward and helpful it is to a Forex beginner.

The FOREX Market- Trade with your head not your heart!

Sounds simple…right? In actuality, this is the number one reason why day traders lose their shirts. They let their emotions get the best of them and end up doing something real stupid. Trust me I’ve done it.

When trading currency, you need to take yourself away from the platform and look at your trades in actual bills not numerical values on a computer screen. For example, let’s say you short the USD/JPY for a 50 mini-lot right before a data release and it tanks. The USD/JPY goes down about 50 some odd pips and now you’re up $2500 in about thirty seconds.

Now, if you were smart, you would close the position and take your profit, but you’re not and you decide to let it ride. The market goes down about another 10 pips. So, now you’re up $3000 and you still won’t close it. You think that it’s going to keep tanking and that you could make 5-6k on this one trade…wishful thinking.

All of sudden the market retraces and shoots back up 20 pips, your still up about $2000, but now you tell yourself, I’ll wait until it goes back down a few pips and then close it. Too late, the market ignites and now you’re break-even and then you’re negative. In the end you take a $500 loser, which isn’t too bad, but considering you were up $3000 it’s like you lost $3500.

Now, let’s pretend you did this same trade with actual, physical dollar bills. Now or days most people trade from a three wide spread, so let’s say that you gave a trade booker $150 cash to place a short USD/JPY 50 lot. The data is released and this man keeps giving you $50 bills and before you know it you have $3000 in your hands. In order to keep this money all you have to say is close.

You decide to press your luck and wait and the market continues to trend down and now you have $3500 cash. All of sudden, the market begins to retrace and this nice young man starts taking $50 from you each pip it retraces. How many pips does the market have to retrace before you say close? Maybe, ten pips? Once you saw actual dollar bills being taken away from you, you would throw in the towel. So, how does one improve their money management skills?

First of all, realize that you are trading real money. I’m sure you realize that the money you are trading is real money, but do you conceptualize it? When you make a few hundred or a few thousand dollars trading, do you feel like someone just handed you cash? Of course not! Every time you’re trading, no matter if you are profitable or not profitable visualize and grasp the outcome. Don’t just watch your balance and equity fluctuate; you need to relate your loss and gains to every day life.

For example, let’s say you have a 10k account and in the first week you doubled that to 20k. You need to step back and understand what you just accomplished; you just made 10k in one week by sitting in front of your computer and trading currency. Now, let’s take that money and put it to everyday use. If you were handed a free 10k, what would you do with the money?

Would you pay of some debt, by a car, put money down on a home, go on a vacation, put it towards school, I think you get the gist. All I’m saying is that 10k is yours, you own it and there is no reason you have to keep in the FOREX. You are that 10% that succeeded this week, but the law of averages states that you are most likely to be the 90% next week. If not next week then the week after and if not then, eventually you will.

If you invest 10k and your account doubles to 20k, why would you pull out 15k leave in 5k and go for the gusto? If you lose your remaining 5k who cares you still made 5k in a week at your computer. Tell me another investment where I can make 50% on a 10k investment in one week. Turn around the following week pull my initial investment and my profit and still have 5k to play with. If I hadn’t experienced this first hand then I would have never believed it. DO NOT GIVE YOUR WINNINGS BACK TO THE MARKET! It’s not worth it.

Thoughts on Managing Money

We often hear from students by letter, telephone, and in person at seminars, that they greatly desire to trade managed money.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we also hear from students who want money managed for them. In either case, the experience can be gut wrenching.

This chapter should serve as a warning and a caution to both. Since your author has at one time or another engaged in managing money for others, I base what I have to say here on my own experiences and, if it please the reader, this may be entitled "Confessions of a Trader."

The psychological basis for successful trading is indeed a delicate subject. No one we have ever heard of has been able to pinpoint exactly what it is that gives one trader success while another trader fails. Although some claim to have done this, coming up with an attribute profile of the "average" winner, no one we know of has identified a set of common denominators among professional winning traders. Besides, which of us is "average?" Is it you?

Winning in the markets seems to involve a fine balance of traits that differ among winning traders. To make the identification of winning traders even more complicated, there seems to be a distinction between those traders who can successfully trade their own money and those traders who can successfully trade the money of others. I have met both.

Two of the most successful money managers I know personally began by trading managed money. They began trading other people’s money for lack of sufficient money of their own with which to trade. Later in their careers, when they did have sufficient money with which to trade their own account, they found that they failed miserably. They were not able to trade their own money with any degree of success. More than that, when they traded their own money simultaneously with trading managed money, they failed at both.

Upon further investigation, and after speaking with a number of traders who have tried both, I discovered that there are many traders who are successful at trading managed money, but who can’t trade their way out of their hat when trying to trade their own money. Invariably, upon further probing, some admitted that they were much more daring and courageous with other people’s money than they were when the money was their own.

Also in this group of those who trade better for others than themselves, I have been able to identify traders who said they were much more careful and conservative with the money of others than they were with money of their own.

So within this group of traders, all of them students of ours who can successfully trade managed money, some are successful because they are more daring with other people’s money, and some are successful because they are more careful with money not their own.

Next, we come to those traders who successfully manage their own money and who have attempted to manage money for others, but failed.

I have heard from quite a few traders who attempted to manage money for others. In this group I include those who have failed miserably. I have spoken with a number of students who have had the experience of losing at least half of the money under their management prior to returning the balance to those who invested with them. Amazingly, the answers are the same as with the group who successfully manage money. Managed money seems to be a "monkey" on their backs. They find that they trade too carefully, too conservatively when the money is not their own. Worse than that, when things go wrong with a trade, they do not act rationally and with the same cool determination as with their own money. When they trade their own account, they do not think of it as money. When they trade someone else’s account, all they can think of is that it is money. And, because it is not their own, they try their hardest not to lose it. Unfortunately, experience shows that what they fear the most happens - they do lose the money.

I have spoken with students who successfully manage their own money because they are more careful with their own than with the money of others. They, too, have failed with managed money, and have resigned themselves to trading only their own accounts.

Among the students and acquaintances, I have identified at least four categories of traders who attempt to manage money. I’m sure there are other categories, but these are the ones I’ve found:

1. Those who successfully manage money for others but cannot manage their own account with any great degree of success because they are too careful with their own money, while they are more daring with the money of others.

2. Those who successfully manage money for others but cannot manage their own account with any great degree of success because they are too daring with their own money, while they are more careful with the money of others.

3. Those who successfully manage their own money but fail with managed money because they are too careful when managing money for others.

4. Those who successfully manage their own money but fail with managed money because they are too daring when managing money for others.

Conclusions:

Among these students I found none who successfully traded both managed accounts and their own accounts. The size of the population for this study was too small to come up with any meaningful statistics, but there are some warnings and cautions that can be concluded.

To those of you who want to have your money managed, be aware that the individual success of any trader trading his/her own money is no guarantee that that person can successfully manage the money of others. It would seem to bear out the reality of placing managed money with a proven successful trader of managed money.

To those of you who want to manage money for others, be aware that successfully trading your own account is no guarantee that you will be able to successfully trade the account of other persons.

Failure in either of these situations is painful for all concerned! In fact, the pain can be so great as to prematurely end the trading hopes of either party.

Be very careful, because in both of these situations the result can be great personal pain. The pain may be both physical and mental, and can cause you to abort your trading career. I feel it is my duty to caution you about getting involved with managed money, whether you try to manage the money of others, or whether you want someone else to manage yours. The costs can be horrendous.

The responsibility of trading managed money can really wear you down. You may have to go for years without a vacation. You find yourself working late into the night, and working a significant portion of the weekends.

All work and no play is not a good thing for your trading career.

Interestingly, most of my students come to me relating that the reason they want to learn how to trade is so they can become independent and not have to work at a regular job. However, trading managed money is one of the most grueling jobs you can ever undertake.

Trading with Strategy

Trading successfully is by no means a simple matter. It requires time, market knowledge and market understanding and a large amount of self restraint. ACM does not manage accounts, nor does it give market advice, that is the job of money managers and introducing brokers. As market professionals, we can however point the novice in the right direction and indicate what are correct trading tactics and considerations and what is total nonsense.

Anyone who says you can consistently make money in foreign exchange markets is being untruthful. Foreign exchange by nature, is a volatile market. The practice of trading it by way of margin increases that volatility exponentially. We are therefore talking about a very ’fast market’ which is naturally inconsistent. Following that precept, it is logical to say that in order to make a successful trade, a trader has to take into account technical and fundamental data and make an informed decision based on his perception of market sentiment and market expectation. Timing a trade correctly is probably the most important variable in trading successfully but invariably there will be times where a traders’ timing will be off. Don’t expect to generate returns on every trade.

Let’s enumerate what a trader needs to do in order to put the best chances for profitable trades on his side:

Trade with money you can afford to lose:

Trading fx markets is speculative and can result in loss, it is also exciting, exhilarating and can be addictive. The more you are ’involved with your money’ the harder it is to make a clear-headed decision. Money you have earned is precious, but money you need to survive should never be traded.

Identify the state of the market:

What is the market doing? Is it trending upwards, downwards, is it in a trading range. Is the trend strong or weak, did it begin long ago or does it look like a new trend that’s forming. Getting a clear picture of the market situation is laying the groundwork for a successful trade.

Determine what time frame you’re trading on:

Many traders get in the market without thinking when they would like to get out, after all the goal is to make money. This is true but when trading, one must extrapolate in his mind’s eye the movement that one expects to happen. Within this extrapolation, resides a price evolution during a certain period of time. Attached to this is the idea of exit price. The importance of this is to mentally put your trade in perspective and although it is clearly impossible to know exactly when you will exit the market, it is important to define from the outset if you’ll be ’scalping’ (trying to get a few points off the market) trading intra-day, or going longer term. This will also determine what chart period you’re looking at. If you trade many times a day, there’s no point basing your technical analysis on a daily graph, you’ll probably want to analyse 30 minute or hour graphs. Additionally it is important to know the different time periods when various financial centers enter and exit the market as this creates more or less volatility and liquidity and can influence market movements.

Time your trade:

You can be right about a potential market movement but be too early or too late when you enter the trade. Timing considerations are twofold, an expected market figure like CPI, retail sales or a federal reserve decision can consolidate a movement that’s already underway. Timing your move means knowing what’s expected and taking into account all considerations before trading. Technical analysis can help you identify when and at what price a move may occur. We will look at technical analysis in more detail later.

If in doubt, stay out:

If you’re unsure about a trade and find you’re hesitating, stay on the sidelines.

Trade logical transaction sizes:

Margin trading allows the fx trader a very large amount of leverage, trading at full margin capacity (in ACM’s case 1% or 0.5%) can make for some very large profits or losses on an account. Scaling your trades so that you may re-enter the market or make transactions on other currencies is generally wiser. In short, don’t trade amounts that can potentially wipe you out and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. ACM offers the same rates regardless of transaction sizes so a customer has nothing to lose by starting small.

Gauge market sentiment:

Market sentiment is what most of the market is perceived to be feeling about the market and therefore what it is doing or will do. This is basically about trend. You may have heard the term ’the trend is your friend’, this basically means that if you’re in the right direction with a strong trend you will make successful trades. This of course is very simplistic, a trend is capable of reversal at any time. Technical and fundamental data can indicate however if the trend has begun long ago and if it is strong or weak.

Market expectation:

Market expectation relates to what most people are expecting as far as upcoming news is concerned. If people are expecting an interest rate to rise and it does, then there usually will not be much of a movement because the information will already have been ’discounted’ by the market, alternatively if the adverse happens, markets will usually react violently.

Use what other traders use:

In a perfect world, every trader would be looking at a 14 day RSI and making trading decisions based on that. If that was the case, when RSI would go under the 30 level, everyone would buy and by consequence the price would rise. Needless to say, the world is not perfect and not all market participants follow the same technical indicators, draw the same trendlines and identify the same support & resistance levels. The great diversity of opinions and techniques used translates directly into price diversity. Traders however have a tendency to use a limited variety of technical tools. The most common are 9 and 14 day RSI, obvious trendlines and support levels, fibonnacci retracement, MACD and 9, 20 & 40 day exponential moving averages. The closer you get to what most traders are looking at, the more precise your estimations will be. The reason for this is simple arithmetic, larger numbers of buyers than sellers at a certain price will move the market up from that price and vice-versa.