My Forex Experience

Many traders hate trading based on news and avoid the markets whenever significant news is on the horizon. I think this is short sighted and a wrong way to approach your forex trading. Significant news stories affecting currencies can provide excellent forex news trading opportunities to profit from the subsequent movements. The key is to understand which news stories will move the markets with the highest probability. And of course you need to know what affect positive and negative news surprises will have on the value of a given currency.

It’s obviously the dream of everyone who enters the forex markets to trade currencies. To trade so successfully that they become wildly rich and can retire to the islands (or even OWN their very own island). Well, don’t get pissed off at me, but the truth is that most of you will not get rich by trading currencies. In fact, if you can generate a decent income through forex trading you will be ahead of the vast majority of traders.

To put is quite simply, forex trading is all about making money from the perceived value and price movements of the world’s currencies. Forex traders are students of market dynamics who attempt to profit when the value of a currency increases or decreases. Forex traders are also quite possibly the most capitalistic group on the planet as the foreign exchange is based on a free market, open competition and profit motives.

Forex trend trading is all about simply following along with existing trends to profit from the increase or decrease in currency values. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “The trend is your friend”. Well, forex trend trading attempts to take advantage of this principle.

Here’s a trade I got into about 3 hours ago. The signal for my system is the cross of the green over red. Crossing down for a sell and crossing up for a buy. The green line indicates my purchase price and the red line is my stop loss. Stop loss begins at 50 pips and is moved to the top (or bottom) of the preceding candle. The exit rule is to get out when the green line goes flat, but in the case of this trade I am exercising some discretion even though the green line is hooking upwards. Why?

Money management is one of the key aspects to trading forex markets successfully, that is a given. No more than 1-5 percent of your account balance should be at risk on any given trade. If you are conservative or unsure about a trade, stick with 1-2 percent and if you are aggressive or very confident about a trade you can risk 3-5 percent. This is part of the basic forex rules.

New traders and even those with substantial experience can find forex trading to be a complex, complicated and often frustrating experience. It doesn’t have to be that way though. If you can avoid all the conflicting information that only serves to paralyze you and make you question your trading decisions you’ll find the path to forex trading made easy.

With millions of traders and trillions of dollars moving through the forex markets, it is easy to say that not everyone trades the forex the same way. In fact, when you consider that forex is a zero sum market, it makes sense to assume that many people trade the forex in an opposite fashion with nearly -1 correlation.

As I am just learning to trade forex, I don’t expect many will follow along here anytime soon. What I do hope though is that my learning curve and process can become a help for future potential forex traders. I believe it is always better to learn from the mistakes of others so that we can avoid making those same mistakes ourselves.

I have been investigating a forex trading system that is both simple to follow, easy to implement and takes little time. I am wondering if now is the time to start day trading forex live? That is, I will post charts and setups here in real time as I take and close each trade. Considering how quickly this system allows trade decisions to be made and the fact that even though I call it day trading it is done on 4 hour and 1 hour charts, I think I could easily have time to keep all of you updated on how my trades are progressing.