quinta-feira, 11 de setembro de 2008

The 5 Traits of a Successful Forex Trader

Forex trading is definitely not for everybody. There are many factors to take into account and the risk of losing money is always present. Some people just aren't cut out for this. If you are thinking about become a Forex trader, you should keep reading. Successful Forex traders have different traits from other people.

If you don't possess all or at least most of the following traits, Forex trading might not be the right path for you:

You will need discipline. Successful traders don't try to trade "on the fly". Instead they put together a trading system which works and they stick with that.

You need the ability to accept risk. Forex trading is not risk-free. You can lose money when trading and you might be prepared to accept this risk.

You also need to be able to accept failure. Even the world's best traders lose money sometimes. The difference between them and other traders is that they accept their failure, learn from it and move on, rather than focusing on the failure.

Successful traders must have confidence in their ability to make successful trades and in their knowledge of the market. They don't guess or doubt their trades.

You need to accept being wrong. Nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. There will be times when your analysis is inaccurate. Don't stay in trades which have turned bad just because you don't want to admit you were wrong. You should instead cut your losses and search for another opportunity to make them up.

You need to be patient. Good traders follow their system and await the best opportunities. You don't need to have positions open all the time. You might have a few days without any trades being made. Don't trade just for the sake of it because this is how you end up picking bad trades over good ones.

Know when to get out. You need to know when to get in but getting out is important too. A lot of traders have become greedy and remained in a trade too long, only to see a sudden downtrend wipe all their profits out. If your trading system suggests getting out, do it.

Be aware of your financial limitations. Never over-leverage yourself. Don't trade with money that you need for other things, such as paying your mortgage and bills. If you do that, you are risking your home. Trade only with money you can live without. This might mean you only have a couple of hundred dollars to begin with but that is fine.

Why Forex Trading without a Plan Fails

Forex trading can and should be a profitable venture. However, the sad fact remains that, statistically, over ninety percent of the people who get into forex trading will lose money. So how do you discover a method for trading that is consistently profitable and allows you to build up your financial future while minimizing your risks?

One of the most consistent methods for profiting with forex market trading is using what are known as forex signals. While this may not be the most exciting method of trading available, it is ideally suited to those who would like to get into forex trading without losing the proverbial shirt off their backs. With forex trading signals, there are no complicated systems or instructions that you have to practice, play with, adjust and ultimately pay for.

Forex signals allow you to utilize someone else's wisdom while you gain your own knowledge. You will receive a single email on a daily basis and you simply sign into your online forex account and place your orders. After that, you enjoy the rewards of their work while you go about your life as you normally would. The only difference is that now you will be secure in the knowledge that you are not paying for your education, but rather, you are actually earning money as you learn more about the forex trading market.

Another key factor in being successful with the forex trading markets is knowing when to start and knowing when to stop. Again, forex signals take all of the guess work out of the equation altogether. Many people believe that they can win each and every day. While this may be possible for a very few people, it is the exception rather than the rule.

Placing a viable stopping point on your investments will allow you to consistently walk away a winner without reinvesting all of your new-found fortunes or giving away your life savings. Knowing when to stop is every bit as important as knowing where to invest if you want to be a successful forex trader. Being able to walk away with your profits in your pocket will only enhance your forex trading experience.

The only difficulty that should remain when you are interested in learning more about the forex trading markets should be finding a safe, reliable and consistently profitable forex signals service. Look for opportunities to join in with other members and discuss the current markets and methods that did and did not work for them.

Look for testimonials from the people that are using the system and listen to what they have or have not been able to accomplish with their forex signal service. Mostly, you should look for one that allows you to join without forcing you to put your life's savings in their hands and under their control. The forex markets are a great way to enhance your financial portfolio during these difficult economic times. If you want to work on securing your financial future, forex trading signals are without any doubt, the best method for getting started today.

Forex Mechanical System Trading: Why Not Me

Forex auto trading systems have become very popular for both beginners and intermediate traders. Many claim auto trading systems will produce better results than any sole human can achieve.

Let's address four key critical areas where a Forex auto trading system helps a trader to better profits.

1. Complex technical analysis is handled by software.

2. Human emotions are removed from the equation.

3. Can trade anytime.

4. One can back test, and forward test on a free account.

1. Technical analysis is used extensively for forex trading. There are a vast number of indicators, many of them involving complex mathematical calculations. More importantly a good system never relies on a single technical indicator but involves several and how they relate to one another. A good Forex trading system uses a computer to analyze these different technical indicators and issue buy and sell signals based on probability of past correlation of these indicators. This is critical as experienced traders often spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars learning different technical indicators and how they relate to one another. We all know computers are great at number crunching and detecting patterns. A good Forex auto trading system uses this huge advantage to benefit the trader.

2. Any experienced trader will tell you the biggest obstacle any trader will have regards successful trading is their emotions. A good trader must master their emotions and this can take several years. An automated system removes the element of emotions, all one does is let the system do the trades. Fear has prevented many traders from entering a position when the technical indicators are positive. More importantly greed has often turned huge gains into losses, just ask any trader. I can't stress enough that human emotions are a Forex trader's worst enemy. When you have a trading system that you know works over time you just let it run its course.

3. Forex trading occurs around the clock Monday to Friday. There are systems that run on autopilot, they attach to your trading software and execute trades without your intervention. Institutions, banks, and large broker houses have done this for years. The main reason are for the two items listed above. Now, consider if you live in New York and you are trading the US/EURO. A very active timeframe for trading is during the European business hours, that would be 1AM to 4AM your time. So why not sleep and let an automated forex trading system do the trades for you. And let's not forget when the Japanese traders are active during their normal business hours.

4. I mentioned being able to do back testing and forward free testing on a forex trading system. If I am to purchase a trading system I want to be able to do a risk-free test of the system. Some systems will give you the exact details of their signals and you can then actually go back in time to the charts and see how effective they were. Also many forex trading systems will provide you with historical records, but keep in mind there are other factors involved and you may be observing ideal situations. As almost every forex broker will provide a demo account you can actually test a system for free using a demo account. This is a MUST. I would never test a trading system with real money.

Forex trading, and Forex trading systems are becoming very popular today mainly because you no longer need $100,000 to open account, in fact you can open account with some brokers with with as little as $100. Also in the past the systems have been cost prohibitive so only large institutions used them. Forex has always offered huge leverage like 200:1 and for this reason has been very popular. You are hearing more about it today because almost anyone can get started for the very little money.

Margins in Forex Trading - Importance of Margins for Profit

Trading in the Forex market is done with "lots" and "mini-lots" of currency pairs. These lots and mini-lots are leveraged money, which is what allows you the potential to make so much profit from trading currency in the Forex. The standard size for a lot is $100,000 in currency, while a mini-lot usually represents $10,000 in currency. What leverage allows, is that you don't need $100,000 to trade $100,000 worth of currency. That's where leverage comes in.

If you have leverage of 100:1 then you only need $1,000 to trade a lot, since the money is leveraged at around 100 to 1. Most leverage comes at levels of 50:1, 100:1, and rarely at 200:1, although those ratios do exist out in the world of Forex trading.

These are the most common amounts used, though sometimes you might hear about a "micro-lot" being traded. A micro-lot is 10% of a mini-lot and has a value of $1,000 of currency. Usually, though, all trading will be done with lots and mini-lots. The use of lots allows more trading because a smaller amount of money (the margin) can allow a trader to control a much larger stake of actual currency.

Margin, leverage, lots, and mini-lots are very much connected and allow the common trader to be involved in the Forex market, since you don't need a fortune to be able to trade.

Traders can trade larger amounts of money with leverage than they could otherwise afford, allowing them to make a much larger return on their trades. This occurs because money is being returned on the entire lot, not just on the initial amount in the trader's account. You don't just get the raise in pips that come from a $1,000 lot, but you get the raise in pips from all the money that was leveraged by that lot.

This is how a trader can make profit on a .0001 raise in a currency value, because the sheer amount of currency involved is likely leveraged 100 times over.

The same can happen the other way, however, so while the Forex market offers unmatched opportunities in gaining profit, leverage also magnifies losses when the trader is on the wrong side of a market swing.

You need a good proven trading system to avoid being on the wrong end of a market swing, because as with any market as open and volatile as the Forex, where there's great opportunity, there is also great risk.

Why Have Forex Expert Advisors Become So Popular?

Forex expert advisors have really grown in popularity in recent years. For so long they were the preserve of large financial institutions, but now they are available at a very reasonable price to the ordinary trader. So why are expert advisors so popular?

Well the main reason is because these programs or robots enable you to profit from forex trading without actually having to trade yourself. All you do is download the software, configure it to run on MetaTrader4 and allow it to run in the background. The expert advisor will then place trades automatically for you based on the trading criteria that it's programmer has pre-configured.

So therefore you don't really need to know anything about forex trading in order to use expert advisors, although at least a little of knowledge is advised in order to configure the software correctly.

It is very difficult to come up with your own profitable trading method so thankfully these expert advisors can trade for you. They are programmed to look for high probability set-ups so over the long term many of these systems have more winning trades than losing ones.

This isn't always the case of course. No expert advisor can win all the time. There are still occasions when you will be stopped out at a loss, and ultimately the success or failure of a particular EA depends entirely on the skills of the programmer. If it has been programmed to use sound trading principles such as a tight stop loss policy, for example, then there's no reason at all why an expert advisor can't make consistent long-term profits for it's user.

The major benefit of an expert advisor is therefore it's potential profitability. It can take several years for you to devise your own successful trading methods, so you can bypass this steep learning curve by using an automated trading robot instead.

Furthermore an expert advisor is extremely convenient because even if you become a successful forex trader yourself, forex trading basically just becomes a job, albeit a very lucrative one, that requires you to sit staring at a computer screen all day long. An EA can be set up and left running during the day and can take positions for you without any intervention needed from you at all.

You can often turn them on and off at will and in some cases can configure them to suit your own particular trading style. So you can take a pre-existing expert advisor and tweak them to make them even more profitable.

So overall it's easy to see why forex expert advisors are becoming increasingly popular. Whether you are a professional trader or a complete newbie, an expert advisor has multiple benefits.

An Introduction to the Forex Markets

The Forex market is known to be a very lucrative market, with trillions of dollars exchanged daily. The forex market is known as an international exchange currency market, where currencies are exchanged on a daily basis. Or are you a trader who is looking for other markets to play around with? Well hopefully, we will give you an introduction to the Forex markets that will accommodate both your needs and inform you of the basic concepts and issues that intertwine with the world's currency exchange market.

While these Forex traders know their market, it's simply not possible to understand and stay in touch with everything that occurs in all the types of investment vehicles and markets across the world. Did you know that the forex (foreign exchange) market is 30 times larger then all other US markets combined. As you start analyzing forex charts you will realize that the market often displays some very familiar patterns of price movement, that are known as trends; and you will notice that once a pattern is established, it becomes the most probable course of future price action until the market changes.

As always in Forex, your main trading objective is to get into profitable trades most of the time and a trending market is the perfect situation to find this profitable trades by riding the trends until you make your target profit objective of the day. As you fill find mentioned in any article about forex, the key difference between technical analysis in the equities market, and technical analysis in the Forex currency trading market, is the fact that it is possible to participate in Forex trading 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However it should be accepted that forex currency trading could also be a very risky investment as the market can swing both in an upward and downward movement in a split second depending on the market conditions.

All that can be said is that it does offer an alternative method of currency trading but should still be ventured into with predetermined loss limits and careful study of the currency market. You're probably thinking that demo accounts are worthless since they don't mimic live trading very accurately, but in the case of currency trading the forex, you would be wrong. There are a number of workshops available that are ideal if you're new to the Forex market and have some experience trading stocks or other products.

There are a bunch of benefits that make the Forex market a far superior investing and/or trading vehicle than any other financial instrument in the world. For the Forex trader it is simply a question of deciding in which direction the market is likely to move and then deciding upon a payoff should the market move as he expects within a given time frame. There is another situation in which stop hunters try to move the market toward a group of stops in the hope that triggering the stops will push the market further in the same direction, thus triggering even more stops and so forth in a snowball effect.

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