Choose your broker carefully

While this point is often neglected by beginners, it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the choice of broker. That a fake or unreliable broker invalidates all the gains acquired through hard work and study is obvious. But it is equally important that your expertise level and trading goals match the details of the offer made by the broker. What kind of client profile does the forex broker aim at reaching? Does the trading software suit your expectations? How efficient is customer service? All these must be carefully scrutinized before even beginning to consider the intricacies of trading itself. Please refer to our forex broker reviews to find a reliable broker that suits your trading style.

Plan your goals. Stick to your plan

Once you know what you want from trading, you must systematically define a time frame and a working plan for your trading career. What constitutes failure, what would be defined as success? What is the time frame for the trial and error process that will inevitably be an important part of your learning? How much time can you devote to trading? Do you aim at financial independence, or merely aim to generate extra income? These and similar questions must be answered before you can gain the clear vision necessary for a persistent and patient approach to trading. Also, having clear goals will make it easier to abandon the endeavor entirely in case that the risks/return analysis precludes a profitable outcome.

Know yourself. Define your risk tolerance carefully. Understand your needs

To profit in trading, you must recognize the markets. To recognize the markets, you must first know and recognize yourself. The first step of gaining self-awareness is ensuring that your risk tolerance and capital allocation to forex and trading are not excessive or lacking. This means that you must carefully study and analyze your own financial goals in engaging forex trading.

The Two-Part Journal

• A chronological columnar list of trades you can total and aggregate so you can have a record of all your efforts. This is best accomplished by handwriting in the columns all the pertinent data. Of course, you can keep records using an Excel spreadsheet that can automatically do the math for you, and which will remove simple calculation errors. This depends on your own abilities in spreadsheet modeling.
• A printout of the actual chart you used to determine the trade, indicating your entry level, your stop-loss level, and your potential profit level should be clearly marked up on the chart. Mark the reasons you made the trade on the bottom.

Finally, you should set up a journal for each type of trading methodology or system you employ. Do not mix systems, as the results of your trades will derive from too many variables and will then be inconclusive. Therefore, if you have more than one trading system or methodology, you should keep a
journal for each one.

Every trade you record should be based on only one particular system, which will then give you the ability after 20 trades or so to calculate the expectancy or reliability of your system.

Mind Pattern Modification

One of the most useful features of your journal will be the concrete help it provides in forcing you to change your habits from destructive to constructive. As you learn how to trade your plan, you will develop a greater level of confidence. Your profitable trades won’t feel so random, and your losses will be “planned for,” and therefore won’t ding your psyche in a way that will make you feel that a loss means you are a loser. A very important mental and emotional factor in trading is your level of confidence. Confidence is the antidote for the fear and greed cycle in which many traders will get
caught. Fear and greed is a natural, hardwired response in most humans. If you are winning, you want to win more; if you are losing, you feel fear and even panic as your account dwindles toward zero.

Having a journal that gathers your statistics sets up a trading plan by defining parameters of action needed, provides a rearview mirror so that you can measure how well you executed each trade, and most importantly, provides you with the feedback to develop and evolve your trading skills. You will find
a good trading journal to be a best friend and mentor as you make progress. (Market hours for Tokyo, London, and New York determine volatility peaks.

Methodology Verification

Another very important by-product of a trading journal is the fact that, over time, it will verify your methodology. You will be able to see just how well your system performs in changing market conditions. It will answer questions like: How did my system perform in a trending market, a range-bound market,
different time frames, and the impact of your trading decisions such as placing stop-loss orders, too tight or too loose? In order to retain the full details for the logic behind a particular methodology, the trading journal must be fully comprehensive.

Planning Tool

Not only should a good trade journal record your actual trade data, but it should also provide information on what your plans are for each trade. This feature allows you to consider each trade before you take it by setting parameters for where you want to enter, how much risk you can accept on the trade, where your profit target will be set, and how you will manage the trade as it proceeds. In other words, the journal becomes a way for you to record your thoughts in actual numbers and makes it possible to convert wishful thinking into practical reality. It forms the basis of a method for planning your trade and then trading your plan.

Historical Record

Over a period of time, the journal will provide a historical perspective. Not only will it summarize all your trades, but it will provide, at a glance, the state of your trading account. In other words, it becomes your personal performance database, which will provide you with the opportunity to go back in time and determine how often you traded, how successful each trade was, which currency pairs performed better for you, and even what time frames gave up the best profit percentages.

Set Entry Rules

This comes after the tips for exit rules for a reason: Exits are far more important than entries. A typical entry rule could be worded like this: “If signal A fires and there is a minimum target at least three times as great as my stop loss and we are at support, then buy X contracts or shares here.”
Your system should be complicated enough to be effective, but simple enough to facilitate snap decisions. If you have 20 conditions that must be met and many are subjective, you will find it difficult (if not impossible) to actually make trades. In fact, computers often make better traders than people, which may explain why nearly 50% of all trades that now occur on the New York Stock Exchange are generated by computer programs.
Computers don’t have to think or feel good to make a trade. If conditions are met, they enter. When the trade goes the wrong way or hits a profit target, they exit. They don’t get angry at the market or feel invincible after making a few good trades. Each decision is based on probabilities, not emotion.

Set Exit Rules

Most traders make the mistake of concentrating most of their efforts on looking for buy signals, but pay very little attention to when and where to exit. Many traders cannot sell if they are down because they don’t want to take a loss. Get over it, learn to accept losses, or you will not make it as a trader. If your stop gets hit, it means you were wrong. Don’t take it personally. Professional traders lose more trades than they win, but by managing money and limiting losses, they still make profits.
Before you enter a trade, you should know your exits. There are at least two possible exits for every trade. First, what is your stop loss if the trade goes against you? It must be written down. Mental stops don’t count. Second, each trade should have a profit target. Once you get there, sell a portion of your position and you can move your stop loss on the rest of your position to the breakeven point if you wish.