Older Tips
Choose the Right Trading Partner for You
It’s critical to choose the right trading partner as you engage the forex market. Pricing, execution, and the quality of customer service can all make a difference in your trading experience. FX Heights provides you with the best of guides and tutorials so you have a wide range of tools to start forex trading.
Don’t Be Afraid to Explore
While consistency is important, don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your trading plan if things aren’t working as you thought. As your experience grows, your needs may change; your plan should always reflect your goals. If your goals or financial situation changes, so should your plan.
Keep It Slow and Steady
One key to trading is consistency. All traders have lost money, but if you maintain a positive edge, you have a better chance of coming out on top. Educating yourself and creating a trading plan is good, but the real test is sticking to that plan through patience and discipline.
Check Your Emotions at the Door
You have an open position and the market’s not going your way. Maybe you could make it up with a trade or two that don’t fit with your trading plan…just a couple couldn’t hurt, right? “Revenge trading” rarely ends well. Don’t let emotion get in the way of your plan for successful trading. When you have a losing trade, don’t go all-in to try to make it back in one shot; it’s smarter to stick with your plan and make the lost back a little at a time than to suddenly find yourself with two crippling losses.
Know Where to Stop Along the Way
You don’t have time to sit and watch the markets every minute of every day. You can better manage your risk and protect potential profits through stop and limit orders, getting you out of the market at the price you set. Trailing stops are especially helpful; they trail your position at a specific distance as the market moves, helping to protect profits should the market reverse. Placing contingent orders may not necessarily limit your risk for losses.
Know Your Limits
This is simple yet critical to your future success: know your limits. This includes knowing how much you’re willing to risk on each trade, setting your leverage ratio in accordance with your needs, and never risking more than you can afford to lose.
Forecast the “Weather Conditions” of the Market
Fundamental traders prefer to trade based on news and other financial and political data; technical traders prefer technical analysis tools such as Fibonacci retracements and other indictors to forecast market movements. Most traders use a combination of the two. No matter what your style, it is important you use the tools at your disposal to find potential trading opportunities in moving markets.
Practice
Put your trading plan to the test in real market conditions with a risk-free FOREX.com practice account. You’ll get a chance to see what it’s like to trade currency pairs while taking your trading plan for a test drive without risking any of your own capital.
Make a Plan and Stick to It
Creating a trading plan is a critical component of successful trading. It should include your profit goals, risk tolerance level, methodology and evaluation criteria. Once you have a plan in place, make sure each trade you consider falls within your plan’s parameters. Remember: you’re likely most rational before you place a trade and most irrational after your trade is placed.
Know the Markets
We cannot overstate the importance of educating yourself on the forex market. Take the time to study currency pairs and what affects them before risking your own capital; it’s an investment in time that could save you a good amount of money.
Tip Of The Day
Keep Excellent Records
Many experienced and successful traders are also excellent at keeping records. If they win a trade, they want to know exactly why and how. More importantly, they want to know the same when they lose, so they don’t repeat unnecessary mistakes. Write down details such as targets, the entry and exit of each trade, the time, support and resistance levels, daily opening range, market open and close for the day, and record comments about why you made the trade as well as the lessons learned.
You should also save your trading records so that you can go back and analyze the profit or loss for a particular system, drawdowns (which are amounts lost per trade using a trading system), average time per trade (which is necessary to calculate trade efficiency), and other important factors. Also, compare these factors to a buy-and-hold strategy. Remember, this is a business and you are the accountant. You want your business to be as successful and profitable as possible.