Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Biggest Mistake New Forex Traders Make

By Jacob Tremblay

Forex trading is an extremely lucrative, but extremely risky, venture. If you make the right choices, or even just get lucky, you can very quickly become extremely rich. However, this is extremely unlikely and difficult to do.

There is only a certain amount of money available for people to have, so a trader in currency can only gain as much as another trader has lost. Add in brokers fees, and this becomes a negative-sum game. What that means is, everybody loses if they stay in long enough - some people are smart enough to stop while their ahead, and the others end up going broke.

So try and get out when you're winning. It's very tempting, if you take just a little drop in an otherwise upward streak, to hold on and hope it gets better. But you never know when your luck will change, and telling a minor blip from a huge drop takes a lot of knowledge and experience.

The biggest mistake most people make when they start, is to not know what their doing. I'm sure you've read a few books, maybe attended a seminar or watched a video course. Maybe you're already an expert with conventional stock trading. However, currency trading is very different, and requires a totally different skill set to do well, more then can be offered by books.

Perhaps you've even tried paper trading, and you think this will let you learn what you need to know. However, no matter how good you are at paper trading, it's still just a game. No amount of training in fake trading can help you when it comes to the real thing.

In fact, the only way you can be sure of doing well immediately is by having help. You'll need to get quite a bit of experience before you really know what to do, and no amount of books can give you that. A skilled trader can guide you through the process, and make sure you don't lose all your capital in a bad trade right at the start of your career. Otherwise, you'll need a really good system, and more importantly you'll need to follow it. Nowadays you can get a computer program to give you expert advice, which is often all you need to get started. With the amount of money involved, you really can't afford to take chances, and it's best to be as sure as you can be that you're going to succeed. Or at least that you have a good chance of it.

There is a lot you can read about in books - heck, you're reading some of it here. But these words are only the tip of the iceberg, and there is no way to convey, in an impersonal book or article, what the best thing is for you to do. So if you want to do well with forex trading, then you need a good system to work with, and someone who can offer you good advice when you need it. - 15224

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