Secrets to Successful Foreign Exchange Currency Trading

Imagine a lifestyle like this…

You wake up early everyday (around 7:30/8:00 am) and enjoy a beautiful breakfast on your patio that overlooks the ocean. You take in the warm, breezy air and soak up every ounce of your relaxing lifestyle. Around 8:30, you head on over to your computer where you’ve installed your foreign currency charting software and you take a look at the forex market for the day’s potential trades. After about 20 minutes of sizing up the market, you see three potential trading opportunities. Two are not quite ready to go as yet and one is presenting itself such that you can plan out and execute a trade right away, but your entry would most likely occur later on in the day. Since you live on the east coast and are dealing with Eastern Standard Time, you can trade at 8:30 am every day and participate in the US session. By 10:00am, you have entered all three trades and now it’s just a matter of waiting to see how they play out. By this point in your trading career, you are confident in creating, executing and sticking with a trading plan so you have no need to sit in front of your computer, waiting for your trades to complete.

So, you head on out and enjoy the rest of your morning. Since you went for nice swim yesterday, you decide that today you will go for a run on the beach with your dog. You arrive back to your place an hour later and find that one of your trades completed. Unfortunately, you find that you incurred a loss but you are not upset because you are comfortable with the fact that it just goes with the territory of trading. Shrugging off the outcome, you hop into the shower and think about what you’ll do for the rest of the day… Perhaps catch a matinee? Spend time with your spouse/partner if they are not working? See some friends? As soon as you jump out of the shower, you find that your two other trades have now completed. Another one has incurred a loss, however one worked out as plan and captured plenty of pips for you. Overall, you are looking at a net gain for the day and it’s not even noon yet. Today, your net gain totals $460 and on average, you are netting about $500/day (or, $10,000/month). You are very happy, indeed…

Could you live this lifestyle?

Many people dream about being a successful currency trader. If you can see yourself living the sort of lifestyle described above, it is very realistic and possible to achieve that goal. That said, there are certain factors that play into becoming a successful foreign currency trader.

These are the five key areas that you need to excel in if you want to be a successful currency trader:

Get a good Forex Education
Take the time to learn about the forex market and how to trade it. There is plenty of quality forex trading education available, more so than ever before. Take the time to learn what works so that you can short-circuit your learning curve and accelerate towards successful trading.

Practice with a Demo Account
Forex Education will take you so far. You will need to practice, loose money (yes, you read correctly) and make plenty of mistakes before you can become comfortable in this market. Unfortunately, this is how you learn to trade the foreign currency exchange market – by falling and getting right back up.

Control your Emotions
How would you feel if you have incurred a string of losses (about $350 each) and your current trade is loosing yet again? If you are a skilled trader, you wouldn’t be phased at all. Most traders, on the other hand, freak out and feel the need to take action and put an end to the trade before it gets worse. They accept the developing loss out of fear, in the hopes to minimize the loss but in doing so, they miss out on huge opportunities. Skilled, well-practiced and especially emotionally-controlled traders are the few who succeed by doing the opposite; they let their trades complete as planned, which accounts for some of their loosing trades turning into big winners. Sometimes, a trade can look like it’s doomed to fail but until it hit’s the proposed stop loss, there is always the possibility of that trade succeeding. To close out the trade early (instead of letting your trade plan pan out) guarantees a loss and this is where so many traders loose big time. In addition to practicing such mental and emotional fortitude, skilled forex traders understand that the majority of trades can be lost and they can still make money in forex trading. As such, if a loss does indeed occur it does not upset them.

Be Disciplined
This skill goes in hand with emotional control. You must be prepared to create very strict trading rules and abide by them. You will be surprised just how many forex traders lie to themselves about discipline. When confronted, they claim to practice it. When in front of their trading stations, it is quite another story. Suddenly, stop losses are abandoned, accounts are overleveraged with high-stake trades, etc. There is a reason why only 10% of forex traders make money in the foreign currency exchange market and that is simply because these traders have the discipline follow all of their own rules.

Trading with enough Capital
You need a fair amount of money in the market to make a decent amount of profits. While it is true that one should pay attention to returns on investments and not actual dollars and cents, more often than not, traders want to create an income with their currency trading, which equates to profits that are $200, $500 or even as much as $1,000 per day. This is possible in the forex market. Unfortunately, what people fail to realize is that forex brokers indicate you can get started with as little as $300. But, this small amount of money will not get you the daily profits indicated above. Even if you had $5,000 in your account, you’d be hard pressed to see $500 or $1,000 per day unless you could capture an obscene amount of pips every day and limit the amount of lots/mini lots/micro lots you use. Well, unless there is a fundamental announcement, you are not going to see currency pairs move that much in one day! A good amount of capital to start with is $30,000 if you’re hoping to make $250 – $500 per day. If you have anything less this, aim to simply grow your account without actually trying to generate and income out of it. That means, if you were looking to get a 10% ROI each month on your account and it was $5,000 to begin with, you would then be aiming for only $500 for the entire month, which is very easy to do.