Forex Trading and Investing

Posts Tagged ‘currency trading’

There are thousands of new beginners coming into foreign currency trading all the time now and most of them are desperately searching for the magic system that will make them pots of cash. They think the system is the only important factor in working out the best way to make money.

Probably 90% of these beginners will fail, and not because they didn’t find a good system. There are plenty of good systems. No, they usually lose because they did not understand the importance of money management and planning.

Professional traders, on the other hand, know how vital this is, and that is a major part of why they succeed. Here are 3 top tips to make sure that you are among the winners.

1. Strictly Limit Your Risk On Each Trade

The amount of your funds that you risk on each trade can vary according to the system and the amount of your funds, but it should never be more than 5%. In fact 5% is very high. Unless you have a very small foreign currency trading fund that you want to build up fast and don’t care too much if you lose it, you would be better off sticking to around 3%.

When your funds are large you will probably find that you want to decrease the percentage risk. If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in your account you want to make absolutely sure that you do not lose it all, even in the worst of losing runs. Most traders at this level will risk just 1% of their capital per trade.

3. Think About Your Risk To Reward Ratio

Something that many traders never even think about is the relationship of the risk that they are taking to the possible reward. Yes they keep their risk to a certain percentage but they only take small profits from each trade. They may even be risking more than they expect to profit (e.g. risking 60 pips to make 30).

Usually, this is not a successful strategy in the long term. It may work in theory if you have a system that makes a very high percentage of successful trades but the effect of having a few losses in a row will be devastating. Choose instead a system that has a risk to reward ratio of around 1:2 (e.g. risking 30 pips to make 60).

2. Do Not Open A Second Trade Until The First Is In Profit

However confident you are about your first trade, do not open a second position until the first is actually in profit and you have moved your stop up above the break even point.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that if your first trade suddenly takes a dive, you are in a stressful position and having to deal with a second position at the same time could lead to panic decisions.

The second reason is that with multiple unsecured trades you are very vulnerable to a sudden unforeseeable market event that could cause the prices to dive in the wrong direction and trigger all of your stops at once. So keep to the rule of trading your positions singly to make sure that you keep a good grip on your profits.

Observing these three rules is the best way to make money with foreign currency trading.

What is currency trading? It is something that sounds quite simple and many people speak about it as if the meaning is obvious, but not everybody knows what it really is and how it works.

Currency trading is also known as forex trading. Forex (sometimes written FX) is short for foreign exchange.

You probably know that the value of each country’s currency goes up and down according to how well the country is doing compared with others. So for example, the value of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar will be higher or lower depending on reports of the Canadian and US economies. The same thing happens with all other currencies.

Currency values are constantly changing, so a trader can easily deal in them to make a profit. He or she can buy when a currency is worth less and sell when it is worth more, just as a stock trader would do.

The difference is that where stocks have only one value, their value on the stock exchange, a currency has different values compared with each of the other currencies. So for example the Canadian dollar might rise in relation to the US dollar but at the same time it could fall in relation to the Japanese Yen, if the Yen rose even higher.

Principles Of Currency Trading

Most forex market trading is margin trading. This means that instead of buying the whole value of the currency, you can invest in only a percentage. This allows a small deposit to control larger amounts. The principle of it is that a currency is very unlikely to change in value by more than a certain percentage of its value.

To simplify trading, currencies are traded in what is called pips, or price interest point system. These are the units of trading. They give a standard for comparison as the currency values change relative to each other. So you will hear traders talk of a currency gaining or falling by a certain number of pips, rather than talking in dollar terms.

How To Make A Profit With Currency Trading

In order to make a profit with currency trading, you need to have some idea of the likely movements of currencies. This knowledge can be gained by analyzing the markets or by applying a system that experienced traders have figured out from their own analysis.

If you are a beginner it is probably better to be receiving your information and analysis from somebody with more experience at first. You can pick up a lot of different systems online and watch how each one does, or you can work with an automated system. These are known as expert advisers or forex robots, and they will make the trades for you when the time is right according to the settings that you have programmed.

If you use an automated forex system you do not need to know what is currency trading in so much detail, although as with all things, the more you know the more success you are likely to have.