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The proper market mindset

Forex training - price action

The market mindset trap:

The Forex market can be a very dangerous place for those not operating from the proper mindset. Trading is almost entirely psychological and how you think about the market is the most important factor in determining your long-term trading success. An objective mind set is really what is necessary to succeed in the forex market. While many traders start out with an objective mindset towards the market, very few can maintain this way of thinking.

The difficulty in maintaining an objective market mindset resides in the fact that you can do an enormous amount of damage to your trading account extremely quickly in the forex market. Traders have access to an enormous amount of leverage in the forex market and leverage is extremely dangerous to someone who is trading with the wrong market mindset. So how does one achieve and maintain an objective mindset in the ever changing and volatile arena of forex trading?

The proper market mindset begins with not trading money that you can’t afford to lose. You should most definitely not be trading money that you could possibly need to live on or that anyone else in your family might need. This is the first thing you need to do in order to operate from an objective point of view in the market. Not needing the money in your trading account allows you to develop virtually no emotional attachment to anyone trade you enter, this is very important if you want to consistently make profits in the foreign exchange currency market.

Only after we have confirmed that we are not using money we need for any day to day expenses should we move on to the next most important factor in achieving and maintaining the proper market mindset; a truly profitable and easily definable trading methodology. We need an edge in the market, a definable and profitable market edge is important because we need it to base our trading plan on. Money management is equally as important, if not more, than your profitable edge. However, you first need to define your trading method before you can build a money management plan.

Building your money management scheme is the next step after you know what your definable trading edge in the market is. You need to sit down and calculate how much you are willing to risk every time your edge appears in the market. Many traders cannot maintain an objective mindset while risking more than 2% on any one trade. This of course is only a general rule and mainly depends on the frequency of your trading, if you only trade once a month than you might be able to operate objectively by risking 5% per your once a month trade. However, if you are trading once a week or more than generally speaking 2% is the most you should be risking if you want to give yourself a realistic shot at not trading based on emotion.

I can recommend a very good trading method that will provide you with some time tested strategies for finding a truly consistent edge in the market. Price action analysis is the best method I have found so far for trading the forex market. After I discovered and implemented specific price action strategies into my trading I was able to easily plan out my money management technique. This allowed me to remain calm and confident during every trade; this is the key to achieving an objective market mindset. There are many ways to profit in the market, which ever way you do it though one thing is for sure; you need to think objectively about all of your market related activities.

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Consistency; your key to forex success

Trading Reversal Bars - Price Action Trading System

Consistency is the key to forex success:

When starting down the path to learn about forex trading, we often hear that we need to be consistent in our approach to the markets. What exactly does this mean and how do we achieve consistency in the forex market? Consistent profits are derived from consistent actions. There is no room for emotional reactions in the forex market; however, there is a need for flexibility. Consistency is the result of a mindset that consciously manages a person’s emotions while interacting with the market. So exactly how can a trader develop a consistent approach to the market while not eliminating flexibility from their forex trading plan?

The only real way you can ever develop consistency in the market is by first finding your edge. A market edge is a method of trading in the markets that gives you a positive ratio of winners to losers over time. You need to have confidence in your market edge because it will not win every single time; you must be able to endure a series of losing trades in order to see your profitable edge play out over time. As you gain confidence in your trading method you can then start to develop some rules around it that give you a little more rigidity in your trading plan, this will allow you to remain calm and follow your rules no matter what the market throws at you.

Once you have developed your own rule based system off your market edge you will be well on your way to consistency in the forex market. This doesnt happen over night. Foreign exchange currency trading is not a get rich quick scheme; it can however be a get poor quick scheme. At best it is a get rich slowly scheme, and only through consistency will you attain your long-term goals in the market.

As mentioned above, flexibility is a vital part of any trading plan. While developing a rule based system is vital to your long-term consistency, building in some flexibility to your trading plan is also important. The forex market can be extremely volatile at times and no two moments in the market are ever exactly the same. This is why you need to maintain flexibility in your approach to trading the forex market. I know it seems contradictory to be stressing the need for a rule based system to develop consistency while simultaneously emphasizing flexibility. Consistency and flexibility are required components to forex trading success however, part of the reason why so few ever achieve that success.

Our approach to the market needs to be consistent and flexible, thus we need a trading method that gives us a flexible yet consistent view of the market. Forex Price action analysis is the only method I have come across that is inherently flexible yet at the same time can offer you concrete strategies to develop a system around. Price action is simple and effective and will greatly help you in developing the flexible yet consistent approach that forex trading success requires.

 

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Get a forex education

Price Action Forex Trading Strategies Tutorial

Learn to trade the forex market

Learning to trade the forex market can seem like a daunting task to any beginner. Fortunately there are many traders out there who have made all the common mistakes and already traveled down the bumpy road of learning to trade the market. The best piece of advice to give a total beginner to forex trading is to learn from a professional, someone with time-tested and relevant trading strategies; someone with a common sense market philosophy as well as a unique market perspective. Learning to trade forex does not have to be the frustrating, pulling your hair out task that it so often becomes for people. You will need to develop the proper market mindset and this can best be learned from someone who already possesses it. Just as you learn any other job-related skill from a mentor, learning to trade forex should be no different.

If you want to learn to trade with the least amount of trial and error possible, I suggest you learn from a professional trader who offers on-going support. Learning to trade can be a very expensive endeavor, so I suggest you do not try to do it by yourself. There is a variety of good information available on the internet for learning to trade. However, there is probably far more junk information as well as people trying to scam you out of your hard earned money.

Most people who want to learn to trade forex are mainly interested in the technical side of trading. That is, making trading decisions from the information provided via a price chart. Where many people go wrong in technical trading is thinking that more is better, or that if they understand how more indicators work it will lead them to consistent profits. First of all, you need to understand that when it comes to technical analysis and your charts, less is more. Professional traders and hedge fund managers are not using lagging indicators because they understand that such tools are useless and even counter productive.

Most professional traders you will find make their decisions based on pure price action analysis with a decent amount of fundamental economic understanding. A price chart is at the very heart of any market and visually represents all market participants’ beliefs about that market. There are so many trading courses for sale that make you believe you need to over-lay a bunch of indicators on your chart that it can be extremely frustrating for someone who teaches and trades just from pure price action like myself.

Learning to trade is difficult enough without all the unnecessary bells and whistles that many so called forex educators try to sell to you. When learning to trade you need someone you can trust and who is providing a relevant and time-tested product. Don’t fall prey to the charlatans trying to take your money and run. Research price action analysis and I promise once you find a genuine price action educator you will never go back to your overly complicated indicator method. Learn to trade from price action and you unlock a world of difference in the way you think about trading.

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Forex trading advantages

forex trading training strategy

Advantages of trading forex versus other markets:

§ The foreign exchange currency market is extremely liquid.

Daily average turnover is more than 3.2 trillion dollars the forex market has by far the most liquidity of any other market in the world. This allows for virtually no slippage; the price you see is the price you get.

§ On-going liquidity, 6 days a week.

The forex market is different from other markets in that a person can trade 24 hours a day 6 days a week. Where as stock and futures markets have certain trading times their respective exchanges are open, forex markets allow for trading at any time of day. This provides for more time to test strategies and larger samples of data to work off of, as well as the ability to trade during other world city’s active trading times.

§ No actual centralized market.

Since forex trading can be done from right inside your own home there is no physical trading market. The advantage this provides to the retail forex trader is that there aren’t any broker’s commissions or fees. Forex brokers, known as market makers, are paid by the difference between the bid and ask price on a currency trade, this is known as the spread. The effect on the trader is that their forex position will start off being between 1 and 10 pips negative, depending on the volatility of the currency pair being traded. However, to the trader with a consistently profitable trading method, this small burden is hardly detectable.

§ It is impossible for your account to go negative in forex.

Forex brokers generally all offer trading platforms that automatically close out a client’s open position if they have an open loss that exceeds the margin requirement. This means there is no risk of your account going negative at which point you might actually owe money to the exchange, which can happen in futures trading

§ Low margin requirements allow for leverage.

In forex trading a trader can get leverage up to 400:1 on a micro account. This means they can control 400 times the amount of money at risk on a trade. This is called leverage and it provides the possibility for very large profits relative to account size, but also for very large losses.

§ Easily accessible demo account trading.

Almost every single forex broker you will encounter offers a free demo account to learn how to trade from. If properly utilized a demo account can educate you on the mechanics of trade execution as well as give you time to develop and test your own personal trading method. A trading method that consistently makes money on a demo account, if traded the same way, should make money on a real account. The difference lies in the fact that live money trading is much more emotionally difficult on people. However, if you take the time to test your trading method on a demo account and really take it seriously, the transition to trading real money in the forex market can be relatively seamless.

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What is forex trading?

Price Action Forex Trading Strategies Tutorial

What is Forex Currency Trading?

The foreign exchange currency market is where forex trading takes place and is the largest financial market in the world with daily average volume in excess of 2.1 trillion. Currency traders buy and sell various currency pairs with the intent of profiting from a favorable change in value of a currency pair. Economic and world events are the main catalysts that propel the forex market.

Forex Basics:

The foreign exchange currency market is not limited to a physical location like stock markets are. In fact, the foreign exchange currency market is substantially bigger than all the world’s stock markets combined. Trading in forex is usually done over the telephone or via the internet. Most forex trading transpires in the major cities of the United States, England, Australia, Japan, and Germany.

In the forex market the first currency of a currency pair is known as the base currency and the second currency is known as the quote currency, counter currency, or terms currency. Rates are quoted per unit of the base currency, so for example, the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the euro will be indentified as EUR/USD, so the number will be the amount of U.S. dollars that can be traded for one euro.

Currently the euro has first precedence as base currency, this means all the currency pairs involving the euro should have it as the base currency. The hierarchy for base currency is as follows: Euro, Pound Sterling, Australian Dollar, New Zeeland Dollar, United States Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Swiss Franc, and Japanese Yen.

How Forex trading works:

In the foreign exchange currency market quotes include a bid and an ask price. Bid is the term used for the price to sell the base currency in exchange of the counter currency. The ask is the price to buy the base currency in exchange of the counter currency. In forex, the term spread is used to describe the difference between the bid and ask price. Brokers in forex are also known as market-makers; meaning they enable transactions to take place between buyers and sellers of currencies. Forex brokers do not charge a commission like stock brokers do, instead they are compensated by taking the spread of the currency pair being traded.

Traders use the term pip to address currency pair movement. One pip is the term for the smallest incremental change of any currency pair. For example, if you see the current price of GBP/USD (British pound/U.S. dollar) quoted as 1.6832(bid)/1.6837(ask), then the spread of this currency pair is 5 pips, because the difference between the two is .0005. So for the GBP/USD currency pair one pip; the smallest incremental change for that pair would be equal to .0001.

Forex trading can be quite volatile due to the multitude of big money players that trade this market. If properly utilized, volatility in the forex market can help you make profits fast, however if you risk too much for your account size volatility will take your money very fast. Make sure you understand the many intricacies of price action before jumping into the market head first.

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