Forex Trading Systems Blog

With more and more people scrambling to get onto the currency trading, or forex, band wagon every day, there’s a plethora of tutorials – courses, videos, and ebooks – coming onto the market to satisfy the demand for information in this field.

It’s a real problem for the newcomer because, as with most of the internet, there is information overload. And you never know what is real information and what is phoney. This article will help you differentiate between the two.

Nearly everyone who tries to sell you a currency trading tutorial will recite how around 95 per cent of new traders lose all their money but that you yourself can avoid that fate by purchasing their information. That’s actually quite a clever technique, using the number one reason why you should really steer clear of the forex market and turning it around into the reason you should enter this volatile market after all, but only through buying their own tutorial or using their own online brokerage with bundled tutorial.

Telling the difference between a genuine currency trading tutorial and one that is just there to earn money for the seller of it is not that difficult. The most important thing to bear in mind at the outset is that the forex market is not a wealth creation system, but a wealth redistribution system. So if some people make fabulous profits with forex, it’s because other people – far more numerous – are losing their shirts.

You can eliminate most forex tutorials from your shortlist by finding out whether the author of the information is a real trader in forex making real profits. Ask him how much profit he has made in the last 12 months from the techniques he teaches in his course. Make sure he gives you the figure for his trading, not for selling his course. Unless he convinces you that he has indeed made substantial profits himself and that this is his main form of income, then his course is a sham.

One thing you should know is this. There is a mass of information on various aspects of trading forex available online free of charge – on broker’s sites, forums and discussion boards – and there are even free ebooks available as well as videos if you look for them, and most of them deal with one or two specific techniques or methods some people have used to make some money.

These are for the most part genuinely offered by the authors to help others, though the reliability of the information is often open to question. It’s very easy to someone who knows how to make an ebook or video course to download this material and cobble it together to make a tutorial and sell it for $47 or $97 at a time.

But the chances of it helping a newcomer to forex learn how to develop a profitable trading strategy are remote.

Another most important fact you should be aware of is this. Many sellers of forex information will try to convince you that it’s possible, or even easy, to make large profits by day trading, that is, opening and closing positions on the same day on a regular basis. Keep away from any such people.

Making regular profits by day trading with a currency trading account is virtually impossible. Even if, for example, you spot an up trend on a particular market, such as the USD/JPY, that doesn’t mean there won’t be a temporary reversal that can cover up to 100 or even 200 points. That’s just the way the forex market is. Most newcomers are (wrongly) advised to have tight stop losses and will regularly lose money this way.

Of course, it’s possible to have two or three early successes with day trading, but it won’t be long before all the profits disappear in a succession of losing trades. This sounds pessimistic, but I’m afraid it’s the truth.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom, because there is a path through the jungle, if you’re prepared to resist the temptation to dive straight in to the volatile and highly strung forex market. There are one or two highly successful financial traders out there who will teach you how to make regular large profits on the financial markets. Not necessarily the forex market, but nevertheless real profits on financial markets. And it won’t cost you an arm and a leg either.

These people tend to stay away from the forex market for the reasons I’ve outlined above. Find such a person and follow them. And no, I’m not myself such a person, but, as they say, I know someone who is, and I have made real profits in the financial markets as a result. And if I can do it, so, I expect, can you.

By: Philip Gegan

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