Forex Trading Basics

Over-cautious trading - Like the trader who tries to take small incremental profits all the time, the trader who places tight stop losses with a retail forex broker is doomed. As we stated above, you have to give your position a fair chance to demonstrate its ability to produce. If you don't place reasonable stop losses that allow your trade to do so, you will always end up undercutting yourself and losing a small piece of your deposit with every trade.

Independence - If you are new to forex, you will either decide to trade your own money or to have a broker trade it for you. So far, so good. But your risk of losing increases exponentially if you either of these two things:
Interfere with what your broker is doing on your behalf (as his strategy might require a long gestation period);
Seek advice from too many sources - multiple input will only result in multiple losses. Take a position, ride with it and then analyse the outcome - by yourself, for yourself.

Tiny margins - Margin trading is one of the biggest advantages in trading forex as it allows you to trade amounts far larger than the total of your deposits. However, it can also be dangerous to novice traders as it can appeal to the greed factor that destroys many forex traders. The best guideline is to increase your leverage in line with your experience and success.

Forex Money Management and Trailing Stops

After having identified your trade entry price and your initial risk which if the difference between your entry and initial protective stop, many traders will also enter a limit order to take profits.

In the FX Power Courses, we normally recommend using a 1:2 risk:reward ratio to determine that exit level. If you are risking 50 pips on the trade, you should look for a minimum of 100 pips in potential profit. This way, if you are able to maintain close to a 50% win ratio on your trades, you can be consistently profitable. However, having the patience and discipline to wait for the market to reach that price level to take profits is much harder than it sounds. If the market moves up towards the profit target and then reverses and moves back towards the entry price, many new traders will exit taking a small profit. While this sounds like a good move, in the long run this usually results in a good win percentage but no profits. The reason is that the trader will end up with bigger losing trades than winning trades. How do we work around this? The answer is normally to set your initial protective stop and limit order to take profits and then just the trades play out on their own. To keep you from losing on a trade that showed a decent profit at one point, the use of an automatic trailing stop can be of great value. I recommend using a trailing stop the same size as your risk. Otherwise, if you are risking 50 pips and looking for a 100 pip gain, use a 50 pip automatic trailing stop. This way your protective stop will move to the breakeven level when/if the market moves halfway to your target. Now one of two things can happen, you can break even or take the full profit. That is a good position to be in and a great way to play the FX markets 24 hours a day.