By James Woolley
A lot of people who develop an interest in currency trading start off by reading a few forex books. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. They do a great job of providing you with a basic education. However they can only teach you so much.
After you have initially learned the basics, you will then start to create your own trading systems. Alternatively you could of course buy a commercial system online. Anyway the point is that your real education will begin when you start trading the currency markets with real money.
The more experience you have of the forex markets, the more likely you are to end up becoming a consistently profitable trader because you will always be learning from your mistakes and evolving as a trader. So to do this you will inevitably destroy one or two trading accounts in the process, but this is not necessarily a bad thing because we have all been there. The key to success is to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in the future.
Another point I want to make is that currency trading is a very emotive business. You will experience a whole range of different emotions when you start trading and this is something that no book on the subject will prepare you for.
For example there is no better feeling than closing out a trade that went to plan beautifully and generated a healthy profit. However too many of these winning trades can also lead to complacency, which in turn can result in you increasing your stakes and possibly deviating from your initial strategy because you suddenly become very confident in your own abilities.
Similarly if you suffer a few heavy losses in a row, you may find yourself taking rash decisions in order to try and win back this lost cash. This too is highly dangerous because you can easily lose even more money if you are not careful. Sadly it is a trap that many traders fall into, and it is not something that a forex trading book can ever prepare you for. It’s something you have to learn to deal with yourself.
So the point I want to make is that there is no reason at all why you shouldn’t start off by reading a few books, but you have to remember that this is only the very start of your education. The real fun begins when you start risking your own money, and it’s only then that you will start to learn how to trade for yourself.
About the Author
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