Learn Foreign Exchange Trading: How to Lose

Yes, you read that right: if you want to learn currency trading, you’ve got to be ready to lose. Naturally you’ve got to go into each trade with the objective of earning profits, but some trades will inevitably go against you. How you handle that when it occurs is one of the biggest factors in deciding whether you will become a successful foreign exchange trader.  

Everybody knows that it is vital not to let your feelings be in command of your trading. However, even super cool traders, even those who employ a system like FAP Turbo, who never make a dumb mistakes ( if there are any ) are sure to lose sometimes because no system is one hundred pc successful. Some trades will just go wrong.

Also, and this is harder to handle, all systems will sometimes go through bad patches where they drift into making a loss over a few days or weeks. You can see this happening when you backtest a system. There are times when everything seems to go right and times when it is the opposite. When it happens in real life, you have to be prepared.

One way to get ready for a bad spell is to have an idea of the drawdown of your system. This is the amount by which your funds are probably going to drop in a bad run. It depends on the percentage success rate of the system ( the share of moneymaking trades ), the average profit of those trades and the average loss of losing trades. Generally if you have backtested the system thoroughly you may have an idea of what the drawdown is probably going to be. Real life can always surprise us so it is best to set your position size so that your total funds cover the drawdown three or four times over.

When you begin currency trading it is very easy to be drawn in to committing too much money to each trade. You may begin with a minute account and use a lot of leverage to manage position sizes that involve you in more risk than your fund balance can handle. This can necessarily lead to a crash. So even if you only have the littlest possible micro account, work out your drawdown and make allowance for it. If you do not, your funds will be wiped out sooner or later in the routine ups and downs of your system and even if it was only a touch, this is really daunting.

So on the one hand you should protect your funds from bad times at any price, but on the other hand you have to be a little detached from them too. Don’t consider that money yours any more, consider it spent, just as if you had used it to get a new auto. You should be trading with money that you are able to afford to lose, so if you can’t do this, you need to rethink how your trading is sponsored.

It is important that you don’t depend on this money. Never trade with the rent money. If you do, you may be under plenty of pointless stress while you are trading and that is probably going to lead to mistakes. Ironically, the way to make more money when you learn forex trading is to plan for loss.

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