3 simple steps to better your currency trading results

Foreign Exchange is the largest financial market in the world. 3 trillion dollars are transacted daily over 6 continents daily over 6 days a week and every week in a year. Below is 3 important area that you should always remand focus in order to gain success in Forex trading.

#1 Discipline: Stick to your trading rules

You must never get emotion while trading as it will cause you to loss money in trading. For example if you execute a trade with is trending but just minutes after the trades, the currency price went against you and you went into losses. You may have losses that goes as low as -100pips (assume your stop loss is 150pips), do not panic and close your trade early to cut losses. Always stick to your trading rules. Hold onto the trade and let the trend ride out.

Like wise, if you execute a trade and the trend just go crazy and hit 100 pips profit. Do not be temped to close the trade and get the profit (assume your profit take is 200 pips). For fear of losing before the trade hit the profit target, you may just close the trade. Do not be over joy and close the trade. Stick to the trading rules and let the trade hit the profit level by itself. You may end up missing the profit that you should if you let emotion affect you. Be discipline always.

#2 Money management

This is the most important factor to every forex trader that is actively trading the currency market. Due to the leverage of forex trading as compare to conventional stock and shares, the leverage of currency in forex is 100:1. By saying this, using 100K contract or equivalent of buying 1 lot of normal trade, which is 100 x $1k of equivalent of currency value. In relative calculation, 1 pip which is 4 decimal for United State Dollar give you $10 per pip. (Assuming flat exchange rate for simplicity). With a trading account of 100:1 leverage, You need to spend $1k to buy and hold onto 1 lot at 100k contract.

The above is simple to calculate by just taking the leverage of your trading account setting. The tricky part is the margin calculation. Taking the same example, if the currency goes up by 100 pips, you will gain $1k unrealized profit. But if the currency does down -100 pips, you will loss $1k unrealized loss. So if you only have 2k capital in your trading account, your account would hit margin call (1k+1k=2k). The trade would be faced to close by your forex broker and you will hit losses. So it very risky to trade with zero stoploss. For me, by rule of thumb, I will use 10% of capital to trade, by calculation, you would have 900 pips to play with. (this applied to leverage 100 or 200 or 500:1 because leverage only reduce your initial 1k holding to $200. Since your contract is still 100k contract, the pips loss and profit remain the same. So stick to using 10% or less of your capital to trade). Instead of increase your capital, you can use mini lot or 0.1 lot for 100k contract. This will reduce your holding to $100 (using the above example).

#3 Review all trade: Keep a trading journal.

Good consistent trader always keeps a trading journal. Winning trades and losing trades are review consistently for flaws and good trigger setup. As all trades are executed using setup triggers, always have a habit of trying out different variation of the setup trigger. Example could be Simple moving average, you may find at period of 20 SMA cross over 50 SMA at 1 hour trading chart, always give you an accurate signal to execute a buy trade for EURUSD during early morning hours, and over 10 trades, you hit 7 winning trades. You can apply this together with another set of trigger rules to make your winning rates higher and consistent.

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Source: http://www.bestforexranking.com