How Did I Miss That Trade?

Are you a Forex trader? Are you “in it to win it?  Are you looking for profits wherever possible? That means you will be examining the results of the trades that you take and learning from both your successes and your failures. But what about “the ones that got away”, the trades that for one reason or another never happened and nearly always would have turned up trumps.

Why do we miss out on trades, especially the ones that will cause us so much heartache subsequently? There are of course loads of different reasons. You could have chosen to “sit this one out” having had a couple of losing trades just previously.  You could have been too preoccupied with another trade or considered that it just didn’t fit into your preconceived trading pattern. You may have had enough for the day having met your daily target or you might not have had enough balance to proceed.

Now these are all good reasons, but the fact remains that a missed opportunity is a missed opportunity which will cost you in the fullness of time.  You might not realise how much money you are actually losing by not taking up those missing trades and all the potential profits that have vanished unless you are honest enough to track everything in a journal.

If you are a mechanical trader, you can well find that your performance will be down and you will not get a full idea of whether the system is working for you.

If you get into the habit of missing trades, especially after a losing streak, you must treat that as a really bad one.  You have to accept losses as an integral part of trading and you shouldn’t have the baggage of previous failure over-influencing your decisions.

Perhaps the most hazardous result of when you miss out on a trade is that your psyche says “hey we made a big error there, let’s make up for it”. This is what is called “looking for revenge” – you go into something that’s a long way short of ideal and trade it aggressively. You lose control of your emotions and at the same time, lose a good deal of money as well.

Missing trades therefore is a bad place to be in. So what can you do to avoid all that?  Firstly you could log all your missing trades which would be an incentive to sticking to your trading plan.  Secondly set your trading style alarm clock – you could fix price alerts or use entry orders; perhaps even design a mechanical system for your platform. We know you can’t be everywhere but you can help yourself!

Are you missing trades through lack of confidence, worried about the dangers that could affect your funds? If you decrease your position size, you will ease up on a great deal of pressure.

Finally if you focus on the process you will accept loss, take care of it but have the courage to carry on trading sensibly and methodically and in the end you will make a lot of money.

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How Forex Makes You Better at Making Money

Forex is an interesting way to make money, but it also gives you money making skills that transfer into other financial endeavors. To understand that, you have to understand how Forex works. We’ll start with a simple explanation.

Forex terms can get a little complicated, so a free trial with a brokerage source like ETX Capital is really the best way to go. When you get there, you’ll see a lot of different currency pairs. The first currency listed in the pair (if you were to bet money on it) is the currency that you think will gain value relative to the other listed currency, over a specific amount of time.

Forex trading allows you to leverage your trades, sometimes as much as 200:1. This was, you might be able to effectively trade one hundred thousand pounds, for example, while only being required to deposit a thousand or so.

The finer points of Forex (and its cousin, spread betting, also available through ETX Capital) are best learned through experience, so try out free accounts with reputable brokers to learn the ropes. Alternately, you can watch plenty of Youtube videos about Forex trading, which use images to convey concepts which are harder to grasp through words alone.

How Forex Gives You Money Making Skills in All Disciplines

Now that you understand more or less what Forex trading is, it’s time to explain how trading Forex will give you transferable money making skills for all kinds of purposes.

At its core, this form of trading is all about exploiting opportunities. You’ll quickly learn when you make an account of your own that you won’t have much success if you’re simply guessing about value behaviors. There are so many complexities that influence the relative value fluctuations of global currencies. In order to make money regularly, you’ll have to do some homework. Fortunately, this will yield an education that can make you a very sophisticated investor in disciplines outside of the world of Forex.

Let’s say you do really well at Forex trading and earn $100,000 in your first year. You want to use some of this money in the traditional stock market so that you can earn excellent returns without having to make regular trades as you do in your fast-paced Forex account. Your knowledge of the United States Dollar gives you the inside scoop on companies like Coca-Cola, who are being challenged globally by the strength of the US Dollar.

You knowledge of currency would tell you that because the dollar is so strong, money that Coca-Cola makes outside of the United States (an international market which the soda giant is actively trying to increase its market share within), loses value every time it is brought back into the United States where Coca-Cola does its banking.

You would expect, therefore, that the international brand would be having revenue difficulties in the present (they are), and that any time the Dollar starts to lose some steam, that revenue for Coca-Cola would increase (it will).

Then you hear that President Donald Trump is announcing measures to slow down the progress of the too-strong Dollar, as a way of preventing another market bubble. We’re not recommending that you take action on this hypothetical scenario, but just as an example, what would you do next?

If you thought that Coca-Cola stock would be a good bet based on that information, a lot of investors would agree with you. And you made this insightful decision based solely on your knowledge of the power that global currencies have over consumer brands. This is knowledge that the average investor lacks, and you got it just by trading Forex. Forex is a great way to make money on its own, but it’ll also prepare you for all kinds of other opportunities.

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