If you want to participate in the $6.6 trillion-a-day forex market, there are several things that you’ll need to help you succeed. After all, it’s estimated that up to 70% of forex traders lose money on a regular basis, with only a select few banking sustainable profits.
But what distinguishes successful forex traders from their contemporaries? Well, there are certainly some fundamental steps that you’ll need to take to succeed in the marketplace, while the mindset is also key if you’re to succeed.
Training also plays a key role, as does practice and developing a keen sense of determinism. We’ll explore these concepts below while suggesting the key steps that can make you a successful forex trader!
#1. Learn About the Market’s Fundamentals
Let’s start with the basics; as every successful forex trader has built their attainment on a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding.
This must be accrued over time, with a view to learning about the fundamental mechanisms that underpin the market and the role that determinism plays in helping traders to make informed and reasoned decisions.
You can garner this knowledge through various means, from online courses to seminars and the raft of forex trading books that exist offline. Your task is to select the best learning material while uncovering the strategies that best suit your outlook as a trader.
#2. Mastering the Practicalities of Trading
While theoretical learning is key to forex trading, this means little unless you can put this to practical use in the real-time market.
Fortunately, you can achieve this by accessing a MetaTrader 4 demo account, which affords you access to a simulated and real-time marketplace in which you can hone your initial strategies for a period of between three and six months.
Over time, this enables you to master the basics of corporeal trading and create fully functional strategies, while also enabling you to see the true nature of the market without risking your hard-earned cash.
#3. Create a Trading Journal
There’s no such thing as a risk-free investment market or trading strategy, so novice traders are bound to lose money and see their capital diminished when starting out.
For this reason, we’d recommend keeping a trading journal, which should detail every single trade that you make, its leverage and eventual profit or loss numbers.
Not only does keeping a trading journal outline your journey and make it easier to learn from your unique successes and failures, but this can also create a sense of discipline and far greater methodology over time.
#4. Use Trading Tools to Your Advantage
Last, but not least, we’d recommend that you make the most of online trading tools (in addition to the demo account we mentioned earlier).
For example, you can help to automate your trades by using strategic stop losses. These tools work by automatically closing open positions once they’ve incurred a predetermined level of loss, based on your leverage, the size of the position and the nature of your budget.
This way, you can minimise the risk of incurring huge losses, without necessarily compromising on your initial trading strategy.
The key steps to becoming a professional forex trader
