The Life of a Forex Trader

A Forex trader's lifestyle has its both advantages and disadvantages. If you are looking into Forex trading, you might want to consider these before starting.

The main advantage of Forex trading full-time, professionally, is that you get a lot of freedom. It means that you can pick your own hours and work whenever you want to work, since you will be self-employed and especially since the Forex market is open 24 hours a day (closing only on the weekends). With a full-time job, you usually will have to work all day every day, but with Forex trading you can wake up when you want (within reason) and take days off whenever you feel like it (again, within reason). By trading currencies full-time, you will experience a lot of freedom. Your Forex trading strategy will play a part though, when it comes to how many hours you actually spend trading; those who trade long-term trends can expect to work very little, for example, as they require much less attention than shorter-term trading strategies.

The lifestyle of a professional, full-time Forex trader also has many other advantages, which are also all related to extra freedom. For example, Forex traders can work from their own home, meaning they don't have to travel to get to work and they can work in a very comfortable environment. This also means that they don't have to get told what to do by a boss; they are self-employed and work how and when they want.

Some Forex traders do work for firms and not all are self-employed, so these traders don't get as much freedom as the self-employed ones, but they can still experience a very fulfilling career with lots and lots of potential.

There are some disadvantages that come with trading currencies full-time though, as a professional Forex trader; it is a fairly lonesome job and some can get bored of it after a while. Both of these minor disadvantages can be overcome though. If you are a very focused individual, you probably won't have a problem with working hard independently and staying focused on your goals, but some Forex traders do get tired of trading and it isn't ideal to trade when you aren't feeling the markets.

In order to overcome the minor disadvantages above, you can simply take some time off to spend with your friends or family; you can also take advantage of lots of fun, enjoyable features that some Forex brokers can provide within their trading platforms. For example, some brokers run social Forex trading networks, allowing to interact with other traders and copy the best Forex traders, which can allow you to take a break from your conventional Forex trading and actually make a nice, additional income. In fact, you might even build a following yourself and make even more cash. The possibilities really are endless, in Forex trading.

In conclusion, the life of a Forex trader is actually overall quite a pleasant one. There some minor disadvantages, but these can easily be overcome and a lot of freedom can be experienced through trading currencies full-time. Also don't forget that you can make a huge amount of money through trading currencies, so there is also a lot of potential for self-employed Forex traders to make a lot, lot more than they could by working a regular job.

How Forex Trading Works is a resourceful website that serves to deliver free, online content relating to Forex trading, to anyone and everyone. Providing useful tips, reviews, articles and writings on forex online.

The 2013 Forex KAIZEN Manifesto

A "checkerboard trader" hops and jumps all over the board trying to find the perfect system. He or she is jumping from one sure thing to another trying to find that holy grail.

Lack of fundamental trading knowledge is really the primary cause for so much struggling and time wasting, and it's sad. It's the reason why the overwhelming majority of people new to the Internet will fail in achieving their dreams even if they buy lots of automated systems, study the traditional indicators religiously, and work extremely hard.

I'm going to address the issues I see, because I know from past experience that my unique perspective can really make a tremendous difference in your trading. I cannot sit on the sidelines and allow so many dreams to fall by the wayside due to a misunderstanding of how successful trades are executed. I will expose those issues, one by one, and you will gain clarity about your relationship to this skill (and how to improve it substantially) that you've never had before.

To put online trading into perspective we have to go back in history a bit, before online trading.

If the names Larry Williams, Joe DiNapoli, and Jake Berstein mean nothing to you, that's not important. What is important is that these gentlemen and many others like them could do no wrong in the 1960s, 70s, and even 80s. They were super traders, making money with the simplest of systems.

They all gained such a reputation that they began selling their advice and counsel, and some still do today. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have updated their systems.

The most well-known trading phenomenon and story of all time may be that of the Turtles. These 14 students of Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt amassed fortunes by trading breakouts and made the trend following method famous.

As time and technology advanced, automation began to take over. The triggers that Williams and others had been using for entry and exit began to be packaged as indicators and sold to the trading public.

Why not? They had worked so wonderfully for such a long time.

But, unwittingly, these innovations were setting the stage for the confusion, frustration, and despair among today's traders. Why? None of them work like they used to.

I don't blame Williams, DiNapoli, Bernstein, et al. for anything devious. They were just trying to pass on some of their expertise. In fact, logic would tell you that these inventions were good-hearted. What they didn't anticipate is that these tools are now being used as weapons - no, a better word is "bait" - to extract money from the uneducated trader.

And I can't blame the brokerages that build these indicators into their platforms. They perceive it as a service feature that they must have in order to compete. But I can tell you for a fact that some professional traders watch the action around these indicators and trade against the amateurs, taking the other side of their trades.

Obstacles to Achieving the Success You Want As a Trader

Now that you know how the game has evolved, you should stop for a few minutes and reflect on how you have played it so far. Let's take a look at the obstacles you might face in actually creating a powerful methodology that has staying power.

By exposing and eliminating these problems, you'll be able to reach your goal faster (and easier) than you ever thought possible. These are the same overriding concepts on which ultra-wealthy traders operate.

Let's take a look at one fundamental problem most traders experience:

Symptoms: Buying anything that looks like it'll make you money, getting no results.

Cause: Opportunistic Thinking

Problem: Lack of Strategy

The very first obstacle we need to look at is you and your thinking. There are two different diametrically opposed ways of thinking when it comes to trading. There's opportunistic thinking and strategic thinking.

Having No Strategy Creates Frustration, Despair, Discouragement, and Failure

There are measurable actions in each trade that can be planned, becoming a part of your strategy. They are:

1. Environment

Have you assessed the environment in which you plan to trade? Is it volatile? Is it trending? Is it choppy? Is it being driven by scheduled news announcements? What time of day is it? Is it a rollover day? Is it subject to seasonal influences? Is it a popular market? What time frame is most appropriate? Should I use more than one time frame to assess the environment? What does the economic calendar say for today? How do I assess the overall environment? Should I use indicators or some other method?

2. Money Management / Position Size

What is your account size now? How much of your account can you risk on this trade? What position size will maximize the return? Where must your stop be? Will the stop placement jeopardize your risk tolerance? Is the MFE/MAE ratio favorable to your planned position size? Are there correlations in your positions?

3. Entry

At what price should you enter? Should you enter at the market? Should you enter on a breakout at a specific stop price? Should you enter on a pullback with a limit order? At what time of the session should you enter, based on the environment in this market? Do you go all in with one entry, or is it best to scale in? Should you plan to average down? Am I going to use an indicator? What indicator(s) should I use? Why am I entering this trade?

4. Position Management

Should you leave this position on overnight? Are trailing stops appropriate for this trade? Would chandelier stops work better? Should you add to the position, based on market behavior? At what point do you minimize the risk of losing focus with an action or protective order? Have I reached my daily loss limit? Should I hedge my position?

5. Exit

Should I exit at the market? Would a limit order be better? Would a stop order be even better? Should I trail the position now that exit is the strategy? Should I scale out or exit all the position with one order? Has the trade met my target? Did I have a target? Has the environment changed, requiring an exit even though my target hasn't been hit? Why am I exiting this trade?

6. Post-trade Reflection / Assessment

How much money did you make / lose? What mistakes were made? How can you improve the step(s) in which the mistake(s) were made? What were the metrics for this trade - MFE, MAE, hold time, session traded, position size, trade direction, and others?

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I beg your pardon for taking so much time on the negative. If you have two to three years' experience in the Forex market, all this negative stuff is probably familiar to you. If you're brand new to the arena, you need to hear this and become aware of it, so that you don't experience so much frustration in the future. But enough is enough, so let's get to the positive side of this manifesto.

To make a sustainable, substantive change in your life, you must do something substantially different. So what's different about what's being proposed in the Manifesto?

The first aspect of your strategy addressed is your mindset. Now, that's not revolutionary in the world of teaching these skills. There have been thousands of books and articles written on mindset with regards to how you should view your trading practices and how you should manage your mental state to achieve success. I have many of those books in my library and have studied them all, because I place this factor at the top of the list in successful trading.

However, the most important aspect of mindset in the KAIZEN system is that of treating your trading involvement like a business. You must view it as a business, no matter what your level of participation is - part-time private speculator or full-time investment advisor and money manager - as well as everything in between. Once you have established that mindset, then the principles of KAIZEN can be applied to create a powerful flood of improvements in your technique.

Most people don't think of trading as a series of actions or process steps, but that's exactly what it is. A business mindset helps you see that. And like any business enterprise, you must operate within certain standards for each step. Furthermore, KAIZEN is a process in itself - one of making continuous improvements to those standards.

Amateur traders think of trade success or failure in terms of the whole transaction. In other words, "I got in here, and I got out there. I lost money, so I failed." You will learn why that is a counter-productive way of looking at your trading, because it offers almost no useful feedback that leads to improvement. And this is what I mean by that: What step(s) of the process caused the failure? What about the environment, if anything, caused this trade to go wrong? What happened in the next step, and the next?

By breaking down each transaction into stages and evaluating each, just as if your trade had been processed on an assembly line, you will begin to discover your strengths and weaknesses. By analyzing each step in the process for each trade, you will establish a system of continuous improvement that will transform you from that defenseless "fish" into the grizzly bear.

This is KAIZEN, the system that made Japan the leading automobile manufacturer in the world. Anthony Robbins combined KAIZEN and neuro-linguistic programming to create a global self-help revolution. And it spawned many other performance improvement models, such as Six Sigma™. Employed as a means to learn and implement proven trading techniques in the correct way, it is explosive and highly rewarding.

The Internet is flooded with training, coaching, automation, gimmicks, tricks, magic bullets, and outrageous claims for making money day-trading. These shortcuts are as prolific as weight loss solutions, yet most of us are still fat and broke.

STOP, right now, and take stock of your part in all this folly. Where has it led you; what have you achieved that is sustainable? If you're reading this, I think I know the embarrassing, humiliating answer... and you do, too.

You can change that by reading the complete report at forexkaizen.org, where you will also find a little video that will make you happy for the next two hours - if not all day. It's all free and my gift to you today. Providing useful tips, reviews, articles and writings on forex online.

Being Prepared to Lose Your Money in Forex Trading

Forex trading is just like any other business in the sense that there is risk involved. As a Forex trader, you have to risk your money as well as your time, in order to potentially make lots of money. If you are an aspiring Forex trader, you must understand that trading currencies is risky and you must be prepared to lose your money.

Risk isn't something that you should shy away from though. Of course as already mentioned, with risk comes potential reward. Potential losses do also come with risk, but in order to be successful you need to make sacrifices. You actually encounter risks all the time in your daily life. Getting out of bed is a risk. Getting in your car and driving to work is a risk. Embrace risk and just think about what you would do, if you knew you couldn't possibly fail. If you stick at Forex trading, even if you lose again and again, you will most likely succeed in the long run if you just keep at it and don't give in.

Many people say that you should never risk more money than you can afford to lose and this is wise. If your goal is to succeed in the long run, then you should never risk more than you have to. You can always start small and you don't have to leverage your trades if you don't want to. You might want to apply more risk to your trades when you see some kind of consistent success, but when you are starting out with a live Forex trading account, don't deposit more money than you can stand to lose. This will only make you perform badly in the Forex market, since your emotions will take over.

In order to be prepared to lose your money, you need to deposit an amount that you don't mind losing. This will help you to relax a lot more. Some people will be prepared to lose more than others and some people will have more money to lose than others. This information however is irrelevant to the individual. As an individual Forex trader, know the amount of money you are willing to lose and deposit that into your account.

If you are not prepared to lose any money at all, then Forex trading is unfortunately not for you. In fact, no kind of business is right for you, or at least not until you understand that with risk comes potential reward. Just remember that the most successful people in the world would have taken risks of their own, some of them would have taken phenomenal risks, to get where they are today. Many of them would have also failed more times than you can imagine, but they are where they are today because they kept on trying.

In conclusion, you need to prepared to lose your money in Forex trading. You should accept that with risk comes potential reward and that sacrifices need to be made in order to be successful. Forex traders with newly opened live accounts should simply deposit an amount they are willing to lose. They should then place their few first trades, or simply just their first trade and make sure they take educated and calculated risks. These Forex traders should then accept their losses as good education, or if they make profits the first time round, they should enjoy their earnings but make sure to try and replicate their success as much as possible before moving on and scaling up their system.

How Forex Trading Works is a resourceful website that serves to deliver free, online content relating to Forex trading, to anyone and everyone. Providing useful tips, reviews, articles and writings on forex online.

Why the Knock-On Strategy Is So Popular

Traders can choose just about any binary options strategy and find success; but some of them are more popular than others. This may be partly due to the fact that some are simpler to understand and use while others are more difficult to grasp. The knock on strategy is one of the more complicated types of binary options strategies but it is very logical. In some ways this is a very good option for making some kinds of trades. It is one of the more logically arranged strategies because of the way it is applied.

In order to be able to adopt and use this type of binary options strategy a trader will have to be able to discern the relationship between different assets. This difference might be between two commodities, stocks, indices or currency pairs. To be able to develop this binary options strategy the trader has to figure out how the two assets are related as it pertains to industry. Maybe it's where the two companies are located; or perhaps it is the same two base currencies that one company uses. There are also times when a company will substitute one product and offer a complementary product instead. As a general rule, when products are related it will be a direct relationship; when it is a relationship between two companies it is generally reverse.

When two companies have a reverse relationship a trader will be able to see a decrease in the stock price that is dependent on the company. In cases where there is a direct relationship then when one price increases, so will the other one. An example of a product relationship can be seen by two software products: Microsoft and Oracle. Let's say for example that Microsoft gets attacked by a particular malicious virus. This can cause their stock price to drop drastically. However, another software company, Oracle, may very well see an increase in its stock price since computer users will start looking for a decent substitute that is not susceptible to the virus. We may see a direct relationship between products. For instance, when sugar prices go up, other companies such as coffee and tea producers will see less profit. When the price of sugar increases, stock prices for these other products will decrease in response. Once a trader can get a grasp of some of the basic relationships found in the market, they can develop their own binary options strategy so that they can be successful.

As traders come to understand the various kinds of relationships between products or assets, developing their binary options strategy will be easier and they will be able to follow certain market movements. Because of the direction a primary stock moves a trader will be able to employ a binary options strategy and purchase a call or a put option in response. Understanding these types of relationships will help traders maximize all their profits and do so in a small time frame. They will also be at a trading advantage.

There is a large number of traders who use knock on strategies to help buffet their losses since they will be able to realize a large profit in just a short time. Experienced traders can benefit from this type of binary options strategy as long as they want to continue expanding their personal portfolio. However, to develop the knowledge of a good binary options strategy a trader will have to gain a solid understanding of how the strategies work. They will need to understand the many different aspects and become very familiar with the various types of trading instruments. Traders will also need to know how the relationships between assets work for sustainability. This can only come from spending the time to observe the relationships that two companies, currencies or commodities have; and learning how they react to one another on the market.

Master Binary Options Trading is a 100% Fee Binary Options trading community to support traders to grasp winning strategies and trade with the best brokers. We are delighted to provide a Binary Options Strategy for the benefit of new traders looking to improve their trading skills. Providing useful tips, reviews, articles and writings on forex online.