Your chosen Forex trading strategy will drive the trading decisions that you make in the Forex trading system. If you are new or a novice to Forex trading systems, you will need to develop an appropriate strategy that will evolve over time. The following steps outline the approach to building a Forex trading strategy that may be adapted and tailored to your needs.
Develop a Forex Trading Plan – A Forex trading strategy should never be considered absolute or complete. Part of having a Forex trading strategy is incorporating a plan for making adjustments to the strategy. You will need to be able to make adjustments without completely revamping your strategy. Though you may consider your trading strategy to be more technical than fundamental or vice versa, you should take advantage of any available market data in making your trading decisions regardless of which discipline it falls under.
Initiate a Forex Trade – You must decide on the currency pairs that you which to trade and the number of units to trade. You must establish either a buy or sell position. You are then ready to initiate a trade as either a market order or a limit order. A market order initiates a trade at the current market price while a limit order permits a trade to be executed when the market price reaches a limit that is predetermined by you. As a safeguard for online trading, particularly with limit orders, you should also establish limits to take profits or stop losses. Take profit and stop loss limits become particularly important with online trading when your Internet connection is loss. In the time it will take to reestablish a connection, the market price may change and fall outside of any established limits. Your trading platform may be able to calculate a suitable set of limits. Limits are set as either the percentage of the trading range or as distance from the market entry price. If you have established an open position, you may adjust these calculated values to suit your needs.
Determine When to Exit a Forex Trade – If a trade moves in favor of your established position you must evaluate the move. In a long position, a move is considered significant if it is in the range of 15 to 20 pips. In response to such a move, it would be advantage to raise your stop-loss limit above the market entry price and your take-profit limit by about 20 pips or the number of your choice. If the trade continues to move in your favor you should continue to raise the stop-loss and take-profit limits. This aspect of a trading strategy allows you to continue to generate profits while the market is working in your favor. Unless, for some reason, you feel you need to manually exit the trade, you should not exit the trade until the market reverses to trigger your stop-loss order. A take-profit limit should not be used to signal an exit from the trade.
If a trade moves against your established position, you have two options. You may manually exit the trade before your stop-loss limit is reached or stay in the trade until either the stop-loss or take profit limit triggers an end to the trade. It would not be beneficial to lower the stop-loss limit with the expectation that the market price will reverse for a short period of time. While such a reversal is possible, the odds of this type of market action are low and your Forex trading strategy should not depend on this type of anomaly.
By: Andrew Daigle
Posts Tagged ‘Discipline’
Forex Trading Strategy – Simple Tips for Huge Gains
April 20th, 2009
If you want a forex trading strategy for success then these simple tips can help you make big gains. There simple to learn, easy to apply and even better will enhance your profit potential.
1. Get a Simple Method You Understand
To make money at trading you need a method you understand and can have confidence in because if you do you will have the discipline to follow it.
Many traders blindly follow others and lose because they haven’t the confidence when they hit a period of losses to stay with the system. If you don’t have the discipline to follow your forex trading strategy, you don’t have one! Many traders are lazy or greedy and don’t understand that confidence comes from understanding and learning currency trading for themselves.
2. Be Patient
Many new traders want to trade all the time – they think the more they trade the greater their chances of currency trading success – their wrong. You don’t get paid for effort, you get paid for being RIGHT and that’s it.
I know traders who trade all the time and lose and others who trade a few times a year and several hundred percent!
3. Look For Breakouts
It’s a fact that most big trends develop from new highs or lows. Most traders however can’t buy these as they want to wait for a pullback to get in at a better price and miss the trade. You can make money simply by buying high odds breakouts and we have covered this in numerous other articles – check them out.
4. Have The Courage To Accept Big Gains
A paradox of forex traders is that most traders want big gains but can’t accept them. Why?
Because they can’t deal with volatility, they hit a big potential trend and get a profit, the bigger it gets the more excited they get but the problem is daily swings eat into their open equity and they snatch the profit.
If you are trading long term trends you can see on a forex chart that they last for months or even years and can yield huge profits – but they dip back every so often – if you don’t accept this, you wont maximize your profits. You have to accept big short term swings against you, to pile up profits longer term.
5. Don’t Diversify
If you are trading a small account and looking for high odds trades don’t diversify.
Diversification just means you will dilute your profit potential. Instead risk as much as you can on a high odds trade and have the courage of your conviction. Forex trading success is all about taking calculated risks, with as much as you can afford at the right time.
If you like the buzz of trading or you are not prepared to learn the basics your going to lose but if you incorporate the above trading tips in your forex trading strategy you can make a lot of money and build serious wealth.
By: Kelly Price
Forex Trading Strategy – The Easiest Trading Method for Novice Traders
February 13th, 2009
If you are a novice trader perhaps the easiest forex trading strategy to use is a swing trading strategy as it overcomes two problems that most novice traders face but cant overcome.
By using a swing trading strategy not only can you overcome these problems, you can give yourself a great chance of currency trading success.
Let’s look at this forex trading strategy in more detail
1. Patience
Most novice traders lack patience and they think the more they trade the better.
Most go for forex day trading which is probably the best way to lose money you can get – day trading simply does and cannot work, due to the fact all short term volatility is random.
You can never get the odds in your favour and you can never win – PERIOD.
Other traders however lack patience when long term forex trend following – they simply cannot accept the profits it wants to give them!
We all want profits – but when you sit on a long term trade and see open equity dips of thousands of dollars the temptation to take it is huge and most novice traders bank profits far to soon.
If you are forex trend following you need to take a bit more risk and that means hanging on for longer term gains.
Most traders simply don’t have the patience and discipline to do this and it’s hard even for pro traders.
Swing trading when incorporated in a forex trading strategy overcomes the problem.
You are looking at making profits in periods of 3 days to a few weeks, so you are never holding a position for long periods, and there are plenty of opportunities to keep the trader interested and finally, stop loss protection can be tight keeping risk low.
Forex swing trading is easier than long term trend following as you don’t have to be so patient, it’s easy to maintain discipline, which is the key to big forex gains.
2. Swing Trading is simple
Swing trading tends to be quite simple to learn.
All you need to do is look at support and resistance and use some momentum indicators to time your trades.
One or two timing indicators are all you need to judge price momentum as it moves into test support and resistance and your all set to swing trade.
Being simple to understand is a big advantage, because from understanding comes confidence and from confidence, flows discipline – the key to successful trading is having the disipline to foloow your plan through periods of losses and is a trait all succesful traders have.
So if you want to trade currencies then try swing trading its simple, easy on the mind and can be very profitable.
Consider it as part of your forex trading strategy and let it help lead you to the currency trading success you desire.
By: Kelly Price