To achieve your goal of trading Forex profitably, you first need to develop a trading strategy which comprises a set of rules that can be readily adhered to over the long haul. You then need to acquire a very good understanding of money management principles that will help you control and restrict the impact of unavoidable losses.
Many Forex traders have difficulty understanding that their occupation involves a tremendous amount of risk. Good Money Management skills are essential in order to cope with this very serious problem. Basically, money management strategy is a statistical tool that helps control the risk exposure and profit potential of every trade activated.
When inexperienced traders entered trades with just calculated profit targets, the results can be disastrous if they have also not clearly calculated a protective Stop Loss. Money Management will also advise in determining a realistic risk to reward ratio that will limit the effects of draw-downs.
In addition, these principles are essential in selecting accurate Stop-Loss and Target-Limits for each trade entered. New trading systems should then to be back tested using historical data with the objective of producing positive win to loss ratios and expectancy values. Although this task can be done manually, it would be both very time consuming and prone to human error.
As such, traders are well advise to automate their testing using a suitable software tool or by coding their trading strategies, if possible. After properly performing this exercise, confidence will be greatly boosted because now traders will have a much better understanding of the results that their systems will generate over the long haul.
The above analysis will provide new traders with a realistic and measured performance of the capabilities and limitations of their trading system. In particular, they will now know how many losing trades might be encountered during an overall profitable period of time. This knowledge will steel them during periods of adversity so that they will still persevere with their systems by trading them in a consistent manner.
All types of trading are unpredictable and even sure-fire deals can turn surprisingly bad in a matter of moments. This is especially so with the Forex Market because of its size, complexity and volatility always means that a sufficient number of active changes are present capable of affecting the values of any currency pairs.