Start With a Practice Account (Part III)

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Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke (C) prepares to testify before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill July 22, 2009 in Washington, DC. Bernanke testified to the House Tuesday that the Obama administration's plan to overhaul financial oversight would reorient the Fed's powers and help avert more AIG-like taxpayer bailouts.
Keep this mind that forex markets get affected by the sudden breaking news that may have economic and geopolitical implications. Markets dont like surprises. Whenever the market is surprised by a news item, it will react violently. You should know the schedule of all data releases and news events most likely to occur during the anticipated time horizon of your trading strategy. Before the position is opened, every trade strategy needs to take into account the upcoming news and data releases.

You should have a good understanding of what the market is expecting in terms of event outcomes to anticipate how the market is most likely to react. One important thing that you should not lose sight of is that forex markets are highly integrated with the other financial markets.

Forex markets function alongside other major financial markets like stocks, bonds, futures, commodities (particularly gold and oil). There are important and psychological relationships between these markets and the currency market. You need to develop the habit of looking at whats going on in other markets and trying to anticipate the fall out on the forex market.

Look back over the whole process to understand what you did right and what you did wrong. How did you identify the trade opportunity? Was it based on technical analysis, fundamental analysis or a combination of the two? Evaluate your trading results after each trade, regardless of the outcome.

For example, you should probably devote more energy to the technical trading approach if your winning trades are more as a technical trader. Looking at your trade this way will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a fundamental trader or a technical trader. You need to know what approach best suits your personality.

You should also ask yourself was the position size sufficient to match the risk and reward scenario or was it too large or too small. Could you have entered at a better level? What tools you might have used to improve your entry timing? Were you patient enough in your trade or did you rush to make hasty decisions?

You should try to find out were you effectively able to monitor your trade after it was open and active? If so how and if not, why not? The answers to these questions will reveal a lot about how much time and dedication you are able to devote to your trading.

These questions and the answer to them will reveal the role emotions play in trading. Controlling your emotions in trading is crucial to your long term success. Currency trading is all about getting out of it what you put into it. Evaluating your trading results on a regular basis is an essential step in improving your trading results, refining your trading style, maximizing your trading strengths and minimizing your trading weaknesses.

There are two approaches to learning currency trading. Practice the demo account a little and straight away jump into live action. Learn as you go. In other words, you can learn all these things on your real account by trading live. But you will have to go through the roller coaster of trying to control your emotions while blowing your account repeatedly. In my opinion, the best way to learn and experience all these things is on your demo account. Whatever trading plan you make or whatever trading strategy you like, first test it on your demo account. I keep on repeating myself. Only trade live, when you double your demo account three times in a row.

Doubling your demo account three times in arrow will give you the level of confidence and belief in you to make it big in the fore market. You cannot double your demo account three times in a row without going through all the above that I have pointed out.