Learn Currency Trading: How to Lose
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010Yes, you read that right: if you need to learn forex trading, you’ve got to be ready to lose. Naturally you’ve got to go into each trade with the objective of earning money, but some trades will unavoidably go against you. How you handle that when it occurs is one of the largest factors in figuring out whether you’ll become a successful forex trader.
Everyone knows that it’s essential not to let your emotions be in control of your trading. However, even super cool traders, even those who employ a system like FAP Turbo, who never make a stupid mistakes ( if there are any ) are sure to lose often because no system is 100% successful. Some trades will just go wrong.
Also, and this is harder to handle, all systems will sometimes go through bad patches where they drift into making a loss over a couple of days or weeks. You can see this taking place when you backtest a system. There are occasions when everything appears to go right and times when it’s the opposite. When it occurs in real life, you must be prepared.
A method to prepare for a bad spell is to have an idea of the drawdown of your system. This is the amount by which your funds are probably going to drop in a bad run. It depends on the p.c. success rate of the system ( the proportion of moneymaking trades ), the average profit of those trades and the average loss of losing trades. Typically if you have backtested the system thoroughly you’ll have an idea of what the drawdown is probably going to be. Real life can always surprise us so it’s best to set your position size so that your total funds cover the drawdown 3 or 4 times over.
When you begin foreign exchange trading it is very easy to be drawn in to committing too much cash to each trade. You may start out with a very small account and use a lot of leverage to manipulate position sizes that involve you in more risk than your fund balance can handle. This will unavoidably lead to a crash. So even if you only have the smallest possible micro account, work out your drawdown and make allowance for it. If you don’t, your funds will be wiped out sooner or later in the routine swings and roundabouts of your system and even if it was only a small amount, this is very daunting.
So on the one hand you should protect your funds from bad times at all costs, but on the other hand you have to be a little detached from them too. Do not consider that money yours any more, consider it spent, just as if you had used it to buy a new automobile. You should only be trading with money that you are able to afford to lose, so if you can’t do this, you want to reconsider how your trading is financed.
It is critical that you don’t depend on this money. Never trade with the rent money. If you do, you may be under plenty of unnecessary stress while you are trading and that is probably going to lead to mistakes. Ironically, the way to make more money when you learn foreign exchange trading is to plan for loss.
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