Even if there are many important things you will learn from a forex school, there are still many essential skills that you may not get from your forex education. This is not to denigrate the value of formal education in currency trading, but rather to stress the limits of this training.
When you are actually trading with real money, there are many practical skills that you will need in order to avoid losing all your trading capital. Of course, there may be opportunities for you to learn some of these skills if the school offers mentorship programs or supervised trading opportunities. Here is a short overview of some of these skills.
Guest Post by FXCC – Forex School
- Risk management. Every time you open a trade, there is always a chance that it will go against you and you will lose your money. Because of this, you will have to develop risk management skills that will help you to deal with the risk so that you’ll be able to navigate it successfully. One example of managing risk is to limit the amount of money you will risk per trade to a certain percentage of your trading capital. This will limit the amount of your losses in case you make unsuccessful trades. Of course this does not prevent you from increasing the amount ventured on your trades in case you feel the market is in your favor.
- Developing a trading mindset rather than a gambling mindset. One of the worst things that you can do as a trader is to let your trade run rather than closing it out when it begins to go against you. A trader would accept that a trade is unsuccessful and accept their loss while a gambler would let the trade continue to run in the hope that it will eventually reverse itself in the trader’s favor.
- Learning patience. It takes time to learn how to trade successfully and the trader should accept this rather than believe that after only a few courses, they will be successful at once. Apart from the lessons they will learn from the Forex school, they will also have to spend hours of practice making paper trades before they go and make actual money trades. It is said that it takes 10,000 hours to become proficient at something, and you will have to put in the time required to develop into a successful trader since it will not happen overnight.
- Taking the long term view. Most beginning traders mistakenly believe the hype that the currency market is a place where you can make a fortune virtually overnight. Any good forex school will inculcate in their students the basic lesson that it takes time to make money. Attempting to make a big amount of money at once in the markets can only end in disaster unless you’re really lucky. Keep in mind that the only way to earn substantial profits from the forex markets is to trade using leverage, but this also greatly increases the amount of money you can lose.
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