As a trader for over 25 years I have tried lots of ways to make money and learned forex trading the hard way. Here I am going to look at the basics of building a currency system in simple steps and show you how to get one that not only works but suits your trading temperament and lead you to currency trading success.



The first point you need to consider before devising a currency trading system is what type of trader are you ? Do you have lots of patience or do you like a bit more action?

You essentially have two choices, swing trading or long term trend following.

A common error made by most new forex traders is they are tempted by forex day trading but it doesn't work. The biggest myth of forex trading is that day trading makes money, yet of all the systems sold on the net you will never find one with a real time track record of profits.

The fact is all short term volatility is random and you can never get the odds on your side, so it's doomed to failure.

Let's look at the benefits of swing trading:

You are trading moves of about 3 to 5 days, you get plenty of action, get profits and losses quickly and don't have to have the patience of a long term trend follower.

Long term trend following is hard mentally however it's potentially the most rewarding in terms of cash, but you have the mental turmoil of seeing open equity dip ? if you can overcome the mental hurdle you can make excellent gains.

The two basics of any currency trading system are:

You need to be able to spot support and resistance and then you need to enter trading signals in line with market momentum.

Many traders simply hope levels of resistance and support hold or break, however if you want to learn forex trading, you must learn to confirm each and every trading signal before entering.

We will look at the best indicators to use in the next article but what we want to concentrate on now is the most essential part of forex education that traders fail to learn ? money management.

This is much more than learning to place a stop ? that's easy. The hard bit ( particularly when trend following) is moving the stop and how to maximize your gains.

If you are trading using support and resistance the stop obviously goes behind the level the opposite way to the way you're trading. The problem is:

How to follow trends and get out with large profits?

Most traders simply cannot accept a large profit.

They get so excited when they get a profit they move their stop to quickly to protect what they have and then get stopped out by normal volatility. They then get frustrated when they see the trade pile up $10,000 or more in profits and their not in!

If you want to long term trend follow your stop needs to lag a long way behind and you need to have confidence your target will be met. Either exit on a target or accept you will give back a lot of the gain ? this doesn't mean to say you wont make money you will but you will of course miss some.

It's frustrating but that's forex trading

With swing trading you should never use a trailing stop always use a target and bank just before the next level of resistance or support.

In the next part of the article we will look at the best indicators to use and how to apply them for profit.