It may sound obvious but a real time track record of profits.

The bulk of advice over 90% is not worth the money and you can get better advice on the net for free.

Most vendors simply make up track records and produce a hypothetical track record that is done you guessed it in hindsight ? Knowing the closing prices! Well that's hard.

You will also get testimonials but these are normally made up friends or traders who had a lucky trade.

If you ask for the real time track record you know the vendor has had success himself and while this doesn't mean you will win it at least shows they have confidence to trade their own system.

Finding good advice

You can get a lot of good research for free:

From banks and brokers and a lot of it is very good and you can get ideas ? You shouldn't follow it blindly and you should always compare it with your analysis but for ideas its great place top start.

While a lot of the vendors who sell advice will give you a system it is normally of little use as it doesn't have a real time track record and you should ignore it - all you need is on the net and it's free.

Here is what you need to do.

1. Look up technical analysis and learn how and why it works and learn the concept of support and resistance

2. Then you need to learn the concept of breakout trading how and why it works

3. What you want to do is to trade against support and resistance and you need to get the odds in your favour, so you need some momentum indicators to help you.

Go to a good free chart service such as futuresource.com and learn about stochastic and the Relative strength Index and how to use them.

You can then trade support and resistance and use these indicators to time entry.

The above will give you a perfectly robust system you can apply for profits. All the information is free and to help you we have written numerous articles on building forex trading systems so look them up.

There is some advice worth paying for and you can get that from Amazon.com

Two essential books are:

1. Market Wizards by Jack Schwager that interviews some of the top traders of all time. These are traders who don't just talk the talk they have walked the walk and made millions.

2. Also get ?Way of the turtle? by Curtis Faith ? He learned to trade in just 14 days in a famous experiment devised by legendary trader Richard Dennis to prove that anyone could learn to trade.

These traders known as the turtles went on to become some of the most successful traders of all time, all learned to trade in just 14 days and all had no previous trading experience.

Curtis Faith made $30 million and was the most successful turtle of all and this is a great book for anyone wanting to know what you need to do to become a successful trader.

So your system you can get free on the net and the two books above will give you a good introduction to the mindset of the successful trader.