Thursday, April 30, 2009

How to Develop Your Forex Trading Strategy

Developing your own Forex trading strategy is critical to your success as a Forex trader. Forex trading can be profitable, but the market is very volatile and you need to take a methodological approach which not only helps you to maximize profits but also minimize losses. Your trading strategy will consist of using a variety of tools and indicators as well as learning how to manage both your money and emotions effectively.

Your first step in developing the best Forex trading strategy for you is to master the fundamentals of Forex trading. This includes have a good working knowledge of how Forex markets work as well as learning the nuts and bolts of both technical and fundamental analysis and the tools and signals used in these analyses.

An important step you must take is to determine what your investing goals are as well as what funds you have available for trading. Another important factor which will help to determine your Forex trading strategy is to determine the time frame that you will trade in. You will need a much different strategy for short term, medium term and long term Forex trading.

There are certain principles you should incorporate into any trading strategy. One thing you can do to minimize losses is to always incorporate stop losses into your trades. You should also diversify your trades by not limiting yourself to just one currency pair or putting all your money into just a few trades.

For the small investor, taking a medium term approach may be the best strategy. Short term, or Forex day trading, is extremely difficult to succeed with. Traders are looking to capitalize on small price movements using leverage within very short time frames. Day trading requires a lot of capital and is very high risk.

A long term Forex trading strategy also requires a large capital investment to protect against volatility in open positions. The small investor may also not have the patience to hold on for the long term.

With a medium term or swing trading approach, the Forex trader will use technical analyses to make trades over the course of several days to several weeks. There are fewer trading opportunities using the criteria, but it is a safer approach than short term trading and does not require the same amount of patience and capital requirements as a long term approach.

A swing trading strategy will make use of variety of technical indicators within several time frames to weigh trading opportunities. As a trader you are looking to find situations where most of the technical signals are pointing in the same direction. You will make use of candlestick charts in various time frames as well as other technical indicators.

Developing your own trading strategy is absolutely essential if you hope to be a successful Forex trader. Master the fundamentals, set your investment objectives, minimize your losses through the use of stop losses and diversifying your trades, and determine the time frame and technical indicators you will use to evaluate your trades. If you work out a well developed Forex trading strategy you will give yourself an excellent chance of becoming a very successful Forex trader.

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