To trade or not to trade

Why do people trade? Obviously to become quick rich! Interestingly enough, only a small minority of traders ever make any profits worth mentioning-yet, despite this reality, trading still excites people and many see it as a fast money-making tool, and plunge into it, unaware of the risks involved!

Trading is not simple; it is a cocktail of many factors, such as knowledge, experience, confidence, patience and even psychology.

Let’s define them for the sake of argument, shall we?

The more knowledgeable and experienced a trader, the greater his chances of success. Armed with these two factors, he can anticipate market volatility, study the market trends (with the help of indicators and other trading tools), recognise the strength of certain currencies and will know when to close an order to make a profit. The more experienced a trader, the less mistakes he will make.

Knowledge and experience boosts confidence and this last factor is essential in developing a successful trading strategy. Confidence comes with time and it provides the ammunition to combat the complexity of trading, it allows you to succeed in making a better judgement of market trends, and makes you confident when choosing which currency to trade. Confidence also allows you to accept any mistakes you may make, reassuring you that it is not the end of the world and that mistakes can be a positive tool in avoiding all repetition of the same mistakes.

Patience is a virtue, and not more so than in FX trading! Patience is required to evaluate the markets and identify trading patterns, grasping golden opportunities to place orders, learning how to employ all indicators to assess the markets, etc. With patience, as a gift, a truly successful trading strategy can be developed. But patience is difficult to master in an environment of excitement and fast trade movement, which can bring both profits, whether expected or unexpected, and disappointment.

Psychology, how is this a factor, I hear you ask? Well, trading involves high risk, and any type of financial loss affects our psychology causing anger and disappointment, and the real feeling of failure sets in, so how do we deal with this? Well, we need to have a solid state of psychology whentrading, we need to be armed with enough knowledge to enable us to trade to avoid any disappointment of losing, which can trigger anger and make us surrender. We need to also understand that being lucky is not the answer to trading; so if we make a win through luck, we should not imagine that this ‘false luck’ will continue to prevail in our trading strategy. This false hope may lead us to invest all our funds, and then maybe even losing them. Believing in ‘luck’ can be disastrous to any trading strategy.

So now that we have learnt all about how the above factors can affect our trading strategy, let’s venture into the fascinating world of FX trading and become savvy traders!!

CommexFX wishes you a pleasant and successful trading experience!