Ooooh. 
This is an interesting read @PipMeHappy! Thank you for sharing this, a good read especially for newbies (like me 
) who are still making up their minds about what kind of trader they’d be. 
I’m actually a bit curious on what you think about this. 
Hello @ria_rose I remember - and you may be in a similar situation, perhaps - when I was a newbie and tried to learn about everything that could apply to trading, from macro-fundamental to the size of intra-day volatility and all manners of indicators thrown in: this is a fairly typical newbie stage, where one tries to soak up everything very quickly and becomes obsessed with ‘the markets’. Eventually one would expect a newbie to start becoming narrower in focus - less overtrading, less pairs on the watchlist, less indicators - and going through a consolidation phase, to really try preserving capital and becoming at least a little more consistent in NOT losing money. After this, there is almost a reversal to the 360-degree newbie phase, looking out at some wider themes in the markets, but with an increased awareness of which aspects are more directly going to impact the trading side, rather than filling one’s head with all possible information indiscriminately.
So if I were giving you some sort of advice - the same that I would give myself if I could go back five years - it would be that concentrating on big themes like these is not so useful at the beginning, and although it is fantastically interesting and stimulating to read about big themes, it is very difficult trying to make sense of them in trading terms, day in and day out.
Personally, since 2015 I started incorporating more big-picture themes and things like fx futures volume in my trading journey, and the jury is still out as to whether it will make me profitable, but it really fits my personality better, because short-term trading gives one that rush which makes trading exciting but ultimately I can be quite impatient and allowing myself to let emotions seep into something like trading is just a disaster. I have experienced this again between November 2017 and February 2018, when I allowed myself to break rules etc. and started trading off-the-cuff: it led me to losing money on my demo account, going from over £58,000 to just over £10,000 in the space of three months.
Since then, I went back to what I was doing in 2015 - 2016, trying to better myself in terms of size management and also to have a better focus on bigger themes: I recovered in part, taking the account from that £10k+ to about £36k; I am now at £27k and the next leg up should see me through to the £40k mark. The outlook is still murky but the method is becoming clearer: what is certain is that I have taken the emotion out of trading, taking losses where needing to preserve equity and margin, and trading much less.
Sorry for the long reply… you did ask 
Now I will pass the ball back to you!
Thanks for sharing your views with us. In many instances new babies are in a continuous dilemma which investment time horizon can be best suitable to him. From my own point of view, initial stages of forex trading can pass with short term strategies so that a trader get chances to understand the nature of the market while at the same time he gets profit without taking significant risks.