So im fairly new to the whole forex market. Im somewhat familiar with trading, but the concept of it, never really traded though. My friend told me about forex, and what really interested me was to see how big the market was and how easy it was to get started. So he told me about baby pips and i started learning, i bought the book currency trading for dummies, im on chapter 5 barely, but im studying it for my life. I learned the vocabulary on the forex.com glossary and i wish to keep expanding my vocabulary as that is a hard part for me here lol…
So i had a couple of questions and wanted to get different opinions and see what you guys think, any thoughts or comments greatly appreciated, Feel free to make it a discussion, i feel good learning from a book but i want more opinions for real traders out in the market grinding. so here are the questions let me know what you guys think
What are good books for understanding technical analysis and how to learn more about understanding the fundamentals and how to use the fundamentals to place winning trades.
What are good books to help guide me into finding my own trading stradegy? And how did you find your own trading stradegy with out losing a lot of money.
What are key elements you look for in Daily news, or the economic calender to help you make trades?
For beginners, do you recommend sticking to one currency pair, or do you feel its cool to kind of linger around different pairs, finding good trades?
I plan on starting in december 3 with a live account of $500. Do you feel thats too small? Or do you think thats good?
What trading platform do you like to use, and why.
Thanks guys. Lets see what we can get going here and appreciate your time to answer some questions
These are only MY opinions from someone who has spent every waking moment since January last year studying, demo trading, testing strategies and back testing and obviously a little family stuff ;-):
Study the babypips school - it’s invaluable - understand whether you want to be a technical trader or a fundamental trader. Once finished study it again!! I’m quite bright but I still find so much new stuff every time I study it :-). Are you comfortable with candlesticks and price action patterns and signals?
Any strategy you want to use - back test it again and again tweaking variables
I currently stick to the majors - my plan is understand their correlation with each other to limit your exposure and understand price action on a limited set of the major currencies…
How much profitable demo trading have you done? I spent the first 3 months hitting and missing - made some lost some! Once you’ve selected a strategy stick to it religiously! Test to make sure it consistently makes you money :-). Ensure you understand your risk levels and follow your money mgmt strategy - know how to place sl’s and tp’s and buy stops and sell stop orders.
I use metatrader for Mac and metatrader trader for windows both through sensus markets. I run a VPS with mt4 installed for my live trades (extremely few and far between)…
I just wanted to comment on point #5: Just make sure you put your $500 in a mini-account and not in a standard account. Learn how to trade in a mini-account and don’t trade more than 0.01 lots until you worked out a strategy and achieved consistent results.