I have been trying to figure out if I could trade after work on the weekdays but have found that the market doesn’t wait for me. I have no idea how people with a full time job could possibly implement any of the forex strategies I have read about. Even on swing trading or longer trading you are waiting for a signal. I am never watching the market it seems when that signal comes. Either most of the people on this site are trading on the bosses time or they know a secret I don’t. Someone please fill me in. Otherwise I guess I will just work all day and trade all night, I should be able to function on 15 minutes of sleep a day.
This is where the planning comes in. It most definitly is possible to trade while holding a full time job. I do it.
You will more than likely have to go longer term. If you work off the DAILY charts then your signals could come at the same time very day if your signals involve waiting for closing prices. You could also set up signals to be sent to your cell phone to alert you of price levels you might have your eye on.
If you are into scalping, you could look at trading during the night for an hour or two. If the night for you is the European session then you have a good chance of seeing decent movement.
You could also trade in such a way where you define longer term support or resistance levels and trade the breaks of those levels by setting entry orders in your platform beyond those points. You would just have to spend an hour or so looking at charts when the markets are quiet to identify those price levels. This you can do when you are home in the evening (I am ssuming the evening for you is the Asian session when markets are quieter)
The bottom line is that you can trade while working full time. Your plan just has to recognize the limitations your job places on your trading and work around that.
It just has to feel natural though. When i first started trading i was paying for day trading signals to be sent ot my Cell phone. I was at work and every time i got a signal i had to find a way to get out of what i was doing to place the orders. After a while i became worn out. I quickly realized that i was not being practical in my approach. It was not natural. It MUST be natural and unforced!
Trading IS possible while ya working.
I (Like pipbull) trade at work.
My system allows me to do this, and that i think is the key.
What is important here is what you are aiming for, and the system you are using to achieve those results.
Let me explain, if you are just after 5-10 pips a day, you should be able to do that even in the quietest periods…even if that means a combination of a 3Pip, a 2pip, a 1Pip and a 4Pip trade…that’s still 10 Pips…you may laugh, but compound 10pips a day for a year and you really WILL be laughing!
The other alternative is to go Daily/Weekly/Monthly, this you can also do in your own time. I won’t repeat what pipbull said, but in my view he got it spot-on.
You have a choice to make here, Forex isn’t something you can go into half-arsed, you do it (and do it properly) or you don’t do it at all…anything inbetween means you will probably lose money…and no-one on this site wishes that.
Bottom line…if gaing your experience/money in Forex means you need to cut into ya bosses hours every now and then, so be it…isn’t the point of Forex to be rid of your Boss eventually anyway???
Your choice my friend :0)
Good Luck.
I don’t want to do this halfway and that is the issue that is bothering me most. I cant seem to find a system that makes me comfortable and allows me to work my job too. I am pulling out what is left of my hair.
What about letting your wife do the trading while you go to work. 
That way, if the trade loses, you can blame it on her !
First and foremost you need to sort out your timeframe. Are you thinking scalping or day trading? Swing trading? Longer-term position trading?
Most likely you would find swing trading the most difficult to manage with a job because the signals can happen at any point and managing the positions requires regular attention. The shorter-term stuff is doable if you have a few clear hours during a high volume time of day. If not, you’re left to longer-term trading, which offers plenty of nice opportunity for those with patience.
Decide what kind of trader you want to be and see if it feels natural for you.
If you scalp, like Maurizio said, you can get away with trading the quiet hours. But not everyone feels comfortable with scalping and have a hard time managing the reward:risk.
Otherwise, you have to go longer term, especially if your work offers no flexibility to access charts and your platform during the day.
Are you familiar with support and resistance trading? Because the market seems to be more responsive to these price levels on the longer-term charts, it could be something worth exploring for you.
If you feel comfortable with 100% mechanical trading then it could be worthwhile to explore automating a set of very well tested rules. Be careful with mechanical trading though. In my opinion, it can be just as profitable as discretionary trading but mechanical systems a not capable of adapting to market changes. You would just have to know when the performance of such a system is falling outside the statistical norm (based on your backtesting) and have the discipline to make the changes when necessary.
The point is that there are options for every single kind of trader, full or part time. The work and discipline is required to find and test the rules extensively according to your personality and lifestyle. Once again, it has to feel right and unforced. Hope this helps.
pipbull,
could you explain a little about s/r trading, any links?
i have been trying to build my trading templates around that for now, any pointers will be appreciated. 
and, i also have the problem of working and trading…my only free hours is when i want to sleep, and the market is crawling at that time…the asian session. :mad:
Pull up a 240 min chart… that is damn easy… I hardly do any actual daytrading anymore because with forex, hell whats the point of scalping +5 and 10’s for a couple hours each day when I can throw on a couple trades off the 240 min charts, set my s/l’s and targets and go to bed?
Last night I went long the GBPUSD, and EURUSD. Woke up to find my +40 pip target in the GBP hit, and my +90 pip target hit in the EUR. It required all of 2 minutes at midnight to glance at a chart and throw on the trade. I made money while I slept, woke up and gave myself the day off.
Get a broker like oanda that has a web based platform or something if you want to check it or monitor the trades every couple of hours.
Sound strategies should require 0 effort from you once the trade is put on. You should know where your in at and where you’ll be out at for either or loss or a profit. If you know all that before hand and you only can make decisions every 4 hours how much time can it possibly take?
I would like to trade off the daily’s once a day before bed or after work, just set it and forget it, but unfortunately all the systems I have found wait for a signal of some kind and I am never home when this happens. I am in the eastern time zone and get home when the market has flatlined for the day. i guess I may have to figure out if I can take a laptop to work and use their wireless connection.
Trades open for 8 hours without any monitoring?
I don’t like it :eek:
What if you wake up in the morning to find both trade have hit their stop losses?! :eek:
Yeee…uk! 
It is a distinct possibility, even it you are a “know it all” about trading and you are 100% sure that you are going to make profit because you have done your homework.
The penalty for a prophet who prophecy fails to materialize is stoning!
Naw its not easy to work around it…especially if you work full-time. Just imagine working part time with different hours and days every week…it does’nt allow me to be as consistent as I would like to be like I was when I was demo traiding, but the trick is to work around it long enough until you start to get a groove for it.
The key here is to not give up just because you don’t have the advantage of being FT.
Personally, I’m using work to my advantage. If you rly can’t find away to manage it, just focus on adding money to your trade account when you can…
So what if both stop out? Stop outs are a necessary part of this game. If you focus on them you’ve been beat before your got out of the gate. Hopefully, you’ve managed your risk appropriately on those trades and you move on to the next trade setup. Whats the big deal? The only thing you do by checking a trade is creating opportunity for doubt or emotions to affect your trade decisions. You can’t do that if you can’t look at a chart. Micromanaging trades is the worst thing you can do. For example, on my EURUSD trade I put it on at noon yesterday and sat through two separate run downs of -30 pips (I had a 50 pip s/l). Just seeing it made me want to second guess myself, bail on the trade, and run home to mommy.
But I didn’t. I stopped looking at the chart, I accepted the fact that what was going to happen was out of my control, but that the trade was put on at a high probability area, and that my risk and reward was already appropriately managed. It required no input from me. So I walked away and let the charts work. I think far too often traders find themselves micromanaging trades… If your trade setup is on a 240 minute chart sometimes it takes days for a tradeable pattern to appear, why then would I expect that I need to manage my trade every 8 hours, or even 4, or 1? Should I not expect the outcome of the trade to take roughly as long to play out as it did to set up?
Thus, we can deduct that us checking our position twice an hour is nothing but a fruitless exercise that will do nothing more than create indecision, doubt, and reduce our profit.
+301 pips 6 days into the month speaks for itself. Don’t micromanage guys, if you are a real trader you should trust your methodology enough that you should not need to constantly monitor your trades (at least on that time frame). Daytrading for +5-10’s is a whole different ball game, but the same principals still apply. Know the probable outcomes before your place the trade and don’t second guess your decisions once the trade is on. Accept the outcome of the situation you willingly put yourself into.
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Cheers!
I agree with daedalus, and have experienced the same thing.
My biggest problem is continuously monitoring the charts. When I see things going against me, I get a sinking feeling, start to panic, and want to exit early. In fact, I HAVE exited early because of panic, only to see things turn around again and go through my previous TP. 
Of course, it depends on your strategy and time frame, but for a 4 hour chart or higher, I believe that daedalus is exactly right – set your SL & TP and let it ride. What happens happens. You can’t avoid losses, but you can limit them – hence the SL.
As we all know, if your money management is good, you can have more losing trades than winning ones and still come out on top.
Personally, I don’t like to have to sit at my computer all day or constantly be near it so I can check the charts. I like the “set it and forget it” method. It gives me much more freedom to do the things that I have/want to do. You just have to make sure you know what you’re doing before trading that way, which means having a plan and sticking to it.
Terry
For example, on my EURUSD trade I put it on at noon yesterday and sat through two separate run downs of -30 pips (I had a 50 pip s/l). Just seeing it made me want to second guess myself, bail on the trade, and run home to mommy.
It required all of 2 minutes at midnight to glance at a chart and throw on the trade. I made money while I slept, woke up and gave myself the day off
Just wondering if these two statements contradict each other?
It also only took you 2 mins?
I certainly will need to look around for this “system” this is
truly the “holy grail”
I doubled down on the EURUSD price and lowered my average entry buy buying in once to guarantee my entry if it ran away and again when it lowered to a secondary support level.
I just trade Fib Retracements man… its no holy grail but i’ll be damned if it doesn’t make a crap ton of pips.
Cheers!
I just trade Fib Retracements
Well that says it all, thanks daedalus.
I learned that the only ting stopping most people from making money in these markets is patience. IT IS by far, the hardest skill to manage in my opinion of all the components that make up a traders psychology.
All it takes rly is one good trade (b/c you knew you were patient letting it do what it will do) to see how effective this skill can help you. It’s harder to understand if you’ve never actually experienced what it’s like to win when your patient, until you force yourself away from the screen and limit looking at the screens to no more then 2 times a day on the 4H and Daily time frames.
This of course, doesn’t gaurentee you a win, but it sure as hell eliminates alot of anxiety you may feel when you see the trade go against you. Then, you will be tempted to close out early for a smaller potential lose. You rly just have to allow the trade to work in your favor all the way to the end, and this is accomplished if you don’t over-analyze.
But other then that foks, trading is easy, it does NOT have to be stressfull, and it can be quite amusing to wacth money grow in your account you previously didn’t have before. No matter what that amount may be
Sarcasm? 
“I just trade Fib Retracements”
“Well that says it all, thanks daedalus.”
Sarcasm?
You can interpret the statement anyway you wish.