Monday, December 19, 2016
Becoming an expert in forex trading is easier and faster than you think. If you follow our ideas you can also learn forex trading virtually for free.
Getting a solid grounding in the basics first is vital if you're to avoid finding yourself out of your depth with your forex education, and is easy to achieve if you follow our simple guide to the who, what and where of forex training.
If you've never traded in stocks, shares, commodities or indeed forex, the mystical world of trading must at first seem very confusing indeed.
The internet is full of companies offering to help you learn forex trading, but if you don't know your bulls from your bears how do you know which forex course to begin with? Many forex courses are very expensive, and it doesn't help that so many are sold by high pressure sales people.
It's fair to say that we stumbled our way through the learning stage, and through luck rather than judgment happened to go to the right forex training places in more or less the right order.
Along the way we certainly bumped into many less fortunate who had inadvertently booked themselves onto an advanced forex trading course before they knew the basics, and looked completely lost within the first 10 minutes.
Here we'll try to help you avoid doing the same, and we'll tell you from our own experience how and where to quickly learn to trade forex without losing a fortune in the process.
Free forex training (virtually)
Let's begin by clarifying one key point - the principles needed to learn currency trading are the same no matter whether you are trading stocks and shares, commodities or forex.
If you have been on a technical analysis course that teaches you how to read candlestick charts, to understand the fundamentals of support and resistance, and a few indicators like MACD, RSI and moving averages etc - you should then be able to trade anything, as forex technical analysis is no different.
In our experience trading courses fall into the following broad categories;
- Free tutorials given by brokers (either live or online)
- Free "complimentary" trading seminars given by training companies
- "Learn to trade" general basics courses (normally billed as stock trading courses)
- Specialist courses e.g. options, futures, forex etc
Brokers - Most good brokers will provide some forex free trading tutorials for their clients. Not surprisingly these forex training seminars tend to focus on how to operate the broker's own software, but nonetheless provide a good forex trading guide and are worth seeing. However, do not expect to walk away from a broker's free forex training tutorial with expert knowledge in how to trade profitably.
Free events - Many of the training/education companies will introduce you to their services with a Free "complimentary" forex training seminar. We can honestly say that having attended several of these from various companies we've never yet met anyone who walked away from one of these sessions having learnt very much at all.
The sole purpose of these sessions is to introduce you to the company and to sell you one of their forex trading courses, rather than to teach you anything particularly useful. However, if you attend with your expectations set at this level you won't be disappointed.
Currency Trading Basics - To learn forex basics you will need to book onto one of these courses, and in a moment we will show you how you can have the course paid for by being clever about when you attend.
It is vital that you begin with a course that teaches forex trading basics, as there is nothing worse than finding yourself on the wrong course and out of your depth from the beginning.
Basic level courses tend to be billed as "learn to trade the stock market". Most people have never heard of forex, but everyone's heard of the stock market, hence the education companies focus their basic trading courses on stock trading. Remember, most of the principles are identical, and at the end of a stock trading course you will be just as able to trade forex as anything else and will also have learned the vital skill of trading money management.
Even for these basic level weekend courses the education companies will charge you a couple of thousand, and although they do usually offer to let you bring a partner or friend along for free, even still it's expensive
- but what if you could have it paid for?
Forex Signals services enable even the novice trader to trade profitably almost straight away. Our suggestion if you're on a tight budget (and we wish we'd done it this way around ourselves) is to proceed as follows;
- Select a broker
- Attend / view online the broker's free forex training tutorials so that you know how to place and manage trades
- Subscribe to a full-service forex signals provider and 2 - 3 other signals services (around USD $100 per month each - but should quickly pay for themselves)
- Purchase a few forex robots (one off cost of around $100 each - but should also pay for themselves quickly)
- Test the signals and robots on your broker's demo account, to make sure they're profitable, or make adjustments until they are. Once you're happy, trade them on your live account and starting reaping in the profits.
- Then use the profits you make from trading signals and robots to pay for your forex course - effectively giving you free forex training.
- Thereafter either continue to trade the signals and robots, or develop your own educated trading style aided by the prompts from the signals and robots. Hence your forex training is paid for and you get the best of all worlds.
Subscribing to a full-service signal provider from the outset really is forex made easy and has the added advantage of giving you daily access to an expert trader's screen and a regular forex trading tutorial on what he's doing. Hence you will have already seen in practice many of the concepts which you will then learn in depth on your forex course, which will hopefully make learning forex much easier for you.
After you've been through your forex trading education, you will have new skills, but you must be aware that you will still lack experience. The worst thing to do with your new skills would be to ruin your own confidence in them by immediately trading a string of losing trades. Therefore we recommend that you subscribe to a full-service forex signals provider straight away if you have not already done so, so that right from the outset you are trading alongside your own personal forex consultant.
Think of it like when you learnt to ride a bike - you used training wheels first didn't you ? Only when you had your balance and had learned to fully control the bike did you ride off on your own. Your trading should be no different. Don't expect to be a profitable expert trader after just 3 days or even a week in a classroom learning forex trading.
It's important not to think of signals as extra cost - quite the opposite, they're a way of keeping loss-making trades to a minimum and optimising your profits.