Many a fool has fallen for those suave advertisements that promise you endless instant riches trading currency.
They all make it seem so easy buying dollars, Euros, pounds, and pennies to instantly sit at the same table with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
What those adverts and brokers don’t tell you is that knowledge is your number one weapon forex trading success.
While it is entirely possible to make big forex profits without any education, it is impossible to find long term success while buried under such ignorance.
There are many important reasons why you need a forex education before you trade.
Get the Jargon
Experienced traders have distinct terminologies that they use to describe market conditions and indicators.
Knowledge of this specialized jargon will help you make profitable trade decisions and avoid loss makers.
When you know what the experts and market players are talking about, then it gets easier to formulate an infallible and effective trading strategy for long term success.
On the flip side, when you are in the dark about what every other sentence means, you will miss out on great opportunities and sink into losing setups simply because you lacked the correct information.
Learn the Tools
Trading currency is not just about blindly exchanging one currency for another and profiting from the difference in prices.
You need to at least use price charts to know how much each currency is worth.
Additionally, you may need various indicators, signals, and oscillators to help you identify price trends and future currency price shifts.
Arming yourself with a forex education will enable you to identify what tools are available for monitoring and predicting market movements.
You will also need to learn where, when, and which tools to use in any given market condition.
Fortunately, though some of these tools may have crazy or complicated names, they generally are very simple to read and translate.
In fact, anyone who has experience in other forms of financial instruments has an advantage since the same tools are used in the currency market.
Sift the Scams
The forex market enjoys a daily global turnover of over 4 trillion USD. This makes it bigger than all the other financial markets combined.
With such a lucrative nest egg, the market has attracted one of the highest numbers of disreputable individuals out to make a coin out of the careless or ignorant.
These modern day con artists have devised many ways to trick you into handing them your money.
For the uninitiated, it is extremely difficult to tell the crook from the genuine forex service provider.
There really are no clear cut demarcations between what’s legal and what’s illegal and many brokers operate in a largely grey area.
With proper forex education, a trader learns to distinguish between genuine brokers and scam artists.
You get to learn what tools are helpful to your trades and which ones are just money-grabbing schemes.
Choose Your Pairs
Even without an education, it might be rather obvious that forex trading entails a simple exchange of one currency for another.
Nevertheless, what you might not know is that picking just one currency pair to trade in is the most likely way to achieve high profits.
Picking multiple currency pairs can get very confusing especially during highly volatile market periods. Moreover, every currency is unique in the way it reacts to market shifts.
Each currency is controlled differently by its issuing central bank and it is these differences in their nature that forex traders bank their profits.
With a forex education, you learn how each currency reacts to market conditions and how to one chosen currency reacts to another.
Always keep in mind that a trade is only as good as each of the constituent pairs. You need to know both currencies in the pair.
Instill Money and Risk Management
You can be the best trader when it comes to accurate market price predictions.
However, this may not translate to real profits if your money management practices and risk management is poor.
As many traders have painfully discovered, you can make 8 consecutive profitable trades only to lose it all on the 9th trade.
Be cautious with your money by judiciously formulating and applying a forex trading strategy.
Have a plan to maximize your profits while at the same time minimizing your losses.
A forex education is never complete if it does not include how to design and implement a risk management plan.
Leverage Your Returns
What makes the forex market such a lucrative and profitable trading arena is the level of leverage and margin offered by brokers.
In other markets, you use your money or borrow from friends and banks to invest.
In the forex market, your broker can offer leverage levels of as high as 1:100 if in the US or 1:500 if in other countries.
This gives you control of a much bigger capital investment than what you initially invested and opens doors to higher profits.
With a forex education, you get to learn that leverage is a double-edged sword. Use it wisely to multiply your gains and avoid poor decisions that multiply your losses.
Learn To Predict Economical Events
One government makes a report on the status of its employment rates while another faces adverse weather conditions.
How do these fundamental events relate to forex trading? To an uneducated trader, these are news events that bear no particular significance.
To the expert currency trader, these two mutually exclusive events happening in different parts of the world are reason enough to overturn a solid trading strategy.
With a robust forex education under your belt, it is easy to recognize natural, political, social, and economic events and how they impact on the prices of world currencies.
Summary
Proper forex education is one of the chief ingredients for realizing success as a forex trader.
With a good education, you will equip yourself with profitable skills and strategies of trading currencies.
