Newbie help

I am new to the Forex Market and I would really like to research it some more. Currently I am using FX Trading Station II with $50,000 of fake money. My problem right now is I have no strategy, I mean I have no good way to pick what I want. I am really looking for resources for a strategy and also for up to date market news. Any help would be great, thanks a lot!

Mattman, you don’t need a system. That may sound counter to what you have heard or read, but the truth is, you wouldn’t know what to do with one if you had it. Let me give a little advice.

Pick a pair, any pair. No pair is better then any other, but some will move more during the time you have available to trade. Find something that fits your schedule and forget about everything else.

Once you have a pair, watch it. Not for an hour or a day… Watch it for 6 months. During that time when you’re watching how the pair moves, read. Read everything you can find about trading and technical analysis. At a minimum you want to learn about price action and patterns. Read about Fibonacci and the psychology of support and resistance. Read about candlesticks and trendlines. Read read read!

As your reading and watching, you come to find some of the things your reading about occurring with your pair. If you think you know something is going to happen, trade it with your demo account and track the outcomes. If you won, great, if you lost, it’s even better. Note why you lost and what you learned. Keep a running total in a spreadsheet of the dates, times, outcomes, and most important of all, your thoughts and feelings occurring during the trade.

After you have blown out your demo account, read about money management. Learn %R and stick to it. When you fail at sticking to it, learn about trader psychology. Start tracking your fear and greed in your spreadsheet.

When you start making some play money open the smallest real account you can ($300 usually) and do what you were doing in demo with your real account. When you blow that up, go back and read the psychology stuff again. It will make more sense now.

Trade some more on your demo account to rebuild your confidence. At this point you should read Reminiscences of a stock operator. It will bring a lot of things into context. When you feel like you can do it, open another $300 account and trade. If you can double your money, you’re ready to start looking at different systems. You will have the understanding and experience necessary to evaluate the different systems to find one that works for your specific needs.

Start to profitable, this process will take you 1-3 years. If you’re not prepared to invest this much time and effort, save your money and stick it in a mutual fund. You will not have any capability of making anything with a trading system without this investment in yourself.

Good luck!

I came into trading just under a year ago. The people selling courses were telling me how much money I could make easily. Then, when I'd paid them, they said, "well, actually, it's not that easy". And lots of people had gloom and doom stories about 'how things are', while others gave the 'you have to work till you drop and learn everything under the sun' ethic. Then you start to feel a little inadequate because you have a sneaking suspicion that some people actually do make money with it, and you must be missing something fundamental. So I set out to find out what the fundamentals were. I believe I found them, started trading live after six months and have never looked back. So I wrote a book about it, to add to the pile that's already out there, and now it's even more confusing for newbies like you who now have another voice saying "here's the answer". So I do sympathise with your dilemma..... The good thing about it is that as it only deals with the fundamentals that are key to making profits quickly, I've been able to make it quite slim. Good luck with what ever you choose, stay positive, and use the KISS principle!