What is your hardest-learned lesson in FX?

there are practically no long term successful traders in forexfactory. trading systems although they are a great number of them are written by overly enthusiastic 1-2-3 months with some success traders and they are 99.9% failures. no objectivity and a lot of confidence when there should be none.

Bang on. The direction and steepness of my equity curve changed (for the better) as soon as I learned this. Van Tharp's books helped me get this crucial point.
I forced myself to try it initially just as an intelectual excersise and then felt a bit stupid that what everyone had been saying was in fact right!

Here, a few nuggets of trading wisdom: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?t=248102

Here is a thread with some "market secrets": http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4067

Very interesting posts - I see alot in these posts of what I have done incorrectly and learnt from so you're not alone.

When I first started out I just couldn't get around cutting my losses and bailing out. I had a stop loss but would try and change it and of course I usually lost money so I learnt to stick to my plan, keep the stop loss where it is (or move in accordance with my rules) and if I lost then it was just a losing trade and emotionally I could move on. Van Tharp's book Trading Beyond the Matrix helped alot.

One of the best things I learnt was to close a trade before Friday NY close (I don't trade long term). One Monday I opened my account to find there had been slippage and of course I lost out. I wrote this into my Trading Plan (must close trades Friday night) and now I stick to the Plan. But really, I thought I was a disiplined person when it came to money and then I started Trading and learnt about how much fear I had around it. It's not easy to conquer but you can do it if you really decide to work on your emotions.

A guy I worked with used one of those automated Robot Trading systems - it killed his entire account overnight. He swore he'd never trade again and I think he took 6 months off. He's back now, using his own strategy and is pretty succesfull so it pays learn from other's mistakes too. The funny thing with Trading is, for me anyway, I actually don't really learn until I go through the experience of the error first hand - then it's something I'll never forget.