Learning to trade is not a quick process. In fact, it can take many years to get a proper understanding let alone to be a profitable and successful trader. Having said that, many people want to take a faster route to Forex education. If you’re interested in diving headfirst into Forex, you’ll most definitely want to read this.
There are things that you can do that can help you get a grip on at least the basics within a week. It is, however, important that you set proper expectations, after a single week of learning and trading, you will not be a success, you most likely won’t be profitable, but the important thing is that you would have put your foot in the doorway of trading and will be at the start of a fantastic journey. So let’s take a look at what you can do and learn in your first week as a trader.
The first thing that you are going to need to do is to work out exactly how much time you have available to learn, it doesn’t matter how much it is, you just need to ensure that you know and have planned times for you to sit down and learn. If you only have one hour a day to learn that is fine, if you have 12 hours to dedicate to your learning then that is great too. Your expectations need to be set against the available time, if you have an hour per day, you won’t be learning as much as someone who has 10 hours per day, but it does not mean that you won’t learn, just not quite as fast, which is perfectly fine. Once you have worked out how long you’ll have and when we can start to look at what you can actually learn and do.
Before we begin to learn, you need to ensure that you have the right environment, even if you spend the first day of your first trading week making things right, it will make a huge difference for the rest of the week and for our future trading. Get a space in your house or flat setup that will be used solely for trading, this area needs to contain all of the things that you need to trade, your trading terminal (computer), some notebooks, a calendar, and anything else that you feel that you may need.
The things that it does not need are distractions, if you can see the TV from your trading station then this needs to be changed, there needs to be nothing that will take your focus away from your trading. When you are starting out it will take away your concentration and will slow down your learning, when you are trading, things can distract from your analysis and trading which can lead to bad trades, so getting this right early can be really beneficial to you as a trader.
On your second day, you are going to need to work out how and where you want to learn. Some people learn best from reading written content, others like to learn from visuals or videos, you need to work out what is best for you. There are resources whatever your preference actually is. There are plenty of really good tutorials on YouTube, there are plenty of sites with completely dedicated learning and coaching sections. Then there are those that require more human input, there are courses and there are mentors out there that can offer a mixture of written and visual learning, as well as some personal input from the trainers. The issue with this is that it often comes with a cost, and at this stage of your learning, you may want to avoid the paid routes before actually knowing whether trading is right for you.
Your main learning priority this week is to learn the basics, to give yourself a foundation for your trading knowledge, there is a lot to learn. In fact, no one can learn everything as it is constantly changing and there is just so much information and variations to everything when it comes to forex and trading. Think about learning what things mean, learn about what pips are, the different currency pair types, what spreads are, those sorts of things. It seems pretty basic and it is, but if you do not know what these things mean then you will never be able to be successful, so as your first learning step, learn the different terms.
At some point in this first week, you will also need to get yourself a broker, there are a lot of them, and we mean a lot of them, you will need to find the one that is right for you. Do a bit of research and talk to others that also trade, while it is important to find the right broker for you, at this point in your career you are not going to be trading any actual money, so just ensure that you find a broker that offers demo accounts that offer similar conditions to what you want as a trader. Open up that demo account as this will be the place where you will be practicing the things that you are learning.
So your demo account is open, you also know some of the basics of trading, now it is time to put those things into practice. There are hundreds of different strategies, knowing what works for you is also important within this first week, as you do not want to put time and effort into learning something that simply won’t work for you. If you are planning to sit in front of the computer for hours then there are strategies for you, if you only have 30 mins a day, then there are strategies for you, once you have worked out what you want to try, we can put something into practice. There is no harm in trying multiple just to find out what is right and what feels most comfortable for you.
As the week progresses, you will be looking more into the strategy and potential risk management techniques to go along with them. You will need to be putting your learning into practice on the demo account that you previously opened up. Take your time to learn the strategy that you are starting out with and ensure that you continue to learn the basics and what is involved in trading.
The first week of your trading career will b a little slow ad you may not feel that you have made much progress, but this is the time where you are building up your base, there is no expectation that you will be an expert trader or that you will ever be trading on a live account, that will come with time. The important thing is that you are building up your understanding of what trading is and how it can be implemented into your life, getting your equipment and environment set up. Don’t push yourself too hard, this is of course the first week of your potentially very long trading career, so don’t feel disheartened if you do not see a lot of progress, stick with it, and over the next weeks and months, you will see the programs start to pick up.
