Tag: Live Trading

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Forex Basics

Everyone Should Know This Before Opening A Live Account

Sometimes we just can’t wait to go live, start trading and earning money. After all, that is why we are here trading in the first place. Going live means that we will be trading with our own money instead of the pretend money that we have when using a demo account. However going live, as […]

Sometimes we just can’t wait to go live, start trading and earning money. After all, that is why we are here trading in the first place. Going live means that we will be trading with our own money instead of the pretend money that we have when using a demo account. However going live, as […]

Sometimes we just can’t wait to go live, start trading and earning money. After all, that is why we are here trading in the first place. Going live means that we will be trading with our own money instead of the pretend money that we have when using a demo account. However going live, as exciting as it is, is not something that you should jump into straight away, this is true whether you are trading manually or using an expert advisor.

There are a lot of big steps and things to consider should you decide to move over to a live account, there are certain things that need to be ready and certain psychological preparations that you will need to ensure that are set up and ready to go. We have made a list of a few different things that you should probably consider before you decide to go live, of course not all of the things are relevant to everyone but some of them certainly will be, so consider them before going live, if you already are live, then consider whether you need to start doing any of these things or even potentially moving back to a demo account should you actually feel you maybe aren’t quite ready to go live.

How long have you been trading?

This one should be quite easy to answer, the standard thing to do is to consider whether or not you have been trading regularly for the past six months. Don’t think about whether it was profitable or not, just that you have been doing it regularly. The definition of regular will vary from person to person so consider it along with your strategy. If your strategy wants you to trade 5 days a week then ensure that you have been trading 5 days a week for six months, if your strategy only requires 3 days a week then ensure you have been doing at least 3 days a week for the past 6 months. This ensures that you have been trading in line with your strategy for a long period of time, building up experience and an understanding of how it works. If you are using an expert advisor (EA) then ensure it has been running well for at least those 6 months before moving towards a new live account.

Have you tried more than one strategy?

Some people join forex and trading, find one strategy, and then stick with it, but how do you know that this strategy that you have picked is actually the right one for you? You don’t until you have tried at least a few different ones. The demo account is the perfect place to do this. If you try one and it goes horribly wrong, at least you have not lost anything. However, if you try something new and it works wonders, there is no harm in taking this one up as your primary trading strategy. Use this demo account to experiment until you have found the strategy that is right for you. Also having experience in multiple different strategies will allow you to adapt much better to the ever-changing markets. So before you go live, ensure that you have tried at least a few different strategies, just so you will be sure that you have the right one and that you are comfortable with the one you are planning to use.

Are your winnings more than your losses?

Something that you want and need to be sure of before you go for a live account is that you are actually trading profitably, if not then at least breaking even on more occasions than not. There is absolutely no sense in going to a live account if you are consistently making losses on your demo account. The exact same thing will happen on a live account but this time you will be losing some of your real money. So ensure that you are making consistent profits, not just a single good day or week, but consistent profits over a long period of time before you decide to put any of your real money on the line.

Do you record and review your trades?

Having some form of recording of your trades, mostly through a trading journal is vital if you want to trade your real money, you should also be using this record and the information that it brings to help analyse the review of your trades. If you are not doing this then start doing it and do it for a while before you go for a live account. This is a fantastic habit to have and one that every trader should be doing. It will allow you to work out why some trades have lost and also why others have won so you can try and alter your strategy or mindset to better suit the ones that are winning. It will also give you a much better overview of the standard of trading. Try to make sure that you are doing this and benefiting from it before you go live.

Is your trading plan based around you?

What we see a lot of is people simply taking someone else’s trading plan and strategy and then simply copying it word for word and trade for trade. This is not a good way of trading and while it may bring you some short-term results. It certainly won’t keep you going long term. If you simply copy what someone else is doing, you most likely do not know exactly why they are doing what they are doing. You need to create a plan that is based on you. You can certainly use another one as a template, but you need to ensure that you get a full understanding of what you are doing and when you need to use it on a demo account for an extended period of time so you can be sure that it works and that it does actually suit you.

So do you think you are ready to go live? If you are not entirely sure yet then there is no issue at all, simply continue with a demo account until you feel ready to go live, there is no harm in spending more time on a demo than others. Remember, you will be trading your own money with any losses being your actual money gone, so ensure that you are fully prepared before you take the major step in your trading career.

Categories
Forex Basics

Ready to Trade Live? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions First

The transition from learning about forex trading to opening your first trading account can be an exciting one, as many beginners are eager to get started and to make money. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, but did you know that opening a trading account too soon is the top mistake that beginners make? If […]

The transition from learning about forex trading to opening your first trading account can be an exciting one, as many beginners are eager to get started and to make money. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, but did you know that opening a trading account too soon is the top mistake that beginners make? If […]

The transition from learning about forex trading to opening your first trading account can be an exciting one, as many beginners are eager to get started and to make money. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, but did you know that opening a trading account too soon is the top mistake that beginners make? If you aren’t ready, you’re likely to lose money, which isn’t reassuring in the beginning. This can even cause some traders to give up as soon as they’ve started because they assume that they just aren’t good at trading. If you think you’re ready to open a trading account, you should ask yourself these 5 questions first to be sure you’re really ready.

Question #1: How Much Do You Know About Trading?

The first thing you need to consider is how much time you spent learning about trading and how much you actually learned. Did you completely grasp each concept you read about? Your knowledge needs to go deeper than beginner material that focuses on terminology, the mechanics of trading, and explanations about what moves the market. You should have moved on to more technical aspects of trading, learned about risk-management, read about trading psychology, different strategies, and more. If you’re not sure where you stand, we’d suggest taking some online quizzes to test your knowledge. If you find that you’re getting a lot of answers wrong, write down the subjects you’re struggling with and use that as a basis for what you need to spend more time on. 

Question #2: Have You Practiced on a Demo Account?

A demo account is a great hands-on tool that allows traders to trade in a live environment without risking real money. Instead, you trade using virtual currency. There are many benefits to using a demo account, as it can help you learn to navigate a trading platform, allows you to test your knowledge, check your results, and even try out different strategies. The best news of all is that it is completely free to open one of these accounts, so there’s no reason not to use one.  

Question #3: Have You Developed Your Trading Plan?

Your trading plan has a lot to do with the whys and how’s of the way you plan to trade. Why will you enter and exit trades? What will you base those decisions on? How much do you plan on risking on each trade? What time of the day will you trade? It’s important to spend time thinking about all these factors before you open a trading plan.

Question #4: What’s Your Trading Strategy?

A trading strategy is different from a trading plan. There are a lot of strategies out there, so it’s important to consider more than one. Scalping is a good example where traders make multiple small trades per day in an attempt to profit from small price movements. Day trading involves opening one or more positions each day and closing them out before the day’s end. Swing trading is essentially the opposite of day trading and involves leaving positions open for days or even weeks at a time. Each strategy offers its own unique advantages and disadvantages.

Question #5: How Much Are You Willing to Risk?

Coming into the trading field, you might have an idea of how much money you’d like to make. However, you should also think about the amount of money you’re willing to lose. With forex trading, it’s better to limit your risk, even if that means making less profits. One large loss or a couple of medium losses could wipe out your account otherwise, so ask yourself if you’d rather lose what you’ve invested or walk away with profits. Experts recommend risking 1-2% of your account balance on a single trade, but this really comes down to your own personal preference.

Categories
Forex Basics

Signs That You Are Ready To Trade Live

Trading on a live account and doing it well is the ultimate goal of many traders, well apart from the dream of owning a private yet of course. There are however a number of different things that you need to consider before you can think about going live, so we have come up with a […]

Trading on a live account and doing it well is the ultimate goal of many traders, well apart from the dream of owning a private yet of course. There are however a number of different things that you need to consider before you can think about going live, so we have come up with a […]

Trading on a live account and doing it well is the ultimate goal of many traders, well apart from the dream of owning a private yet of course. There are however a number of different things that you need to consider before you can think about going live, so we have come up with a number of different signs that point to the fact that you are ready to go live and to trade with your real money in order to start working towards that financial goal that you are looking for.

Are you consistently making a profit?

People often get a little confused when it comes to being profitable and winning. When we talk about being consistently profitable it does not mean that you need to win every trade, in fact, many traders lose more trades than they win but still remain profitable overall thanks to their strategy and risk management plans. We need to make it clear that losing is a major part of trading and is not avoidable at all.

If your strategy is set up correctly then it really doesn’t matter too much if you have lost a trade or two the previous week, it does not mean that your strategy doesn’t work and it certainly does not mean that you are not a good trader. What you should be focusing instead is continuing with your strategy in order to find some new higher probability trading setups for future trades, you should also come up with strategies and risk management plans that can help to minimise the losses that you incur with a losing trade and maximise the profits that you make with a winning trade.

You need to monitor your profitability over a long period of time, most like to say six months, once you have done this and you have remained consistently profitable over that sort of period of time, it can be a great sign and indicator that you may well be ready to go and move onto a live trading account.

Do you have clear risk management plans in place?

If you ask 100 traders what the most important part of trading is, you will probably find that quite a few of them will tell you that it is risk management, and for good reason. Proper risk management is one of the major things that stands between you losing a little with a losing trade or losing your entire account. You need to ensure that before you even think about going onto a live account that you have a clear cut risk management plan that you are consistently following and stick to it at all times. It is relevant that you stick to it, as the moment that you deviate from it, the overall profitability of your trading strategy will shift and this can have a detrimental effect on your overall trading.

So before you consider going live, ensure that you have a set of rules for your risk management set up. Something that is easy for you to follow and also easy for you to stick to, if you are finding it difficult to always follow it, then you may need to think about potentially changing a few things so that you can. If you have this setup and you are able to stick with it, then this may be another sign indicating that you are ready to move onto a live account.

Do you panic when a trade is losing?

Are you able to keep your cool when a trade is going the wrong way? If so then you are on the right track. If you do still panic then you may want to think about how much you are investing and whether or not you are risking and investing a little too much. It’s not an easy thing to do, to keep things cool when you can see your money going down, but it is something that you will need to get used to because it is going to happen a lot. In order to get around this, create a trading plan, a detailed one which includes your risk management plan and this will help you to keep focused and to have a broader view of how things are going, rather than just concentrating on the current trade. Once you are able to stay cool even with those losing trades, that is a sign that you may be ready to go into some live trading.

Do you still take your losses hard?

A loss is never seen as a good thing (unless you can learn from it) but you need to look at how you take these losses. Does it really upset you? Does it make you want to win back the money? Or are you simply able to shrug it off and move onto the next trade? If it is the latter, then you may be ready to move onto some live trading. If you are still struggling with losses you need to find out why, whether you are simply risking too much or for some, trading is just not for them, especially if they are so risk-averse. As soon as you are able to take them well, you can tick this off as a sign that you are ready to progress.

You have found the right broker.

For many, finding the right broker is easy, because they do not have many requirements, but for others, it can be a long process to find the one that is right for you. Before you go live, you need to be sure that you are happy with the one that you are using, afterall you are going to be depositing some of your hard-earned money into it. You need to ensure that you are happy with the spreads, the commissions, and the slippage that may occur. You should also ensure that you have spoken to the support team and that the appropriate deposit and withdrawal methods are available. Only deposit your funds into an account that you are actually happy with, if you have friends already using one that can vouch for it, then that is even better. Just be careful of the not so friendly ones that are just after your money.

So those are a few things to think about, if you are able to tick them all off then it is a good sign that indicates that you may well be ready to head out into the big world of live trading. Remember to take your time, there is no rush to get there, but once you do, stick to what you were doing in the demo account, do not get carried away and you should be able to become a profitable trader.