FOREX How To

About

My reasons for setting up this website are two-fold:

  1. Learn more about FOREX so that I can make some money via trading on the foreign currency exchange markets.
  2. Provide a beginner friendly learning resource for others that are new to FOREX.

A little bit of background about me and my life thus far:

  • I'm engaged to be married, 28 (at least I was when I wrote this, born in '77) and I live in Sydney, Australia.
  • My current income is generated by being a self employed computer programmer.
  • I have studied at university though dropped out with a couple of semesters to go.

The way I found out about currency trading as a suitable way of making money for the average joe was that my sisters new ex boyfriend James happens to be a FOREX trader. I was amazed that you didn't need to have millions and millions of dollars in funds to make money by trading currencies. I was always under the impression that because of the tiny movements that you would need to have a LOT of money to be able to turn a profit of more than a few dollars.

A few months back I did a bit of research into it and found that FOREX can indeed be a great way to make some very nice money (also a great way to lose money if you aren't careful, read below). I opened a free practice account at a website that had a Java based trading application and believe it or not I actually made some pretend money!!!

Then I became distracted by work related things and put my FOREX plans on the back burner for a while.

Well I'm going to get back into it and look at a few other free FOREX trading sites/applications before I dish out any of my $. My plan of attack is to first do some more practice with the free practice accounts that most of the FOREX brokers provide. Then when I'm consistently turning a profit I will open a mini account, from what I can understand about these mini accounts, they are the ideal way to dabble in FOREX without losing your money very quickly. You put up around USD$300 and then you can leverage this to trade in lots of $10,000 instead of lots of $100,000 obviously the profits when you leverage 100k is 10 times the leverage of 10k, though the same goes for losses, so while I probably won't make a fortune with a mini account I'm hopeful that I can learn a bit about FOREX and develop some good trading strategies.

From what I've been able to acertain there are two trading techniques:

  1. Technical Analysis, this is all about the numbers, you analyse the numbers and make your trades based on the price, volume etc. This is the method that I plan to use.
  2. Fundamental Analysis, this is the kind of thing that economics students might excel in. It involves looking at economic indicators for countries and trading in accordance with expectations. Since I don't have the faintest idea about economics I probably won't dabble much in this.

Being a computer programmer I aim to look for patterns that I can exploit. When I was playing with my practice acount a few months back I thought I was onto quite an interesting trend which involved the time differences between Europe and the USA, if my analysis shows that this trend is consistent then I will post a little more about it.

Apologies for the ugliness of the site, I will make it look better soon! 

Related

  1. My Trading History #1
  2. I am a chicken
  3. Aussie Dollar and Interest Rates
  4. Lack of Updates
  5. I think I did it correctly

Comments about: About

Archives

» Nov 2006

» Oct 2006

» Sep 2006

» Jul 2006

» Jun 2006

» May 2006

» Apr 2006

» Mar 2006

» Feb 2006

» Jan 2006

» Dec 2005

Links

» Forex Blog

» Forex Project

» Oanda

» FOREX @ Investopedia

» Baby Pips

» Trading Software

» Forex Bastards

» Ernest Chan