There are a few places to look for help for free, including YouTube tutorials and, but retail forex has a whole scam industry orbiting it. Unfortunately, most of them are scammers. Fortunately, there are a huge number of people on the internet willing to help inexperienced forex traders get profitable. With my losses mounting, I look for help the only place I know: Google. "As human beings we're pretty crap when it comes to trading, because our brains aren't really geared up for thinking that way." As well as working within the industry, he also trades off his own back and is under no illusions about how hard it is to turn a profit. "It's the age-old problem: people take their profits too quickly and let their losses run too far," says David. I fairly sure I'm going to be one of the vast number of rubes who lose money. I really thought about my first few trades before committing, but I gradually get more impulsive. I gain a few wins, but these are outnumbered by losses and my initial £200 investment slowly starts shrinking. I try different strategies, setting wider stop loss and take profit orders (the reverse of a stop loss – it cashes you out once you hit a certain profit). I brush it off and place more trades in the next few days. It lasts no more than a couple of minutes and I'm already down. The trade starts in the red and gets worse from there. I also set a stop loss order – the safety mechanism that ends the trade if it loses a certain amount of money – then I cross my fingers. With leverage, the minimum I can trade is £1,000, but this only requires a £33 margin, meaning I'm not risking a huge amount of the £200 I have in my account. On Plus500, my leverage is 1:30, meaning that every £1 I trade is magnified by 30 – increasing potential profits and, of course, losses. Because it's not actually possible to trade with sums as low as the ones most consumers can afford to invest, retail forex accounts offer high leverage, which involves borrowing the funds needed to enter the market from a broker. Really, though, it's a coin flip.ĭavid says I should trade as small as possible, which sounds like sensible advice, but leverage means this is not as easy as I first thought. These vary from studying currency charts for patterns and favourable signals that can be used to predict price movement, to the less nerdy option of using news events as indicators. Traders rely on strategies like this to make money from the foreign exchange market. I finally settle on Plus500 for my real account, because the minimum deposit of £200 is as low as I find and I don't have a lot of money to throw away.įor my first real money trade I sell the pound (GBP) against US dollars (USD), thinking that Boris Johnson's failure to get a Brexit deal through Parliament that day should impact the price of the pound. Most give you £10,000 of Monopoly money, so it doesn't really feel like you're risking anything. With David's words of warning ringing in my ears, I shop around the various trading platforms and practice with a few demo accounts. "Definitely don't go in thinking it's easy money." "It's important to go in with realistic expectations and accept that if you've never done it before, chances are you're going to be part of the 75 percent who lose," David Jones, chief market strategist at, tells me. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money. Between 74-89% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. Trading platforms therefore carry warnings like this: CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. Of course, more often than not, consumer traders lose. Get it right and you make a profit, get it wrong and you lose money. This is called a contract for difference (CFD). When you place a trade you predict whether one currency will rise in value (buy) or fall in value (sell) against another. Currencies, such as the pound, US dollars and Japanese yen, are organised into pairs. On the face of it, the trading process is pretty simple.
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