Reason 1 - Non Stop Trading! The FOREX market can, apart from a brief period over the weekend, be traded on 24 hours a day unlike the stock and futures markets which are open Monday to Friday between 9.30am and 4pm E.S.T in North America.

Reason 2 - Commission free. Did you aware that every stock transaction could be costing you as much $30? With FOREX the brokers will just take the difference between the asking and the bid prices instead of charging you a commission.

Reason 3 - Orders instantly fulfilled. When trading stocks or futures it's common to have a delay between placing the order and having it filled, which could seriously affect the amount of money you get back. With such a high volume of transactions taking place on the FOREX market you can have your order filled almost instantaneously - however during especially volatile periods there may be minor delays.

Reason 4 - Eliminate the middlemen. With no intermediary required the FOREX trader can buy or sell direct thereby making the trading process quicker and cheaper.

Getting Started in Forex Trading Strategies
(Getting Started In.....)

Reason 5 - No biased influence. Everyone has an opinion as to what you should do when your stocks go into decline.

Generally it's buy when they are falling as they will go back up again, but have you noticed that the people giving the advice generally have a vested interest?

The Forex market is not driven by rumour or speculation from any interested parties - it is driven solely by the economy of the country for that particular currency.

Reason 6 - Fewer choices involved. Did you know that the NASDAQ and NYSE alone have over 8,000 stocks available for trading? If, on the other hand, you trade on the FOREX markets you will have a few dozen currencies, but most people just focus on four key currencies - making the daily task of analyzing your options far easier.

Reason 7 - Cut your risk. Margin limits have to be set by FOREX traders because a margin call is issued should the margin amount required exceed the capital available in your account.

What does that mean for you? It means that the most you can possibly lose is whatever you have in your account - so you will always know your potential liability.

Anyone doing a search on 'Forex Trading Systems' is likely to be overwhelmed by the number of results returned, so why take the time and spend the money on an off the shelf package when you can just as easily create your own system?

Your forex trading system will need to be able to detect trends early to prevent you from being caught out in volatile markets.

And it's possible to develop a system that works the majority of the time, but remember no system will be 100% accurate.

This is what you need consider when creating your system:

1) What's your trading style? Are you happy to sit for hours watching for trends to develop, or do you prefer long trends? When starting out the long trends are the easiest to follow as the trends are more noticeable which also means you have more time to trade out if you need to.

2) Know your indicators. Familiarize yourself with the key indicators as they will show you developing trends. One of the simplest indicators to use is the fast and slow moving averages. All you have to do is wait for the fast moving average to cross the slow moving average - going in either direction.

The Forex Trading Course:
A Self-Study Guide To Becoming a Successful Currency Trader
(Wiley Trading)

3) Managing risk. Be aware that you will lose money at some stage, no matter how good your Forex system is. Now, the best way to reduce your risk is to use stop-losses on all trades and set them to a level you feel comfortable with, however, if you set the levels too low, you may exit your positions before you need to.

4) Knowing when to exit. How do you know when it's best exit a trade? One of the simplest techniques to use is the 'trailing stops' method. All you have to do is update your stop-losses as the value of your position increases.

Alternatively, set yourself a target and exit once it has been reached. Whichever technique works for you stick with it as changing will cause confusion and potential losses.

5) Test out your system. Once you have decided on your entry and exit strategies you will need to find some historical data for the currency you will be trading. When you have the data apply your system to it and write down the results.

Did your system work as planned? Would you have made a profit and avoided any major losses? Take some time to perfect your system and then move on to live data via a demo account.

When you are completely confident with your system you may want to try it out with a live account - but make sure you are confident that it works first and never risk more money than you can afford to lose.

Whenever a friend or business associate calls me I often say "I am pimpin with the Pips." The real question to most of you who are not familiar with Pips is "What in the world are pips?"


The best way to describe a pip is take a number like 1.4563 which is the smallest price change that a given exchange rate can make. Since most major currency pairs are priced to four decimal places, the smallest change is that of the last decimal point - for most pairs this is the equivalent of 1/100th of one percent, or one basis point. (investopedia.com)


In other words the smallest move a currency pair can make is 0.0001. The one (1) would be what we call a pip. Pips can be traded in various lot sizes and are always left up to the investor or the risk that the investor is willing to take.


In other words lets say you want to do one (1) full lot which represents $10 US Dollars. Everytime you made a trade you would be putting $10 up for risk. If you made 10 pips you would earn $100 US Dollars. Of course if you lost 10 pips you would lose 10 US Dollars. The best website I have found on the internet that explains this is called www.babypips.com Aside from this Squidoo Page and others like it you will be hard pressed to find a better resource.


Here's to mo pips to you.