How to Become a Successful Forex Trader in 2019: The Ultimate Guide

Currency trading is a pretty complicated matter. What makes is so uneasy to grasp is the amount of information you need to gather and consider before you jump into trading itself. Depending on the trader’s personal learning speed and style it may take up anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months before they get a solid picture of the process. The good news here is that there are limitless options when it comes to the ways to learn online Forex trading. For example, you can start by taking an introductory course that will cover most of the things you will need to start. Additionally, it is always a great idea to do some of your own research and gather the info from sources like blogs, books, podcasts, videos on YouTube and so on. It is important to remember, that even though you want to start making money as soon as possible, the more time you take on the learning stage the higher will be the chance for your success. Skipping over the studying step leads many new traders to failure. That is why every successful trader knows that knowledge is a good base for a trading journey disregarding of trading style or strategy. As you power through, use these tips to help you on the learning stage:

• Forex is not gambling and your luck has nothing to do with the process of trading. The more you understand about the process, the better you results are going to be.
• Utilize as many tools and sources as possible to fit your personal schedule and learning style: whether it is a 15 minute video lesson or a book that requires 10 hours of reading - do what works best for you.
• Consider using a demo account as an educational tool. You will learn how to open a Forex demo account and what are the benefits of using it later in the guide.

Another great way of how to learn online Forex trading and find all necessary educational materials gathered together is to choose to go with a broker who provides clients with an opportunity to perfect their trading skills for free. Which brings us to the next section: what Forex broker should you go with and why.

In case you are completely new to the fascinating world of online currency trading, you might not know what is it exactly that Forex brokers do that makes them so important. The definition of a broker is a person or a company who performs a number of transactions on the market. More often than not these transactions can be summed up as sales and purchases. In case of Forex brokers can be referred to as tarder’s guides to the market. Their job is to gain you as their client access to the market and assist you throughout the trading process.
The way this works is: you place an order for a trade through the trading terminal on specific conditions, and the broker takes it from there by filling that order. Depending on how loaded the market is at the moment and on your individual agreement with the broker this process usually takes from several seconds to anywhere up to a minute. The speed is a very important factor in this case, since the market can change at any moment.
If you are wondering: can I trade Forex without a broker, you can. However, this is not going to be the same kind of trading we are talking about here. If you wish to trade without a broker you need to take a certain amount of physical money and head to the nearest currency exchange shop or a bank. Then you will swap the amount you brought for its equivalent in foreign currency. From there you might need to wait anywhere from 10 minutes up to a few hours before the exchange joint updates their rates. And then repeat the operation described above, while hopefully making a profit. But to trade from the comfort of your own home or office and get the currency price value updates the moment they take place, you will need to settle with a broker. To answer your question of what Forex broker should I use, here are a few criteria you can use to perform a broker reliability check or as we like to call it - how to check a Forex broker:

• A broker you go with has to be trustworthy. In most cases this can be established by the number of years the particular company spent at the market. Basically, try to avoid any company that started operating within the last two years - this is the most common red flag for a scam.
• The broker should not cost you too much. All brokers operate by charging traders with a fixed commission they agreed upon. What is commission in Forex trading? It is simply a certain percentage of the trade amount charged as a transaction fee. Another way the broker might charge you is a spread, which can be described as a difference between buy and sell values. Pay close attention to how much the broker will be charging your for trading to make the smart choice.
• Another way to distinguish a good broker is to check whether or not they provide an opportunity to learn and practice trading for free. The common misconception is that all brokers want traders to lose. This is not true since the more money you make by trading, the more money the broker makes. So it is quite obvious that brokers who are not there to scam will provide traders with a chance to improve their trading skills and become more successful.
• Apart from knowledge, the big role in trader’s professional arsenal is played by the tools they are using. The center tool is of course the trading platform and the job of the broker in this case is to provide the most recent software updates in a timely manner, as well as have a comprehensive user manual available for download.
• Last but not least point in the broker search is a bit technical. Turn you attention to the account types teh broker offers as well as which channels are used to deposit and withdraw funds. This should give you a clear picture about how organized the selected broker is and how many services they are offering to the clients.

As a pleasant bonus, any of the top Forex brokers will always have a professional customer support team. This is important for both beginner traders as well as for the professionals. Having your technical issue solved quickly and your trading related question answered can go a long way in the trader’s personal success. As you start communicating with the broker, note how much time does it take them to get back to you and how efficiently they are dealing with the questions you need answered.
One of the Forex features we have mentioned a couple of times at this point and you might be wondering about is the ability to practice your trading skills in a demo account. In the next section we are going to figure out what are the perks of starting your trading journey by getting the hang of it in demo mode first.

A Forex demonstration account is a little twin brother of a live account. Demo mode mimics all of the key functions of a real account including they live feed of price values updates. This means that after you have taken your time and studied most of the crucial trading aspects you can take an opportunity to apply your knowledge in simulation and see if you get things right.

To open a demo account in Forex all you need to do is to go to your broker’s website and select the proper tab. You will then need to fill in some information about yourself as well as provide an ID, just like you would during the actual account opening. The broker will provide you with all the instructions and walk you through the set up in needed. After this gets done, it is time for you to start practicing. Here are some suggestions and techniques you might want to consider while exploring the Forex demo account:

• Start by digging around the interface and find every key and menu you might need during trading. Completing this stage in demo mode will save you some precious time when you will be ready to start trading for real. A good way to do this is by using a trading platform manual and trying out some of the basis key sequences described in there.
• Learn about various trading strategies and test them out in demo. To better understand what is a Forex strategy, picture it as a precise step-by-step action plan designed to help you make profit. There are a lot of strategies out there that meet the needs and abilities of all kinds of traders. Eventually, you might want to come up with your own personal Forex trading method that will work perfectly for you. And the demo mode is a great place to implement theory in action and see how things will play out.
• Take your time and play around as much as you need to. By experimenting with different techniques and combinations you allow yourself to some room for healthy mistakes. In demo mode they won’t cost you a single penny so it is the best place to learn from your own little setbacks. Of course, you can do the same during the real live trading but those will hurt your budget harder.
• After you have had you fun and explored take a couple more serious practice days and treat your demo account as if it were a real one. This will help you get into a proper state of mind and prepare yourself for the upcoming challenges. Some of the ways to implement this is to trade only a portion of your account, follow just a few of the selected trading strategies, analyze the setbacks and learn from them.
• A demo account in Forex is free with the right broker and does not require any real investments. Of course, this will also mean that no matter how much money you make in demo, you will not be able to withdraw them, but the experience you gain in the process can be considered priceless.

For now we are done with the theory and can move on to more physical and technical aspects of how to become a successful Forex trader. Coming up next are the software tools that are absolutely necessary for a productive trading experience.

What tools do you need for productive Forex trading

As we briefly mentioned above the critical tool for any tartar is the trading terminal. This is a piece of software that can be installed to a computer, tablet or smartphone, which allows traders to access the market, open and close trades, analyze the statistics and set up automatic features. The most popular trading platform right now is Metatrader 4 also known as MT4. Metatrader deserved its popularity due to the unique ability to combine highly sophisticated programming with an extremely useful interface. For the user it means that they can take advantage of numerous features without having to be a computer genius.

With that said, it is fair to point out that MT4 will still require some adjustment time as it does not look like a minimalistic Google homepage. But with the right approach and an easy to read Metatrader 4 user guide PDF in your hands, you will have to issue mastering this complex program. The best advice on how to use Metatrader 4 tutorial is to read it fully without skipping over the parts that might seem boring. The total reading time will not exceed two hours in total, but all of the information you will come across will prove itself useful at some point during trading.

To find out more on how to download Metatrader 4 as well as how to update MT4 platform, go to your broker’s site and follow the instructions. The most important part during the installment is the settings you will need to do once the software downloaded to your computer. Pay very close attention to the instructions given in the tutorial or provided separately by your broker. Some of the information you need to fill correctly is the server name for your broker company, by getting it wrong you simply will cut yourself from accessing the market altogether.

One of the most frequently asked questions about the platform is how to change the timezone in Metatrader 4. The answer is very simple: you cannot do it. The time zone in the terminal reflects the location of your broker and cannot be altered. But as long as you go with an internationally available broker company, the time will most likely be around the UK’s GMT+1 zone which is great for catching both Western and Eastern active market times. To start trading using the MT4 platform you need to start by opening a live Forex account. This brings us to the next exciting part of our guide: what is a Forex account and how to open one.

What is a Forex account and how to open one

Before you learn how to open a live account in Forex, you should start by getting to know what is a Forex account and how does it work. A trading account is your personal space on the broker’s portal where you can deposit and withdraw money, change passwords and settings, learn about the news in the world of trading and so on. Opening an account is easy but there is one thing you need to do first. And that is to decide what type of account you are planning to open.

The accounts vary in sizes that usually reflect in their name: micro account, mini account, standard account etc. Based on the size of the account the tarder will have access to a different set of features. The first main difference is the amount of the required initial deposit: the bigger the account size the higher amount you will need to invest. Another drastic distinction is the size of the spread that will be charged to the trader. In smaller accounts like micro and mini the spread is up to five times higher than in there sizely counterparts.

Additionally, based on the type of account you open you will have an opportunity to trade different lot sizes. Lot in trading is the amount of currency units you can trade at once. Minimum lot sizes grow in accordance with the account size. Needless to say, that the higher the lot size the bigger is going to be the potential profit. That is why while it is a good idea for beginners to start with micro and mini accounts, it is also wise to move on to at least a standard type later in the process.

As you have figured out what account type fits your resources and preferences go ahead an open a live Forex trading account with your broker. This will not take too much time as long as you have everything ready. This will include a copy of your most recent ID which is required to be submitted by anyone who wants to start trading currency online. After you provide the broker with all the necessary details you will be given the login credentials for the trading platform and ready to start trading. Remember to keep the password to yourself and change it frequently, since your Forex account is the direct access to any income you accumulate through trading.

We have talked quite a bit about becoming a successful trader through hard work and practice. However, there is also a way to become a Forex trader without having to trade on your own. This can be done with the help of advanced trading robots also referred to expert advisors. The following segment will tell you all you need to know about trading using the automated Forex software.

For starters, you need to know what are these expert advisors (EA for short) and how can assist you in being a trader without having to trade. An expert advisor is automated trading software designed to assist traders with various market related duties. They operate by gathering all the relevant data about the situation at the currency exchange market, analyze it to develop foolproof trading strategies and then implement those strategies by trading on behalf of their users. So in a nutshell, by installing an EA all you need to do is make an initial investment and tell the robot about your preferences. Then you can either sit back and observe the program run and trade on your behalf, or leave it alone and go on with your day without concerning yourself about the Forex behaviour.

Since using the automated trading software is a great way of how to make money on online Forex trading without spending hours of your time mastering the complex skills of currency trading, it became popular among both beginner traders and market experts. It is a huge time saver for those who have a day job or a family to watch after. Plus, it takes a great deal of stress caused by at times chaotic Forex environment. In case this is a scenario you think you might want to implement you will need to complete a few steps of how to run an expert advisor on MT4. But before you do that, you should first decide which trading robot you want to use. There are dozens of options available at the market so the selection can be a little tricky. Use the following criteria to evaluate the best automated Forex software for your needs:

• Effective Forex trading robot should not be expensive. In the beginning of your journey as a trader, no matter if you are trading manually (on your own) or automatically (using a robot), you will have enough financial aspects to go over. Paying for installing software does not need to be one of your expenses. So the robot you choose to partner with has to be really cheap or ideally free of charge.
• Of course the expert advisor needs to be extremely smart in order to manipulate great amounts of data and process them with high quality results. But this does not mean that they are going to be hard to use. As we already know, the famous trading platform Metatrader 4 manages to combine high technology with amazing usability, so a good trading robot needs to do the same.
• A huge advantage of some trading robots above others is an artificial intelligence unit. The AI gives the software an opportunity to develop itself and become more sophisticated with every trade and every experience. It is not a secret that the robots still have setbacks from time to time, but a good robot will learn from the mistake and ensure to perfect the strategy in order to avoid a similar situation in the future.
• The automated expert advisor has to be fast. One of the reasons professional traders tend to use the assistance of EAs is the processing speed of market data. For a human trader performing technical analysis for one currency pair can take up anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how much experience they have and which support tools they are using. But expert advisor is a computer program which gives it an opportunity to analyze several currency pairs in a matter of seconds. This gives the user an advantage of seizing the right opportunities right when they occur, while manual traders are still in the process of detecting those opportunities.
• In case the user has his own trading style and preferences, the robot should provide an option to adjust its settings to mimic them. This way the expert traders can fully trust their digital assistants, knowing that they are behaving in the same way the traders themselves would.

And if you are still having trouble deciding which expert advisor you should go with, simply ask your broker if they are partnering up with an existing robot. The rule of thumb here is that trustworthy brokers tend to work with reliable expert advisors, so once you make a decision to switch to automated trading simply reach out to your broker to find out what solution they can offer.

As you now know what is a Forex trading robot, you can easily make out if that is the right way to go for you. And if it is not, you can always continue on embracing manual trading and be responsible for your own decisions and trades. And this brings us to our last but also to the most important portion of this guide: everything you need to know about Forex analysis to be a successful trader.

Where to learn Forex analysis

All that you have learnt from above can be broken down into step-by-step sequences. Same goes for the Forex market analysis. The difference here is that analysis in Forex is an ongoing process that sometimes needs to take place a few times during one day. So let’s talk about what you need to learn Forex analysis.

There are two main types of currency exchange market analysis: technical and fundamental. Technical analysis focuses on numerical data gathered from drawing various types of statistics from the market charts. And the fundamental analysis is the way of interpreting the political, economical and social events around the world towards the situation on the foreign currency market. More than a half of traders tend to stick with technical analysis because it is much more systematized. As long as you know basic math and have the right tools at your disposal you can do your own technical analysis. Plus, due to this type of analyzing data being mathematical it can also be trusted to automated trading software or one of the top Forex analysis sites.

To learn Forex technical analysis you need to do some preparation first. Try the following to have an understanding of how to attempt Forex technical analysis by yourself:

1. Get familiar with various technical analysis strategies and approaches. For starters, there are three main ways the market chart can look like: candlesticks, bars and lines. Depending on which one you are working with the information for analysis will be displayed differently. Then every technical analysis approach focuses on different factors. For example, one way to define a trend in the market is by comparing the risk and return rates. Or you could oversee the average values throughout a selected time period and build your future actions based on them.
2. Gather the right tools for the type of analysis you want to run. The analysis supporting tools are primarily trading platform indicators. In Metatrader 4 there are over 50 various indicators designed to calculate specific values. There are two kinds of indicators: the leading ones, which try to predict the upcoming changes by identifying possible trends and the lagging ones, that signal when a trend or a reversal has already started. Some of the popular indicators are Moving Average, MACD and RSI.
3. Always keep track of the analysis you perform. The most convenient way to do it is by using the Excel sheets with the right set of add ons and formulas up your sleeve. Note, that Google Sheets will not work as well due to lacking the capacity to implement a lot of important formulas. By having an archive of all your previous analysis results you will build a very full picture of your chosen currency pair’s behaviour throughout your trading journey and will be able to place successful trades using this information.

Once you master technical analysis you can attempt combining it with the data from the fundamental analysis. Doing your own fundamental analysis can be slightly harder than technical one because of its nature. Fundamental analysis can be referred to as trading on the news, and news come out every minute of every day. On top of that, most news sources are highly subjective and tend to imply their individual opinions and visions on the reports. That is why it can be challenging to build a comprehensive picture of a complete fundamental analysis. But there are a couple things you can do to make the process of trading on the news a little easier:

• Stick with one currency pair. This will limit the amount of information you will need to gather in order to perform and analysis. For example if you are analyzing the USD/GBP pair, you only need to read up on the affairs that took place in the United States and in Great Britain. Of course, given the political complexity of these two governments the information might still add up into a decent pile, but it is still better than trying to figure out the political situation across the entire planet.
• When in doubt - do not rush with the decision making. Some events that occur in the political scene can be obvious, like a war or an election. And then the others can have multiple possible outcomes. In case you do not know for sure what tardes you should place based on the current news best solution is not to place any. Better safe than sorry applies well to this case.
• Get a second opinion whenever possible. Whether you are doing fundamental analysis with your friend or coworker, or double check with famous analytical media channels, it never hurts to compare your analysis results with someone else’s. This can be helpful in case your news source might have misinterpreted the info and that corrupted your assumption.

And as always you can turn to one of the trusted sources to provide you with ready to use today Forex market analysis. Your broker will most likely have a fundamental analysis blog segment where a market expert will break down the news for the most popular currency pairs. Additionally, this analysis can come with specific suggestions and directions for the upcoming trading day. It is a great solution for traders who like the idea of trading on news but lack experience to do their own fundamental analysis.

Start Forex trading today

Now that you have a solid understanding of what is Forex and how does it work it is time to take some action and start the process of becoming a successful currency trader. Some final tips to help you keep yourself on the right track: Learn new information and practice your trading skills as much as you need, being a true professional means to constantly keep growing and developing.

• Always have a plan. Set up clear goals and the path to achieve them. Try to avoid guessing or “following your heart” when it comes to trading because due to the escalated stress level these feelings can deceive you.
• Do not hesitate to get assistance from your broker or from an additional software when you feel like lacking time or knowledge to conquer the next obstacle.
• Keep calm and practice learning from setbacks. Nobody becomes a successful trader overnight, it will take some time before you achieve some noteworthy results. Focus on the big picture and come up with a few ways to calm yourself during trading.

Go ahead and start your Forex trader journey today by going through the steps we discussed. Feel free to be creative and come up with your own solutions for common issues. Sky's the limit and anything is possible as long as you have the right mindset!

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