Have you ever thought of giving it all up and turning your back away from forex trading? It probably happens to everybody. The obvious reason why you want to quit trading is most likely due to huge losses along with being scammed by marketers promising rags to riches within the end of the week. You have tried just about everything and nothing seems to work. Quitting seems like the only reasonable choice to make. However, more often than not, this is the exact period where you learn some of the most important lessons as a forex trader.
The forex market is the largest and most accessible financial market in the world, but although there are many forex investors, few are truly successful ones. Many traders fail for the same reasons that investors fail in other asset classes. In addition, the extreme amount of leverage - the use of borrowed capital to increase the potential return of investments - provided by the market, and the relatively small amounts of margin required when trading currencies, deny traders the opportunity to make numerous low-risk mistakes.
Most new traders will blow up the first account or two before they either quit the game or start to take things more seriously. A good way to approach this is by thinking of the initial losses as a fee for learning the most important lessons when trading the markets. If you quit the game after the first account is back down to zero you have paid an expensive lesson for nothing. This is exactly the point where you should give the market and your own ability a second chance.
Trading is no different than any other endeavor in life – it takes time to become good at it. Before you quit ask yourself what went wrong? Was it the strategy, a lack of one, over-leveraging, over trading, not sticking to a trading plan, changing strategies too often? Perhaps it was a lack of education or simply unrealistic expectations? Once the source of failure is identified you can take steps to correct past mistakes and make improvements.
When you feel frustrated and ready to give up on trading, just remember that it’s not the ‘end of the world’. Take a big step back and remove yourself from live trading for a while to get back on track. Reassess your trading method and make sure you like the method and it’s not overly-complicated and that it makes sense to you. All you need is a method that gives you an edge that provides slightly more than a 50/50 chance over series of trades, you don’t need the ‘Holy-Grail’ of indicator-infused perfection.
