Forex/futures trading and any form of short term day trading has incredible demands on your psyche. I personally had to give up on it after a year to pursue further self development in other areas of my life. I am still trading but mostly from a more strategic long term perspective. There where many times I could scalp myself to 20 percent return in a day. Only to slowly give back all the profits back in a period of a few weeks. i am talking about a capital base of half a years salary, so it was not play money. I was definitely over trading. But, how do you stop when the going is good. How do you continue when nothing is happening? Too many mind games. Watch yourself when you put real money in. Make sure you don't turn into a forex zombie trying to trade all the market sessions. Learn the mechanics of trading and manage risks. These lessons will be transferable to any financial product you may wish to trade in the future. Trading discretionary, with increasing frequency, provides psychological stimuli very similar to gambling. Be careful.
"Be careful." Its the magic word that traders should be always keep in mind. Thanks for sharing your insight xandman. I've learn from it. Hope to hear more from you.
Definitely, very important you demo trade before going real! It helps you test out all you have learned.
Practise on the demo to get the mechanics right. To learn trading, go with a small funded account. Taking it more seriously because you have money on the line gives an edge in learning. If you need to psych yourself up over small money, find out what works for you. For me, I think of it as beer money, so losing a weekends beer money is something I would not want. And if beer money is too small, just ask yourself if you would buy those many beers for a stranger. No? Then don't buy those beers for the strangers in the market. Anytime I want to try something new, I just switch to small size and trade it.
Yes, of course. If you want to be a good trader in the market then you would need to trade demo for practice, it give us the picture and experience of how to trade with live account. Just look into a better broker that offer demo and the one you can start trading micro account with.
For FX try Oanda. I believe you do not need an account for the demo. In any case basic trading principles are not instrument specific so you can learn with FX and use elsewhere. Edit: I mean funded account, you do open the demo account and with that you also have access to a series of webinars, though not the premium material which is only for those with funded accounts. But you do learn the basics from what they give you.