Hey crgarcia Some good points to follow. You can use cash FX just not through a bucket shop but on an ECN will work too. Another good point, are stops, put them in before you put in your trade, CYA or you could get zapped and tapped by the market.
Hey guys - I concur with alot of the points above. Scalping spot forex for 10-15 pips is very difficult, when you consider the spread that has to be overcome. I agree that for short term you really want to be looking at futures - you can always trade CME EuroFX futures instead of the spot eur/usd. There are loads of opportunities in forex with the high level of volatility, and what I think is a market that trades very technically. Good luck!
Thanks for all the tips! I'm gonna purchase one of those lessons that my broker offers. Should be interesting!
GoodPunk: your broker, if it's a forex broker marketmaker wants you to do two things: - Make a lot of trades - Loose in your trades And that's what they will teach you, they have absolutely NO interest in making you a winner. Seriously if you're excited about taking a course by your broker do yourself a favor and don't trade any real money for at least 1 year. You have a lot to learn and your odds to make a bug are currently really bad. I know you probably don't believe me and will start to trade anyway because you're excited about the whole thing and think you'll do it this time. Good Luck. Daniel
Hi all, Goodpunk, like in any business we need to get fooled, make mistakes, learn...but never give up! Spot Vs Futures It is amazing how certain commonsense notions develop along time, without even being questioned for once. Old style bucket shops are very rare, nowadays, industry supervision is not perfect but it has improved a lot over the time. On the other hand if you have marketmakers that may not be reliable in terms of price feeding (and even then, biggest deviation I've ever seen from Reuters data feed is 4 pips, for major liquidity pairs), think about all the same foes in the exchanges: front-running, market timming, illegal after-hours trading (only stocks)...just to name a few. In my view, lambasting market-makers is nothing but a lame excuse for bad performance. I have lost money, a lot for my financial status, but I never blamed it on others. Market makers can have slightly different prices than mainsteam ones, but as much as they can influence at some point, which would be very little (unless you're scalping, which you have been advised not to by many already), they haven't got the power to manipulate trends (I'd be amazed if you could tell me about someone, except nations, who has manipulated EUR/USD prices for a half a day). The learning process Just think about it: If you have discovered a formula that can return over 500% a year, up to 100M USD, would you sell it to everyone for 20 bucks? Of course not, unless you made more money out of teaching it! It is too much to expect a lot from ppl you don't know. Very few ppl are willing to teach their formula. They will, however, teach you the basics, concepts (building blocks for strategy drafting) and provide you with mainstream strategies (as examples for you to observe how patterns were spotted). How the building blocks should integrate to form a successful strategy is up to you and the work you put into it! If you are new or still not comfortable with your strategy there are many brokers who offer you life-time dummy accounts. Even when your seasoned you should use this accounts to test new strategies (not fully mechanical strategies, that can't be written in algorythmic code) and back testing&optimization tools (Mechanic strategies). The flaw in education Most books, instructors...won't teach something that is very important: general method for implementing a successful strategy and what Rob Booker calls "the miracle of discipline") I regret that the book "Adventures of currency trader" was not my first introduction to fx, it is boring if you know something about the business, but excellent if you don't know much. It captures so much of what trading fx is all about, with a good story to make sense of how everything comes to fruit in a trader's life and carreer. This book provides very good general insight into how to effectively create, test ad implement a trading strategy (method). Also, one of the things that improved most my trading was designing and developing my daily routine for scanning oportunities and avoiding threats ("the miracle of discipline"). Hope it helped! Cya!
Only use 10% of the amount of $ you initially planned on starting with - and oanda is probably the best starting broker.