Managing your money by managing your risk

amantrader2 · Newbie Joined: Apr 08, 2011 Posts: 4

Trading the Forex market can be profitable, however, it can be just as costly without the proper management over your capital. Generally with each trade, stop losses are placed to ensure that a trade that goes against you does not completely devour your invested capital.

A stop loss is a preset target where your trade will close out. Setting proper stop losses are important to ensure that your losses are minimized. For traders that don’t want to sit in front of their computer every minute they have positions opened, stop losses are your best friend.

Setting the amount you are willing to lose per trade is subjective. Generally, risk levels are set at between 1% and 5% of your trading accounts total balance. This means at a risk level of 5%, you can place 20 losing trades before you lose all your funds. If you find that you often lose 100% of your funds, you may wish to back track on your strategy.

Say for example, you deposited an initial amount of $1,000. To risk 2% per trade would be to set a stop loss which will close the trade for you should a single trade lose $20 ($1,000 x 2% = $20).

Make sure that you manage your risk, as this is one of the pivotal aspects in long-term trading success.

Trading Psychology
Managing your emotions

Quite often, the greatest opponent you have while trading is not the market but yourself. When trading, greed and fear often limits the potential returns from profiting trades and on the opposite side of the spectrum can result in greater losses than necessary or turn potentially profitable trades in to losing trades.

All traders (successful and unsuccessful) can attest to holding on to losing trades for far too long for no other reason than the “hope” that they become positive again. This is otherwise known as being too greedy.

Alternatively, the fear of taking profits too early or closing at a small loss when they can potentially be profitable is also another emotional response that needs to be adjusted. Good traders strictly follow a complete trading plan that incorporates money and risk management, entry, exit rules and do not let emotions influence their trading.

When do I move from demo to a live account?

The important move to using a live trading account rather than a demo trading account is a question that is often asked by many new traders. Most important is that you have a strategy in place, once you have become comfortable with a strategy or a few strategies that you have tried, you are encouraged to move to a live trading account.

As great as demo accounts and “play money” is for learning, all too often an emotional detachment is developed to the trading loses with play funds and you will never develop the keen senses to close out losing trades. It’s all too often that serial demo users lose their account balance and continue to deposit remarkable sized amounts of funds. In reality, $100,000 is very hard to replace for most people.

Once you feel you have a comfortable grasp of strategy, control over your emotional misgivings to trading, you can begin your live trading with read funds and expect real returns in profit.
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