Why is it crucial to have a forex mentor and a forex community when trading the currency market?

There are several ways in which you can learn and practice trading forex. You can learn it yourself, you can take a course from a brokerage firm, you can get a mentor, or you can join a community built around a mentor. I have tried all four ways, and in this article I will share some of my experience and suggest what is the quickest and best way.

First thing I did, was to learn it myself. When I first started trading forex, I decided that there is so much free information on the internet, so it should be very simple to just find some sources of good training material, freely use it, practice it for a while until I am sure I get it right, and then I can start trading for real. The problem was that I did not manage to really understand risk. I believe this caused me to lose my first account real fast. When I started I hardly understood what a lot was, what contract size really meant, and what I was actually doing when I entered a trade on the market. I didn’t know how to calculate the size of a trade I was taking, and to realize how much do I risk each trade. It is now clear to me that you need to absolutely understand these concepts to achieve any sort of success in trading and that you shouldn’t even think of a live account unless you perfectly know what are lot, risk, bid/ask, and several more important concepts. If you cannot calculate the lot size you need to trade to risk a two percent of your equity on an X pip stop loss on the EUR/USD in your account with Y equity, don’t trade it!!

The next thing I did was to take a free course from a brokerage firm. I believed in what people in that brokerage firm told me without seeing true evidence of their claims. Actually brokerage firms have one major incentive: You should join them as fast as possible, deposit as much money as you can, trade it with as much high risk as possible, and never withdraw the money until you have lost it all. Why should they teach you to really make profit and take their money? Actually, why a person who knows to profit from the forex market will really work as an employee in a brokerage firm? As a result of that course I had a too high profit expectancy. I believed many people were achieving these high results when in reality absolutely no one was doing so consistently. Check online to see how many traders you can find with 3 year long online success accessible via their read-only investor access and verified with live statements, and you’ll get an idea of how most of these traders are really doing.

The next step for me was to get me a mentor. Mentorship is very important for your success in trading because here you get a shortcut of how to really do it, from someone who has done his failures already, learned from them and practiced until he turned out to be a successful trader. By a mentor, I mean to someone who can show you a constant success in trading forex for a long period of time. Without it you are very prone to believing hypes and extremely unaware of what you really need to do to achieve success. To tell you the truth, I believe it is impossible to start trading successfully when you don’t know anyone who has actually done this who can show you how to do this. Only when I got myself a good mentor who was successful by himself, I started to see fruits from my efforts in forex trading.

The next thing that happened was that a forex community was built around my forex mentor. I never meant for this to happen – it just did. At first I was skeptical and thought this would divide my mentor’s attention among all and I will not benefit from it. However something amazing has happened: With many new members and new ideas joining, it became a great way to share ideas, ask basic questions and develop software and solutions for trading, statistical analysis, etc. Perhaps the greatest thing about the community was that its discussions have always been argumentative in nature and the person who has the evidence to back up their point convinces others through the principles of logic. This has contributed a lot to our success, to minimizing risk and to having a confidence in our systems as well as in us as professional forex traders. If you like to learn more about my mentor and community, check on www.powertrendsystem.info

Michael B. Moore has extensive experience in computer programming, in trading psychology and in currency trading. He has a BA degree in Computer Sciences and in Psychology, and MBA in managing computer systems. He served many years in the high tech industry with a last position as platform development manager on a startup firm. He has been specializing in masses behavior on markets, and in auto-trading forex market using EA robots.

More information in http://www.powertrendsystem.info/