Forex Trading is Nothing Like the Movies
Many people first develop an interest in forex and stock trading after watching movies such as Wall Street and Rogue Trader because they are drawn to the whole lifestyle that these movies portray.
However if you ultimately decide to work for yourself and try to make your fortune from day trading, you will quickly discover that the reality is a lot different.
There is no champagne lifestyle at all. You will generally be working from your bedroom or your living room in your pyjamas and the only person you are likely to talk to during the day is the postman.
It is not that easy to make money from forex trading either, particularly when you are trading with your own money instead of a large financial institution’s money.
Profitable Forex Trading
The reality is that forex trading should not be exciting and exhilarating. If you were to spend a day watching a profitable forex trader, you will find that their days are tedious and repetitive.
In many ways it becomes like a regular job because these successful traders will use the same strategies and trade the same patterns every single day.
They don’t play around with different strategies or get excited when they enter a trade. They simply use a tried and tested strategy, and then just sit around waiting for the perfect set-ups to occur.
This will often involve sitting around for hours and hours, and there may even be days when they don’t enter any trades at all, in which case they may have wasted a whole day, but this is all part of trading.
So if you are someone who has a low boredom threshold and wouldn’t really enjoy staring at a computer screen all day, then forex trading may not be the best profession for you.
Different Approaches to Trading
The good news is that even if you do have a low boredom threshold, you can still develop into a winning trader because you don’t necessarily have to spend the whole day trading.
The key here is to focus on the most volatile periods of day, such as the first few hours of the London session between 8.00 and 10.00 AM GMT.
These are the times when you get some big price moves, and it can be very profitable to trade opening range breakouts if the overnight trading range has been quite small.
So you can sit down at your computer, trade for a few hours, make some money and then call it quits for the day.
Final Thoughts
The point is that whether you trade for two hours or ten hours a day, it is not the exciting profession that many people think it is.
You have very little social interaction at all when you are working from home, and even if you have developed a winning strategy (which the majority of people ultimately fail to do), you will generally be trading mechanically after a while, staring at your charts and looking for the same patterns day in day out.
So this lifestyle is definitely not for everyone, but in my opinion the potential financial rewards and the freedom that you have to work for yourself anywhere in the world that has a good internet connection more than compensates for the boredom and repetitiveness of forex trading.
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