If you want to make money in forex trading you need to have a soundly based forex trading strategy. This is far easier to achieve than many traders think it is and here we will show you how to build one in 4 simple steps.

1. Success Comes From Inner Understanding

To succeed at forex trading you need to do it on your own and understand EXACTLY how and why your system works.

Even if you follow a vendor or someone else’s currency trading system, you can’t simply follow it you must learn it and have confidence in it.

If you don’t understand how your trading system will help you succeed, you won’t have confidence in it which will lead to a break down of discipline if you hit a losing period.

Keep in mind if you don’t have the discipline to follow your trading method, you don’t have a method!

2. Keep It Simple & Work Smart

Many traders believe the more effort they put into their forex trading strategy the more they will make – this is not true. You get rewarded for being right with your trading signal and that’s it.

Other traders think the more complicated their system is the more chance it has of succeeding but again – this is not true.

All the best forex trading systems are simple and this means they have fewer elements to break and are more robust in the face of brutal market conditions.

This is actually good news, as you need to work smart and not hard to succeed.

Simply focus on the right areas and learn them. If you do this, it will lead you to currency trading success.

3. A Successful Trading System

Here we can’t give you all that goes into a successful trading system – but we will give you some important basic elements you need to keep in mind when building one.

- Do not day trade, as you are guaranteed to lose. All short term volatility is random and you cannot get the odds on your side, either swing trade or follow long term trends.

- Base your system on the concept of support and resistance and breakout methodology.

- Do not predict with your system. Use momentum oscillators to confirm each and every trading signal.

If you predict that’s simply hoping or guessing and you won’t win.

Trade the truth of price action and confirm.

- Always place stops and assume the worst eventuality – you need to protect what you have above all else. As one trader I once knew said:

“If you take care of the losses the profits will look after themselves”.

4. The crucial Point You Need to Understand!

In forex trading 95% of traders lose.

This is simply in most instances down to the fact they don’t work smart and learn the right information.

They therefore don’t have confidence to apply their system with discipline.

You need to understand as part of your forex education that your method is important – but you need the right mindset to apply it.

If you want to learn currency trading you can, in fact anyone can – but you must learn how to trade currencies the right way and build a logical, simple forex trading strategy which, takes into account all the points we have made above.

Many new forex traders think the core of a forex trading strategy should be predicting where forex prices will go. Try it and you will lose, you will win if you trade in a different way so why is prediction not the way to make money? Let’s find out. If you are predicting you are in effect hoping or guessing which is not a way to make money in any venture let alone forex trading. You cannot predict the future and if you try, your predictions will be as accurate as your horoscope.

There is however a big market in people who say they can predict and many theories that say you can such as Elliot wave, Fibonacci and Gann. They argue that as human nature is constant so the markets must be as well. However if you think about it this logic is obviously not true, because if markets were predictable with science, we would all know the answer in advance and there would be no market.

Markets move based upon uncertainty and while human nature is constant, it is not predictable with science – trading is a game of odds not certainties. If you want to win you trade the reality of price change and don’t try and guess in advance.

For example if you see a market testing a level of resistance you do not simply enter a trading signal – if you do you are trading against the trend and you could be wrong. Instead you wait for prices to test resistance and wait for prices to turn back the other way. Sure you miss the turn – but you couldn’t predict that anyway, so there is no point trying!

How do you know when to trade.

The secret of correct market timing is using momentum oscillators. There are many you can use and three of the best are: RSI, ADX and the stochastic indicator. We don’t have time to go through exactly how they work here simply look at our other articles and make them part of your essential forex education.

The key advantage they give you with your forex trading strategy is they allow you to gauge shifts in price momentum. You can use these shifts, to allow you to trade the reality of a price change to achieve better market timing and more forex profits.

The forex traders who rely on prediction lose and are generally naïve or greedy traders who think forex trading is simply a walk in the park – its not and neither would you expect it to be. The real pro forex traders don’t rely on hope or guessing or attempting to buy market tops or bottoms they look at and trade the reality of price change.

The way to succeed in forex is simply to look at support or resistance and time your entry on shifts in momentum and you should not just do this with a view to these levels holding.
You also need to buy or sell breakouts of new market highs or lows. It’s a fact that most markets develop their best trends from these highs and lows and you need to learn to go with them and enter the market.

It may look like your getting in at good levels and its tempting to wait for the pullback – but these moves tend to not pull back and accelerate and offer the biggest profit potential. The market price is the right place and if you cut out prediction and trade the reality, you can have the basis of a forex trading strategy that can make big consistent profits.

By: Monica Hendrix