Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Learning Forex


Now that I had found the websites of online forex brokers I needed to learn what the forex market
was all about and how to trade. Besides reading many paper books, e-books, website, and
forums I have also taken several online forex courses, the cost of these courses has ranged from
$500 to several $1000s.
Now I do not want to criticize anyone’s forex training course, if I am honest many of the courses I
have taken have been very informative, some people have put a lot of work into them and they
are a good place to start to learn the basics.
However there is a ton of misinformation in these courses they explain techniques to you that are
based on stock trading and fall down when it comes to the currency market, there is also a
distinct lack of information in these courses, they touch very lightly on the history of money, the
reasons for the relative value of money, the structure, participants and purpose of the forex
market. They really just do not give you the correct picture of the forex market.
They charge you $1000s for a minimal amount of information, at the end of the course they pat
you on the back and send you into a world of sharks with nothing other than your highly
leveraged margin account.
What is important for you to understand is that the vendors of most of these forex trading courses
and even forex mentorship programs for that matter are failed traders. These people have no
interest in your success in trading; their only concern is that you purchase their course and then
their advanced course and then their mentorship offerings. These people want your money, they
will sell you anything to get it and they do not care if you make it as a trader.
In the case of brokers offering training courses, their interests also lie in giving you enough
information to make you a danger to yourself.
Can you believe that virtually all vendors of online forex trading courses are little more than
crooks, selling quickly put together courses whose only intentions are to make as much money off
you as possible? The vendors of these courses must have some good intentions as much of the
material in the courses is correct, however if they have any thoughts that their courses will enable
some one to make money from forex they are sorely deluded.
It is the lack of information and the blatant misinformation in both the courses themselves and in
the advertising of these courses that in my opinion make these people crooks.
There are a small percentage of forex training courses that do give you the correct information, if
you are lucky enough to do one of these courses you will soon realize that no course by itself,
irrelevant of cost, will make you a successful forex trader. This comes from developing a clear
idea and being able to anticipate what the large forex market participants are doing, this comes
from understanding global economics and through years of experience watching global financial
movements, this will be covered in later chapters.
Now I would like to go through the material covered in some of the online courses I have taken in
the past, (2000 to present), the courses were very professional and the people offering the
courses are still around so I will not cover their material in too much detail. It is not my intention to
state here what these courses should have said but merely to point out where they lack
information and where they have provided completely wrong information. These courses typically
cost over $1000.
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These courses generally fall down in their first few lessons as they try to describe the forex
market; a typical first lesson is called “What is the forex Market” and the second lesson might be
called “What moves the forex Market”. A professional forex trader must have a clear picture of
what the forex market is, this is especially important as most of the time the trader is sitting at
home with little more than numbers on a screen to guide him.
To be fair, to a certain extent, these courses do cover this information, central banks, investment
banks, hedge funds, corporations, inflation, interest rates, balance of payments and the economic
news releases that impact exchange rates.
Where they fail is the proportion of the material that is dedicated to the fundamentals of the
market against the proportion of the course dedicated to technical analysis. The big forex market
movers almost exclusively look at fundamental economic conditions when deciding where to
invest money, yet these courses dedicate little more than a couple of chapters to this.
The little information they do give you on the structure and fundamentals of the forex market
excludes vital information regarding the history of money and current characteristics of money,
the history and current structure of the international banking system, the international money
markets, global economic cycles, and the physical underlying structure of the market. They fail to
impress upon you exactly what is happening, whose money, coming from where, going to where,
and why? All these courses have left me with these questions.
Even information provided to me by legitimate successful traders has left me with questions
regarding what is going on with the forex market on a day to day basis. No forex training courses
will teach you what is fundamentally going on with the forex market at any given moment, this
changes day to day. Banks employ 100s of people to analyze the global economy, no course will
teach you this, but it is possible to learn this, you firstly need the correct information and then long
term exposure and experience of the global financial trends, you also need contact with an
already successful trader who you can learn from. I will recommend legitimate educational
material and mentoring services in the latter chapters of this book.
On top of the lack of information into the fundamentals of the forex market, the second failing of
most of the online forex training courses is misinforming the student as to how to analyze the
forex market. Most of the forex courses I have taken have devoted 70% of their material to
technical analysis of the market; which charts to use and how many to have open, trend lines,
candle sticks, double tops and bottoms, 1-2-3 patterns, head and shoulder formations, triangle,
flags and pendants, Fibonacci, Elliot waves, Gann cycles, indicators and how to put these all into
a trading system.
My short answer to all of the technical analysis that can be applied to price charts in the forex
market is; by itself none of it works! In later chapters I will explain to you what I have done to
prove technical analysis by itself does not work and no consistent prediction of the future
movement of exchange rates can be gleamed from historical price data alone.
There is a general accepted notion as present by forex brokers and vendors of forex trading
courses and other systems that the forex market responds well to technical analysis. This is an
out and out lie, and reinforces the statement that the majority of vendors of forex trading related
services are little more than crooks. Technical analysis serves two purposes, people can make
money teaching it and forex brokers can make money from people using it.
The final failing of the majority of forex training courses and forex brokers alike is the suggested
money management and risk management strategies, leverage your account at 100:1, always
use a stop loss and keep your losses small, let your profits run. All of these are commonly
accepted truisms in the forex market, so it may be a surprise for you when I tell you these are not
the strategies the big professional players are using and if you use these strategies you are liable
to get wiped out pretty quick.
It is not my intention here to explain exactly what these training courses should have said. There
legitimate documents and courses available from legitimate successful traders covering this
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information. I will cover much of this information in the latter chapters of this book along with
directing you towards additional information vital to your success as a forex trader.
The next chapter will deal with another breed of forex shark, the vendor of the online forex trading
system. This can either be an e-book out lining an easy to follow trading system or real time buy
and sell signals based on an amazing proprietary indicator, both systems offer an 80% success
rate and are usually so good that they are only offered to the first 100 people who apply, (total
BS).
These guys are complete crooks and deserve to be thrown in jail. I have absolutely no worries
about naming these people and exposing their scams, (they may as well steal handbags for a
living), they are that low.
If you bought one of their systems, do not worry, I have bought many of them. I just fail to see
how some one would want to make money so dishonestly. Well the wheel turns people and you
are going to get named.

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