Forex strategies revealed are always the buzz words that are mentioned in any email I get, promising the easiest way to earn money in Forex. How many do I get? At least 5 a day. This is largely due to my first tentative steps into the World of Forex, and looking for a broker etc... You give them your details, and then pretty quickly you are left with a system that is shoddy at best, downright dangerous at worst. And on top of that, you are bombarded with the next great big thing in the World of Forex. Talk to 99% of people, and they can not resist the temptation to find out what it is and discover if this really is the hidden gem that has been missing from their lives for so long.... Let me give you a hint... It is not!!!
The good thing though, is that if you implement and test these strategies, after a while you will be able to make something up yourself that you can actually make work! Yes that is right, if you are willing to put the effort in, you can be successful. How successful? That is down to you and only to you. This can either be daunting, or empowering. Your failure is in your hands, but counter intuitively, more worringly, so is your success.

So how do you go from buying the latest fad, to creating a winning strategy that will actually work?

The process is easy, but very time consuming. If I could give you a guarantee that you would be earning a million pounds, how long would you dedicate to it? A month, a Year, a decade even?

Forex promises riches beyond your wildest dreams, and you can start turning that £10 into £1 million within 3 months (yes they actually expect you to believe that) and I am sure for that 1 person out of millions has been able to do that very thing – the laws of probability says that it can be done, but the laws of probability says that it probably won’t be you...

The most important thing to do is to start on the higher time frames – more people can lose more the lower the time frame they use. There is nothing glorious in losing your hard earned cash within a week... staying in the game is key! This is why Demo accounts are available.

I will say that demo accounts have their pros and cons. What you want to test out on your demo account is simply the strategy that you use. You are testing to see if the mechanics of the system are repeatable and are successful. You are not demoing to become a millionaire, on a live account things change dramatically. What you need to know is that if you were to lift the system from demo to live, the system would work. This is also why using the higher timeframes are key, as profits should be greater, which means that you will not be lulled into a false sense of security when you see only profit – live accounts come with a multitude of fees that are not shown on a demo account.

So you start on a demo account, what should you be looking for? I always start my demo account with an amount of money that I actually have to play with. If you have $1000, why demo an account with $50,000? Is that going to give you realistic expectations? It also trains you to accept that, certainly at the beginning, you are going to be trading with a view to earning $5 per trade as opposed to $1000. There is nothing as disheartening as demoing a huge account, and then start dreaming of what you could spend your money on, and then to start only making a couple of dollars on your real account – human nature says that you will start to take bigger risks as you try to fulfil your expectations. When you do this, say goodbye to Mr. Account!

So you now have your demo account at a level that you can afford, you now need to start thinking about how much you can risk on each trade. This would generally be between 1% - 3% per trade. Your goal is to make 2%-6% on each trade to cover your losses and still be in profit. So how do you go about this?

1 standard lot = $10 per pip
1 mini lot (0.1 of a standard lot) = $1 per pip
1 micro lot (0.01 of a standard lot) = $0.1 per pip
1 nano lot (0.001 of a standard lot) = $0.01 per pip

If you have a $1000 account, each trade should have a maximum risk of $30.
You position your stop loss, ie 150 pips, and then work out how much you can afford per pip – $30/ 150 =0.2.

So your lot size would be 2 micro lots... $0.2 per pip.

A handy formula would is:

#lots = Acct_ size$ x %risk_per_trade x 0.1 / stoploss_pips

So, with a $1000 account X 0.03 X 0.1 / 150 = 0.02 (which is the micro lot)

You could halve your stop loss to 75, and you would be trading with $0.4 per pip. Your risk is still $30 though. Hopefully you can see how this works. If you want to compound your earnings, you can feed the new account details into the above formula. Or you could set this for a week, and then change the levels.
Either way comes with pros and cons, but this is down to the individual as to how they would like to play it.

The change from demo to real should be within a year if the testing is going well (why would you go live with a system that does not work?). The biggest problem that you have on a live account – is YOU! You have to deal with the emotions of seeing your account showing minus numbers. It does happen, and you have to accept that it is something that will happen. Don’t deviate from your max stop loss, as if you were doing everything right in your demo, then this would just be a normal fluctuation. At the end of the day, you would only be losing a max of $30, and should be able to easily grab that back on the next trade..

Happy trading, and hope this helps a little way!