Forex Beginners – Don’t Spend All Day Watching Your PC!

Saturday, July 16th, 2011 at 8:12 am

Many forex beginners believe that they have to spend all their time watching the computer monitor to look for the buying and selling signals that they have heard and read so much about. However, nothing could be further from the truth, as doing this is a guaranteed recipe for bad trading decisions.

What happens is this. Like nearly every forex beginner you watch the charts and you watch the charts and you continue to watch the charts, almost willing them to give you the opportunity to get into the market. You see a market climb followed by a market fall and you curse yourself for missing out on ‘the action’.

Then you swear that you are not going to miss the action next time. After all, you are forex trader, and you should therefore be trading forex, not just sitting there not trading when you keep telling yourself: ‘there are profits to be made’.

Also like most forex beginners you will have read a few forex manuals, looked at some online information and you know that you should have a forex trading system in place. But hey, trading systems are not always perfect, so why not just grab a piece of the action without worrying about your forex trading system? After all, you have been watching the charts all day, so you know what is going to happen, right?

So you manage to find a fictitious trading signal and dive into the market as soon as you start to see anything that looks even vaguely like market movement.

Apart from the fact that you have done almost everything that you should not have done, the thing that is most wrong with this scenario is that in most cases, you are going to lose money if you trade in this way.

Sitting in front of your monitor all day every day is a classic way for a forex beginner to allow their emotions to take over.

It is almost as if the chart is laughing at you. You expected the market to go, but you didn’t put any money into the market and so of course, it goes up. At this point, you have already decided that the next step up is one that you’re not going to miss – watching the chart too much has given you an irrational desire to trade come what may.

You do not need to stare at your monitor all day. The more you stare at it, the less you will really see and the more likely it becomes that you will throw money away on a bad trade that was never really ‘there’ in the first place.