FAP Turbo

Make Over 90% Winning Trades Now!

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Money Management in Forex Trading (Part III)

By Ahmad Hassam

Live to trade another day is perhaps the best advice that you will receive in your trading career. Forex markets are brutal and unforgiving. You need to learn to survive in the markets.

The single most common factor that causes many traders to blow up their accounts is greed. When you get greedy, you start taking unnecessary risks. You will spend countless hours trying to discover the Holy Grail technical indictor or a forex robot that will make you rich. You believe that by discovering that secret of investing, you will become rich without losing a single trade.

Unfortunately there is no Holy Grail in trading. You must learn not to risk more than 2% of your account on a single trade. Incrementally grow your account over time and never ever be tempted to risk big making one single winning trade that can make you rich.

You should know how much you are willing to risk in a single trade. I said 2%. But if you want to be aggressive you can go up to 5% but stay between 2-5%. Dont exceed it. If you are conservative, on the other hand, you should consider risking between 1-2% only.

Once you have decided on the risk you are willing to take, knowing the rest is simple. Suppose you have a $50,000 account and you decide on a risk of 2%. How much you can risk on a single trade? You can only risk (50,000) (0.02) =$1,000. This is the maximum you should risk on a single trade.

However, if you are in more than one trade at the same time, the amount may be higher. Suppose, you are in 3 trades and you risk only $1,000 per trade. So the total amount at risk will be $3,000. Once you have determined your risk level, you are ready to determine the trade size.

Trade size is the number of currency pair contracts you purchase in any one single trade. You need to first determine where you want to put your stop loss in order to determine the trade size. Lets use a simple example to make it clear and suppose you are willing to risk $1000 on trading EUR/USD pair. You decide on a stop loss of 50 pips. Each pip on EUR/USD pair is equal to $10, so the number of contracts that you can trade are 2= (1,000)/ (50) (10).

You have taken the guesswork out of your trading once you have determined your risk level and calculated the trade size. You can sleep well now knowing how much of your money is at risk. You are going to be able to trade tomorrow, no matter what happens today.

Using these common and simple money management rules will help you avoid the pitfall of losing almost all the money in your account. Never ever take more than 2-5% risk in any single trade. Learning to survive the markets and trading another day is the essence of trading. This can help take your trading to the next level of profitability. - 23208

About the Author:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home