Only trade positive expectancy systems

If you have a positive expectancy trading system, the only factors that will decide how much money you will make per year are the number of trades the system actually makes, how much capital you allocate to the system, and how accurately you use the trading signals.

If you do not know whether your trading system is positive expectancy then it makes no sense for you to be trading it in the first place. Expectancy is calculated using the profit or loss on each trade; divided by the initial risk, and then taking the average of this number of a series of trades. Systems that have positive expectancy will make money most of the time and those with negative expectancy will lose money.

Successful traders only trade systems when the odds of success are in their favor so that they know that making money is the final result of accurately implementing the system and not just pure luck.

You will want to minimize all of you trading business costs

Some trading systems can offer you only marginal profitability, and trading implementation costs (commission, spread, and slippage) can be the difference between making a profit and making a loss.

With the simple availability of modern electronic brokers, and fully-automated trade processing and execution, it is definitely worth the effort in looking for a very low cost way to implement your trading system.

High commission, wide spreads, and large amounts of slippage can be lowered drastically and easily by carefully choosing the right broker. This can be the difference between a system being useable or not. Paying too much for trade implementation is a way to lose money that you can actually avoid.

Educate yourself

In order for you to be able to compete at the highest level in the trading business and be a successful player, you must be well-educated about what you are doing. Being well-educated means that you have thoroughly researched and tested your trading ideas and know why your trading system worked in the past and is still working.

It means that you understand all the technology and applications that your system needs to perform with accuracy. It means understanding your goal and objectives and how trading will help you achieve them. It means understanding yourself and how your personality will affect your results.

In order to succeed as a forex trader, you really need to become an expert in your own trading business to understand how it the dots are all connected, when it is broken, and how it can be improved. This takes commitment, hard work, dedication, and more hard work.

Avoid trading scared money

No one ever made any money trading when they had to do it to pay their bills at the end of the month. Having a requirement to make a certain amount of dollars per month or you will be financially in trouble is the best way I know to completely mess up all trading discipline, rules, objectives, and leads faster than you’d expect to disaster.

Trading is about taking a reasonable amount of risk in order to achieve a good reward. The markets and how and when they give up their profits is nothing that you can control. You should never trade if you need the money to pay bills. Do not trade if your business and personal expenses are not covered by another income stream or cash reserve. This is how hasty decisions are made.


Dealing with your losses
One of the most important rules of Forex trading is to keep your losses as small as possible. With small Forex trading losses, you can outlast those times when the market moves against you, and be well positioned for when the trend turns around.

The one proven method to keeping your losses small is to set your maximum loss before you even open a Forex trading position.

The maximum loss is the greatest amount of capital that you are comfortable losing on any one trade. With your maximum loss set as a small percentage of your Forex trading effort, a string of losses won’t stop you from trading for any particular amount of time. Unlike the 95% of Forex traders out there who lose money because they haven’t implemented wise money management rules to their Forex trading system, you will be ok with this money management rule.

To use as an example... If I had a Forex trading float of $2000, and I began trading with $200 a trade, it would be reasonable for me to experience three losses in a row. This would reduce my Forex trading capital to $800. It would then be decided that they’re going to bet $400 on the next trade because they think they have a higher chance of winning after having lost three times already.

If that trader did bet $200 dollars on the next trade because they thought they were going to win, their capital could be reduced to $500 dollars. The chances of making money now are practically nil because I would need to make 150% on the next trade just to break even. If the maximum loss had been determined, and stuck to, they
would not be in this position.

In this case, the reason for failure was because the trader risked too much money, and didn’t apply good money management to the play.

Remember, the goal here is to keep our losses as small as possible while also making sure that we open a large enough position to capitalize on profits and minimize losses. With your money management rules in place, in your Forex trading system, you will always be able to do this.