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Getting Started Trading

6 Steps That Could Save You Years In Becoming a Profitable Trader

Getting started trading can be very confusing. There are generally a lot of places to start. It is of great benefit to understand your trading craft, especially if you intend to make money doing it. Below we break down the basics and show what we use day-to-day to make our lives less complicated. Understanding your strategy, what moves the market, and how to use the charting tools to execute will be paramount to your success.

Our Start to Finish Process for Traders Trying to Figure out "What to do first?" - These steps could save you YEARS

Step 1: Figure out what success looks like for you

How soon do you need to start making money? Are you having fun or building wealth? Building wealth trading, from our experience is something that will take discipline.

Wealth is achievable, however your odds of reaching whatever you think that is will be much higher if you have a PURPOSE.

What do you plan to do with your trading income? What do you really need? How much can you actually risk and not worry about? Understand the answer to these questions and you will be much more likely to find success.

It is much easier to find success when you have a goal and a way to measure it.

Step 2: Find a Broker You Can TRUST

Pay attention to WHO is regulating your Broker and what kind of recourse that you have to get your money out of the account should the arrangement go sour for some reason.

SECURITY is the most important factor when choosing a Forex Broker.
Furthermore,

Execution Speed is typically going to be fastest with larger, heavily regulated brokers. They have more money, access to liquidity, and often better technology.

Platform Flexibility is also big – having the ability to trade the same account from your computer, phone and tablet is a must for most traders – especially if you plan to be mobile.

Trading Symbols available will also be all over the map. Some brokers will allow you to trade Forex, Commodities, BTC, Stocks, and Indices. Others may limit your range in this category.

Step 3: Get an EDUCATION and Find a Mentor to Learn a Time-Tested Strategy

Trading is very much like every other “business”. The cool thing is that there are other people that are likely much more experienced than you to watch. Gotta love the internet, right?

There is no good reason for you to try and reinvent the wheel. Your goal should be to find someone else to model your strategy and more importantly your MINDSET.

Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to work with thousands of great traders, bad traders, and many in between. The differences in each are typically very small.

SmartTrader trading rooms currently has 4 rooms with 4 traders that together have about 80 years of experience. Video below will also give you a better idea of who controls or manipulates the market – what your up against.

Step 4: Give Yourself an Advantage with Cutting-Edge Technology

Not all traders are going to have access to incredible tools and strategies. Sad truth is most people simply aren’t aware of the type of technology that exists. Technical analysis tools are NOT all created equal and the trading platform that you use could have a big affect on your learning curve.

We like to use SmartTrader, for many reasons. The most commonly used tools in any platform are the drawing tools, and generally Smart Tools have kind of changed the game.

If you would like to get a better understanding of what I mean, and why SmartTrader is amazing – WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW.

Step 5: Understand [MT4]
Metatrader 4, What it is and how to Use it

Metatrader 4, also called MT4, is a dinosaur of a trading platform – only very much alive and very stable. It is also the most common trading platform on Earth – so something you should know how to operate.

It’s so widely used that the whole Forex industry has been putting off moving everyone to MT5 for YEARS. There’s no big jump from MT4 to MT5 in capability, and most 3rd party tools are built for MT4, so the stall could continue for many more years.

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO BELOW FOR A DETAILED WALKTHROUGH

Step 6: Trading Journal - TRACK YOUR RESULTS

Your understanding of “what works” and “what doesn’t work” with your trading strategy will be much more obvious if you Track your trading history. Knowing your average trade length, win/loss rate, which pairs you fare better with and more will be a GAME CHANGER.

Best part is, the days of 3-ring binders are over. You DO NOT need to manually record your results and crunch numbers.

That whole process can be automated and updated constantly throughout the day with very little effort on your part. I like to use MyFXBook – because it’s free at the time I write this and fairly easy to set up.

The video below will walk you through the entire process.

Trading carries significant risk. Never trade with capital you can’t afford to lose. Our General Disclaimer and Risk Disclaimer.