Risk and Your Forex Trading Style
June 28, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
The most important part of any style of investing, is knowing what your risk tolerance is. Without a good comprehension of this, you will not only tend to over extend yourself but also jeopardize your capital base. Every Forex trading strategy carries its own risk parameters and these tie in directly with your risk tolerance. Then there is your trading approach, conservative, moderate, and aggressive.
Initially you may decide to trade a day chart. The bar movement over a day can be 100’s of pips, so when you select your stop-loss position you have to assess what your drawdown risks are. If your money management is set at a 3% funds exposure, you will find problems on day charts unless your account is large.
The 5M or 30M charts maybe more appropriate since the pip range tends to be smaller, so your stop strategies can fall within your management criteria.
Yes, we all want increase our wealth from out trades, but jeopardising ones account to wide stop positions and excessive draw-downs is going to clean out your account and trading career in no time at all.
An avarage risk level is 3% or $300 on a $10,000 account. Switch this to pips, 1 standard lot ($100,000) has a pip value of $10 so if you trade end of day and your stop loss establishment, whether count-back or support and resistance or any other, indicates a 100 pip stop position, then you are not risking 3% but 30%! Three adverse trades and your account has gone!
An aggressive trader is open to taking riskier trades that a conservative trader. Their tendency is to expose bigger sums or money in riskier trades with the hope of grabbing bigger profits – often over longer trading time frames but they may still use the similar strategies for shorter times as well. Very much the ‘crash and burn’ trader.
So where do you think you sit? Are you a disciplined trader with correct money management and risk rates, or a trader that will take over the top risks with all or nothing gains? If you are the latter, you won’t be around for long, that’s a guarantee.
If any of this leaves you a bit uncertain, you need to learn more, so begin by getting your Forex training with Top Dog Trading, you will learn an enormous amount and it will help you trade with safety to win pips not risk everything.
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