Free Forex Training: The Biggest Enemy Of The Forex Trader
In this free forex training article we will consider one of the biggest traps that you can fall into as a currency trader. So what is public enemy number one of the forex trading market? The answer may surprise you.
Systems are important but they are often not as important as the mindset or attitude that we have when we apply them. It is vital not to let your emotions make your decisions for you. Now, most traders already know that and yet they find themselves falling into the trap over and over. Why does that happen? It’s all due to stress.
Forex is a stressful business and stress automatically sets off a physical reaction in the body, often called the ‘fight or flight’ response. Adrenaline surges around the body screaming at you to take some kind of action – right now! This is why it is so difficult to sit it out and wait for the right signals to open or close a trade.
When this happens, it feels like you have an intuition to take a certain course of action, but it is important not to act on it unless you are a very experienced trader. The so-called intuitive decisions of some successful traders are almost certainly based upon subconsciously remembering and recognizing patterns in the market from their many years of trading.
If you do not have that experience, your impulses to act in a certain way when the pressure is on are just coming from the emotions raised by the stress you are under: either fear or a strong desire to fight and win. If you have trouble believing this, just paper trade every time it happens. You will soon see that these emotional decisions do not pay.
If you find it difficult to keep your cool under the pressure of this enemy within, the ideal thing to do would be to take a break from the screen. However, this is not always possible. You may need to be there to keep your eye on the market. But what you can do is to relax physically.
For a quick relaxation exercise that you can do right there at your desk, focus on each part of your body one by one, starting with the face and working down to the feet. For each area, contract all the muscles, then release. So for your face you would close your eyes and screw up your face into a tense, tight grimace, then let go. When you relax it is important to be very aware of the muscles that you have just tensed and make sure they release every last bit of their tension.
So next time you are sitting at your screen knowing that you must wait for the right moment and yet feeling a desperate urge to jump in right now, remember that it is not intuition. It is not a message from above. It is stress bumping up your adrenaline, and you can handle it with the help of our anti stress free forex training.
