If you have already started trading, you will have realised that trading is not easy. It is certainly not a quick way to make a fast buck, at least at the start! However, with patience, a lot of effort and by taking the right steps early on, you could set yourself up to become a very successful forex trader. Here are a few pointers for starting out, which is often the hardest part.

Just Get Going

There is no getting away from it, at some point you just need to jump in. You may have spent hours reading about forex, you may have learnt many theories on strategies, types of trading and risk management but at some point, you need to just jump in, stop the procrastination and start trading.

This is when a demo account comes in handy. It is a great way to dip you toe in the water and start to put some of that knowledge into action. Alternatively, if you haven’t done that much prior reading on the subject, it is still a great way to start up to see how things work without putting any real cash on the line.

Practice Makes Perfect

When starting out in trading, and even when you have been trading a live account for a while, a demo account is so incredibly useful. Here you can practise until your heart’s content different trading strategies, different trading styles, different risk management approaches. In short you can practise almost every aspect of your trading approach, without risking a cent.

As soon as you feel ready you can then transfer your knowledge to a live account. At a Vantage FX if you set up a live account you can then have an unlimited demo account. This is extremely useful because if you find after moving to the live account that something isn’t working then you can always refer back to your demo and also retest any tweaks that you make to your strategy.

Perhaps the big drawback of demo accounts is that your trading psychology changes when you trade a demo account to when you trade real money. For this very reason it is better not too spend too much time on the demo, but rather to use it and return to it if and when necessary.

Learn

I think it’s fair to say very few traders are born naturals. There is so much to learn and a particularly steep learning curve. Mistakes will be made, trades will be lost; all traders have losing trades but what’s really important at the beginning is to try to understand what went wrong. Why did the trade not work out?

There is also so much help and information available on the web and through Vantage FX. This world-renowned FX broker has a comprehensive educational package for its clients. The package includes online articles, webinars and seminars to help support its clients to become better traders.