With the enormous potential profits available in the financial markets and the Forex markets in particular, the forex course has become an information product in great demand, at least judging by the number of them being produced these days!
Newcomers seeking an education in how to trade would do best to seek out a forex course that actually teaches you how to be a better trader.
Not every forex course even pretends to do this. Many are in the business of selling “the dream”; the kind of bizop fantasy whereby you just push a button, everything is done for you and the money just comes rolling in. This is the land of the so-called “forex robot”.
Sadly for those caught in this fantasy, life is not really like that.
A real forex course needs to provide you with a sound grounding in understanding the markets you are going to be dealing with, combined with a proven strategy for trading in forex and making consistent profits in those markets. You need to take the attitude that you are in this for the long-term, so be determined to master your craft.
Moreover, “proven” does not just mean that a bunch of customers have written glowing testimonials. That is marketing. While it might be good evidence, it is not proof as such.
Proof means numbers – a scientific objective backtest. You want to see a track record of real trades in the markets. Here is where many people get caught out with forex courses. A lot of them are marketed with “hypothetical” results, i.e. the creator of the forex course just takes back history and runs his trading system through it automatically.
Such backtests can be done at the push of a button. Invariably, these do not include commissions and slippage, both of which are crucial in a meaningful backtest of a trading strategy.
Also, any forex course that you propose to trade needs…
to be compatible with your personality and lifestyle. If you like a lot of action, then intraday forex trading might be your style and hence a system that only trades once a month will do nothing but frustrate you. If you are risk averse, then learning from a forex course where large swings in your P/L are the norm will prove disastrous.
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A good forex course will give you a thorough grounding in forex indicators and technical analysis. Forget the products that are heavily oriented towards economic fundamentals. You cannot trade economics. You need TECHNICAL indicators that are proven to work in the market you propose to trade. Your forex course should provide you a sound grounding in technical analysis overall – MACD, moving averages, oscillators, Stochastics, RSI etc. – plus even a few high-performance proprietary indicators that the course creator has invented himself.
There is a lot of hype out there and so you need to be aware of this and be skeptical at all times. Check out the credentials of the person selling the forex course. Is this a person of deep experience, who has been trading for years, or better still, is even a market professional? Or is it an ex-bartender who took to forex trading six months ago and now has a product to sell you out on how to do it?
In summary, beware of the hype when you approach the subject of forex education. There are a lot of good products out there and also a lot of very very bad ones. Invest in yourself by first choosing the right forex course for you, one that follows as many of the principles as possible discussed in this article, and you give yourself the best chance of success in the foreign currency markets.
