The Hidden Boredom of Forex Trading
Many people dream of being able to quit their full-time office job in order to work from home trading forex all day.
You can sit in front of your laptop or desktop computer, watch the charts of all the major currency pairs and wait for an opportunity to go long or go short, hopefully generating some decent profits if your predictions turn out to be correct.
However what many people don’t tell you is that it can be extremely boring staring at a computer screen for hours on end waiting for potential set-ups to occur, particularly if you are someone who trades the 1 hour, 4 hour or daily charts, for example, because there will be a lot less set-ups.
Indeed there will be some days when you are watching the price charts all day, but don’t actually end up entering any trades, which makes it feel as if you have wasted a whole day doing nothing because you haven’t earned any money.
Loneliness and Lack of Social Interaction
Forex trading can also be a very lonely profession because you are essentially cut off from the real world, and no longer have any real-life interactions with other people.
Of course there are chatrooms and forums where you can chat with other currency traders and exchange trading ideas, and you can always chat to your friends on Facebook and other social media sites, for example, but it is not the same as talking to people in real life.
Many introverts are perfectly happy working from home on their own, but not everyone is cut out to do this for long periods of time.
Dealing With Losses
The key to successful forex trading is to maximize the gains that you make from your winning trades, and minimize your losses so that you are able to grow your capital over time.
It is important to remember that it is impossible to have a 100% win ratio. Even the most successful traders will have losing trades, and even if they have a strategy that has proven to be successful, they will inevitably have long losing runs at some point.
Therefore traders need to stay calm and focused during these losing phases, and need to have the ability to adapt their strategies if they are no longer profitable, or have the discipline to stick to their existing strategies without trying to chase losses.
Unfortunately not everyone has the required discipline to successfully deal with losing trades, particularly when they have bills to pay and are under constant pressure to earn enough money to pay for mortgage payments, car repayments, household bills and everyday living expenses.
Final Thoughts
The point is that you need to be a certain type of person if you are serious about succeeding as a forex trader.
If you are a very outgoing person who enjoys being around other people, then forex trading probably isn’t for you because this can be a lonely and boring profession at times, with little or no social interaction.
Furthermore, you also need to be aware of the focus and the discipline that it requires in order to be consistently profitable over the long run because you need to be able to deal with losing trades (and losing runs), and have the skill to adapt your strategy at times to account for changing market conditions.
Yes forex trading can be exciting, exhilarating and hugely profitable, but it is only a small percentage of people who have the requisite skills, personality traits and attitudes to be able to turn this into a full-time career.
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