Trading Forex Wednesday August 27th 2008

I’m down to $102 in my FXCM account. That’s as good as having no money in my account. I don’t plan on entering into any trades today. I did enter a few trades yesterday. All but 1 was a profitable trade but the losing trade wiped out the profits from all the others; and that’s the nature of the forex game in a nutshell. Your losing trades usually wipe out your profits from your winning trades. At least such has been my experience.

In my demo account I lost the $1000 I made on Monday ($1000 in 1 day trading forex). I’m back down to the starting value of my account; but having $5000 in your account makes a world of difference from having $102 in your account. It’s pretty much impossible to turn around $102 unless you’re a forex trading wizard which I am clearly not. I probably will not venture to enter into any trades in my live account for a while. I will have to trade exclusively in demo for a while and try to figure out whether or not I should put more money into the live account and keep on trying.

I’ve been thinking FXCM might not have been the smartest choice for a broker. While I enjoy using the FX Trading Station, the smallest lot size you can trade with FXCM mini account is 10K. It doesn’t seem like such a huge problem at first considering you’re only losing $1 per pip ( when you’re losing ) versus $10 per pip with the standard account’s $100k lot size; but $1 can turn into $25 in the blink of an eye. I’m inclined to think that for someone like me, being able to trade sizes smaller than 10K would be beneficial, which would have made OANDA a better choice than FXCM, presumably.