Becoming A Top Forex Trader - 3 Shortcuts To Success

Forex trading is extremely popular nowadays with many people being attracted by the huge sums of money that can be made, but most successful forex traders are only profitable because they've gone through a long and steep learning curve. There are, however, ways in which you can become a successful forex trader a lot quicker.

The first way is by subscribing to some kind of forex signals service. It should be noted that the vast majority of these subscription services are a big waste of time where you will nearly always lose money in the long run. However, there are a few good signal providers out there. The best ones are run by professional traders who actually trade their own signals.

So how does joining one of these top forex signals companies help you become a better trader?

Well apart from blindly following the service provider's signals, you can often learn an awful lot about successful trading by just watching and interacting with the pro trader who is creating the signals. Many of these premium signal providers will have live chat rooms where you can not only interact with the pro trader and ask them any questions, but also chat and exchange ideas with the other traders in the chat room.

The other way you can become a successful forex trader a lot quicker is by following an already successful forex trading system. So in other words rather than spending hours on end poring over charts looking to devise your own profitable system, why not use a system that's already out there and producing profits?

You can find a lot of successful trading systems just by visiting some of the top forex forums. Many top traders are prepared to share their successful systems because not only does it boost their ego, but it makes no difference to their bottom line how many other traders are trading their system as well.

Finally if you really want to become successful, then my best advice would be to find a mentor, ie an experienced trader, who has been profitable for several years, who can teach you how to trade successfully. Of course not everyone is lucky enough to know a successful trader in real-life but you can always search around online, even if it's just on forex forums, for successful traders. Then you can approach them for advice and offer to pay them for some one-on-one coaching if necessary.

So to sum up, if you want to become a consistently profitable forex trader, you can either go it alone and try and find your own profitable system, or you can use other traders to help you to become successful. So, for instance, you can use an existing forex trading system that's currently being used by other traders or you can gain advice either from a top forex signal provider who trades their own signals or an experienced trader who can mentor you and teach you how to trade.

Click here to read a review of Zulu Trade, the revolutionary forex signals service, and to discover why Zulu Trade is arguably the best forex signals service.

Intraday Trading - Forex v Shares

With the current financial markets being so volatile, a lot of traders have switched from long-term investing to short-term trading, as there's potentially a lot more money to be made. However which is more profitable - forex or shares?

Many people are able to make short-term profits from both forex and shares. I myself do alright from both forex and share trading but in my opinion forex trading is the more profitable. This is mainly because the chart movements are more predictable and the major currency pairs conform extremely well to technical analysis.

When you trade forex you know pretty much when all the market-moving news announcements and economic data releases are scheduled, so you can plan in advance to be out of the market when these announcements are made. Therefore you can concentrate solely on technical analysis knowing that the price of the currency pair you are trading is not going to be distorted by any unforeseen announcements. There are very occasional exceptions to this rule such as major news stories or unscheduled interest rate announcements, for example, that can move the markets but these are rare.

Unfortunately this is not the case when you are trading shares. Although most trading statements are scheduled and known in advance, you can still get company-specific news releases, which may be positive or negative. For example, you might get an announced news release mentioning a new contract win which could dramatically lift the share price, or conversely you could get a profit warning completely out of the blue which could cause the share price to plunge in a matter of seconds or minutes.

So you can never entirely relax when you are trading shares because there is always the chance of a market-moving announcement being made about the company. Furthermore although a lot of share price graphs do conform fairly well to technical analysis, this certainly isn't always the case, and sometimes the price will be more affected by the wider market. So a top FTSE 100 share could be majorly oversold on a technical basis, but if the FTSE 100 index takes a dive, then the share price of the company in question could well continue to fall even further.

So overall my personal preference when it comes to short-term trading is to trade forex because you can focus entirely on technical analysis, and can base your trading around the scheduled economic data releases. Plus of course the forex pairs, in my experience, conform slightly better to technical analysis than individual shares.

James Woolley runs a forex trading blog where you can learn forex trading and read a review of Zulu Trade, the revolutionary forex signals service.