Money Management in Currency Trading

Money Management in Currency Trading (Part I)
by Ahmad Hassam

Many forex traders start trading live before understanding and learning good money management rules. Develop a few good money management rules and practices them on your demo account before starting live trading. Developing your money management rules mean how much of your money, you are willing to risk on one trade. It also means determining how many contracts per trade your risk tolerance allows? The important thing when you start trading is to learn how you can improve your investment results by making small changes and tweaks to your trading strategies. Good money management rules can make a huge difference between becoming a successful investor in the long run or an unsuccessful one that blows up the account in a few weeks. Have you ever played poker or watched it being played online or on TV! If you have then you will never see good poker players play all their cards on a single bet. Good poker players know that by risking only a small amount of their money on a single bet, they can win or lose but will still play the next hand. If they put everything on the table on a single bet, they will have to be 100% sure of winning, an impossible thing. You can never be 100% sure. Life is the game of probabilities. Forex trading is far more complicated than playing poker. You are dealing with hundreds of unknown variables that affect the markets instead of only 52 cards. To succeed in forex trading, you must understand and implement the money management principles.You can fall into many pitfalls while trading. As a trader you should be constantly guard against two emotions. Greed and fear! In case you are on a winning streak, you will become greedy. You would want to risk more to make one big win and you would want to strike it rich in one or two big trades. This will make you risk more and more of your money on a single big trade. When you will lose a trade, you will become afraid risking your money on the next trade. Fear will take over. It will impair your decision making. It will make you lose confidence in your judgment and decision making. Lets see how fear and greed can affect your trading.Lets suppose you have a run of successful trades that makes you very happy. You are feeling overconfident. You are not satisfied on risking only 2% of your account on one single trade and you want to risk more on the trade. You are thinking, the more you have in a trade, the more you will make if you are right. You are willing to increase your risk to 5%. You increase it to 5% and you win. You increase it further to 10% and you once again win. You finally decide to put 25% of your account at risk on the next big trade, but misfortune strikes all of a sudden. Your successful run comes to an end and you lose big.Suppose you had a $100,000 trading account and you had foolishly risked 25% or $25,000 on one trade that you desperately wanted to win. Losing $25,000 means you have only $75,000 in your account now after your loss. How much you need to make to get back the original balance of $100,000; you need to make $25,000 again to go back to the original balance. It means you will have to make 25,000/75,000= 33%, so you risked 25% but now you will need to make 33% to get back your original amount.Many investors once they lose a trade try to risk more to recover their original loss, ending up losing more and more. Very soon those investors destroy their accounts and are out of trading forever. There are other investors who try to reduce risk even further on making a loss; eventually they divorce themselves from any opportunity for meaningful growth in their accounts.