By Darrell Martin
What if you could sit down with a helpful, friendly, knowledgeable trading expert who is willing to give you pointers and tips to help you get started in trading? That would be pretty amazing, wouldn’t it? Consider this series of articles just that: A record of valuable tips delivered to you from a trusted friend to aid you in your trading.
Darrell Martin is that knowledgeable expert. In a recent webinar, he outlined important points to consider not only when you begin trading, but also good to review from time to time to keep you on top of your trading game.
One of the most important things to realize is that there is risk in trading, no matter what kind of trading you are doing. If someone leads you to believe anything different, if goes back to the saying, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” There is no way that every trade will win every time.
Martin has been trading for decades and started Apex Investing with the idea of teaching friends what he knew. It has grown to over 10,000 members with the understanding of traders helping traders. There are seasoned traders as well as new traders all learning from one another.
At Apex, Martin offers many things for free, but you have to invest your time. If you are going to succeed at anything, it requires an investment of time and trading is not any different. There is a Forum for questions and webinars. There are Diagnostic Deviation Levels and News Trading Plans that will help you in your daily trading. Even if you don’t trade the news, it is necessary to know what is happening that might affect your trading. Also available is the Binary and Spread Scanners which are valuable tools that let you see multiple markets at one time. You can set filters so that you can see the markets you want to be watching with the expiration times you are interested in. All of these are free to use.
Martin explained several reasons why traders fail and gave tips to counteract those failures. He wants traders to succeed.
The first reason he talked about was Impatience. Sometimes people don’t want to take the time to learn. They say things like, “I want to trade now!” That is like somebody saying, “I want to be a doctor. Give me a scalpel and let me cut into somebody’s brain!” That’s a little scary, but that is how it is if you jump into live trading and you don’t know what you are doing. You need education. Martin said that he had a professor who likened patience to long suffering. That may be how it is. You have to be patient. When there is a right trade and a good setup, you take it. Let the setup come to you.
Lack of education can cause traders to fail. Some traders will hop in a trade without a clue to what they are doing. There is a flip side to this. There are those traders who feel they have to know everything and continue to demo trade long after they should have moved on. You don’t have to master everything in order to do a system. Learn the basics and try it out on demo. Make your mistakes in demo and then move onto live trading.
As mentioned before, Education Is Important. “The longest path to a destination is a shortcut.” Don’t take shortcuts. Sometimes traders want to figure it out on their own, when they could ask a question or watch a video and learn it in a much shorter time. The time invested in a training video is much shorter than the “shortcut” of trying to figure it out alone. People spend years and thousands of dollars on college for a career. If you want trading to be your career, why would you not spend some time learning to trade? Invest in yourself. Why would you not spend a few hours watching a training course? Ask questions. Don’t be afraid. At Apex Investing, there are chat rooms where you can ask questions and post charts to get help with your trading. You don’t know what you don’t know until someone who does know tells you what you don’t know in order to help you.
The last tip for this article is Poor Risk Management. You’ll blow up your account if you have poor risk management. This is the number one killer of traders! When you think about it, if your account is gone, you have to stop trading. Don’t use bad risk management. You need to have enough so that whatever trading system you are using, you can have proper risk management. You can check out this video to learn more about Risk Management and the 5 percent rule.
Martin has several other tips to help in your trading and those will be presented in the rest of the series. If you would like more information on trading or to register for courses, go to www.apexinvesting.com. Apex Investing Institute offers free education, and free access to the Nadex Binary and Spread Scanner Analyzers. Member traders are invited to trade in the chat rooms, take advantage of trade signal services, use key indicators and access the Apex Forum. The forum content is updated daily and includes over 10,000 members. In a supportive learning community of seasoned as well as up and coming traders, traders of all levels learn how to trade Nadex binaries and spreads in depth, as well as futures, forex, stock and options, and gain an edge for successful trading overall.