Why Hard Work Does Not Guarantee Success in the Forex Market

Forex trading is like any other business and you need to work hard in order to be successful. If you don't work hard during your Forex trading career, depending on your trading strategy of course, you will struggle very hard to become successful. However what many beginners and even more experienced currency traders think, is that hard work will always result in great success, but it isn't that simple.

You could work 24 hours a day in a fast food restaurant, 365 days a year with no sleep at all (which is obviously impossible) and end up with less than $100,000 if you worked at minimum wage and didn't spend any money at all. This example goes to show that you can work very hard but still not make a lot of money. You could put in many hours into your currency trading, but you won't necessarily become successful. This is where the concept of working smartly comes in.

It is pointless staring at price charts and graphs for hours on end. In fact it's also pointless to spend hours researching about them, because you could go for many years and still not manage to develop a profitable trading plan that allows you to deduce any kind of profit consistently.

If you want to work smart, you need to think carefully about how you use your time. Ultimately, the best way of becoming a more profitable Forex trader is to gain experience. To gain experience, you should ideally do a good amount of research but also apply any knowledge you gain through practice. So, in order to work smartly, you should allocate some time to studying and the rest of your time to practice. Eventually when you feel confident enough, you might decide to open a live currency trading account, allocating slightly less time to both your studies and practice. It doesn't really matter how you go about it, as long as you make sure that you are not only working hard but working smartly.

How you work will depend on your Forex trading strategy and situation. For example, you might only have a little amount of time to study and practice if you have a full-time job, in which case you would have to manage your time as effectively as possible. If you have a full-time job, you might want to dedicate some time over the weekends to study and dedicate some time on business days to your practice (because the Forex market is not open across the majority of weekends).

Currency trading is all about trial-and-error learning; if you're not successful the first time round, then persevere and try to discover what mistakes you made. By looking at how you went wrong in previous times, you can then try to prevent these mistakes in the future and correct yourself; always look to improve yourself. Even if you eventually become consistently profitable, if you stand still you will go backwards; you need to constantly look to maximize your profits and minimize your losses or you simply won't last in the currency market. You can of course make a lot of money by trading currencies by solely relying on luck, but it's pretty rare for a Forex trader to be successful in the market for currencies without consistently working hard and smartly.

In conclusion, in order to be successful in the FX market, you need to not only work hard but work smart too. You can work as hard as you possibly can but still get nowhere, so you should also focus on using your time wisely as time is a very precious commodity. Success is not guaranteed by just working hard, in fact it's not even guaranteed by working smartly, but by working smartly you will significantly increase your chances of success in the Forex market.