Seriously consider forex signals if you are not yet trading profitably, have limited experience, or just don't have much time to devote to your forex trading.
From the simple one email a day variety to the forex mentor who sits with you all day holding your hand as you trade, a portfolio of forex trade alerts can be virtually free and can transform you into a profitable trader instantly.
If like us you've ever analysed a chart and placed your own trades, you will almost certainly have also sat in front of your screen wondering if you were doing the right thing.
Questions like "have I entered this trade too late ?" and "am I trading in the right direction (long when I should be short)" will certainly have entered your mind.
How many times have you wished you had an expert trader with decades of experience guiding your trades, keeping you out of dangerous trades, and pointing you towards trades with a higher probability of success ?
We were certainly in that position many times in the early days, but always imagined the cost of having an expert on hand would far outweigh any extra profits we might make. It turns out we were quite wrong.
There are numerous services available, known variously as forex signals, forex alerts, or forex tips.
Trading signals come in a variety of formats, suited to how much of your day you can devote to trading. And yes beware, there are loads of scams out there too, but we'll show you how to avoid them, and we'll direct you towards the better ones.
Forex Trading Signals - many varieties
The main characteristics of forex trading signals to be aware of are as follows;
* Cost: Free OR monthly subscription
* Complexity: Simple "one email a day" OR Full-Service
* Control: You keep full control OR the signal provider trades your a/c for you
* Trading style: e.g. frequent scalper OR low volume swing trader
A free forex signal may at first seem like a fabulous idea, but as we will reveal here, you may very well prefer to pay for a free subscription service (yes, we know that doesn't make sense - but read on)
Most forex trade signals charge a very modest subscription fee, usually in the region of USD $80 - $400 per month (although happily most are at the lower end of this range), while there are also websites which provide forex signals for no charge.
In their simplest form a forex trading signal will send you a forex alert email once a day listing trade set ups for the next 24 hours.
Some of these are purely computer generated, some are computer generated and then audited by a human expert, and some are completely researched and generated exclusively by a human expert trader who may add some market commentary to their forex forecast.
Some forex trading signals are high volume scalpers, calling many trades in a day aiming to profit a handful of pips on each. Others only call a few trades a day, aiming to profit 20 - 80 pips on each single trade.
At the more full-service end of the market is the type of forex signal service which provides you with an almost 24 hour a day live online broadcast calling forex trading tips as they occur, explaining the logic of the proposed trade and backing it up with an email or even a video clip.
Some forex trading signals will even trade their signals in your own account for you, leaving you to just sit back and watch.
This is similar to what a robot does by using forex signal software, but with the added reassurance that it's being done by an experienced intelligent human trader rather than a dumb machine following an algorithm.
Think of full-service forex trading signals like a forex TV station, which you have running in the background on your pc or internet connected laptop throughout your day. The broadcast remains quiet when there is nothing to do, freeing your time for the other priorities in your day, then calls for your attention when there is a trade to place or manage.
You may be surprised, as we were, to discover that the prices charged by full-service providers are usually very similar to those charged by the one email a day providers.
This type of service usually also includes an interactive facility, enabling you to send a message to your forex mentor if you have a question.
Many forex signal services have very loyal memberships, and some even limit the number of members they will accept.
Free forex signals (virtually)
On the basis that time is money, in our opinion the amount of time we can now devote to other activities by not slaving over our charts for hours searching for the perfect trade set up, not to mention the improvement in our trading results, has more than paid for the very modest cost of the forex signal subscriptions.
Indeed if you apply this logic, subscription based services can effectively be free when you take into account the improvement in your trading profits, and the freeing of your time for other profitable activities.
If you think about it, a subscription based forex signal service has a built-in incentive to call profitable forex trading tips, as its subscriber base would soon evaporate if it failed to provide profitable currency trading tips. "Free" non subscription signals do not have this incentive.
Manage your risk
In any aspect of forex trading your primary goal is to manage your risk. Choosing, and trading a forex trade alert should be no different.
Even the best most experienced provider of forex signals will regularly have losing trades. However taken with all of their winning currency trade signals the overall result should still be profitable, but not all systems work all of the time. Some forex alerts may even have a completely losing week or month.
However, we have found through our own experience that the best way of making consistent profits with forex signals is to subscribe to several different currency trading signals and trade all of their signals. If one of them is having a particularly bad week, the others should compensate and still net you a profitable week, or break even at worst.
Always do your due diligence before trading a provider's forex alerts. Good forex signal services will publish their last 6 - 12 months results on their website. Some will even show you details of the actual trades they took. Expect to see losses as well as winners - that's just the nature of trading. Indeed, if the results show only winners, or the provider is unwilling to show you any results, or to provide contact details of some of their clients willing to give a reference be on your guard.
Most will offer you some sort of free trial or discounted special offer. Make sure that you clearly understand the terms of this offer and know the deadline by which you need to give notice to terminate if you're not happy with the service provided.
If you compare the last 6 month's results of all the forex signal service providers you intend to use, you should find that taken as a whole they delivered a profit.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but we have found that if you have a good combination of trading styles in your trading signals portfolio you are in with a fighting chance of consistent profits whatever the market conditions.
Again, think about the cashflow logic of what you will be doing here - the subscription costs of each forex signals service are already very modest, and by combining them you are increasing your probability of consistent profits. They can't all get it wrong all of the time, and remember they are all incentivised by their membership to get it right as often as possible.
Even with experienced traders calling your trades, it's prudent risk management to never ever risk more than 3% of your initial capital on any one trade, preferably only 1%. So, if for example your initial capital, (or to put it another way, the maximum you can afford to lose) is let's say 5,000, the position size you take on each trade should be such that if the trade hit your stop loss, your maximum loss would be no more than 1% x 5,000 = 50.
Using forex signals as trade ideas
Even if you prefer not to follow forex tips to the letter, you can still profit from their trade idea.
For example, if you receive a forex tip trading the GBP/USD long with a 40 pip stop loss, but on analysing the charts (following your attendance on a forex training course) you feel more comfortable placing the stop loss let's say 63 pips below entry, giving the stop protection below a visible area of recent and prior support, which happens also to be below the weekly pivot point, and in doing so are happy to have a longer range target - then go right ahead and do so.
We were surprised to find that when we did exactly this with one of our forex signals' tips our trades actually performed better than theirs did. Two heads better than one maybe.
The point is though, that without the forex market forecast drawing our attention to that particular chart at that particular time we would never have seen that trade idea.
This also makes the point that while it may at first seem temping to let a signal provider trade your account for you, if you have the time you may actually prefer to control it yourself.
If you have been through a good forex training course and understand the concepts of support, resistance, pivot points, trends etc you should always use this knowledge to perform your own due diligence on forex alerts. You may well find as we did that you can enhance the overall performance of your portfolio of forex trade recommendations.
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