Forex Money Management 101: 4x Trading Made Simple
Trading 4x is not as easy or as hard as most people think. It’s just different. Novice and experienced traders often make the same mistakes over and over again. Emotional investing, God complexes, or just plain gambling. So, the most important rule number 1 with 4x trading:
Rule 1 of Forex Money Management is Do Not Lose Money! Forget the holy grail of profits, just protect yourself from losing money.
There is no such thing as a forex robot, super computer or the Albert Einstein of 4x trading. We cannot catch every market high to sell, nor every market low to buy. We WILL miss 4x trading opportunities. Get over it! But opportunity cost is not the same as money cost. If I miss a trade through caution or being asleep in bed, that is not the same as getting on a 4x trade and losing on it.
2% of your 4x account is more than you should be risking on a trade if you have proper and effective forex money management.
But let’s get creative with our highly leveraged 4x trading and our forex money management rule. I have a $10,000 trading account. That means I am only allowed to risk $200 of my account on any trade. If I am trading full lots, that means I must set my stop losses at 20 pips. But on extra wildly fluctuating days, I like to trade 5 lots. That means I must set my stops at 4 pips to follow the forex money management rules. How to give the trade room to breath?
How can I trade 5 lots in a highly volatile trading market and only be able to let the trade breath by 4 pips? Quite easily actually. Follow the 1 hour chart for EURUSD for 19th August, 2009. Go on, open up your trading platform now to see the history for that day or I am wasting my time writing this article. You will see that in 3 hours the USD crashed on bad news with the Euro appreciating from 1.4111 to 1.4265 – all in 3 hours. That’s a hefty move.
Not even a super computer could predict to buy at 1.4111. News traders would have got on board based on the USA problems sure. But actually, I was lucky enough to be already long a few hours earlier. But with only a 4 pips stop loss? Luck or stupid?
Fact is I was going out shopping with the girlfriend and I had trading signal software telling me I should be long. So I had placed 2 pending orders. The first was a 5 lots pending buy limit order at 1.4080 (in case of a dip in my favor), and to cover this potential and to obey forex money management rules, I also placed a 5 lots pending sell short order – one cancels the other out should they get executed.
While I was shopping, the market dipped to 1.4069 and I was losing $500 on the long position which was balanced out by the $500 profit on the short position. Think about it. The market could do whatever it wanted and I could not lose. The first rule of forex money management was safely in place with the risk of loss limited to the 0.9 pip spread to do the trades. it only took an hour to close out the short position at zero loss and then I was free to let the long position have as much as it wanted.
After closing out the short position at break even and with the long position in profits, then the next few hours was all about protecting that profit. I was never at risk of losing my 2%. When it profits were high enough, I set the trade to a 20 pips trailing stop and let the trade play out. $8,250 or 82.5% profit on the day. Never was the forex money management rule ever broken. By using hedging, my account was protected.
Hedging your positions is just one essential technique that a professional trader will use to enforce the forex money management rules.
Phil Jarvie is a professional forex trader expert in fx trading, fx sofware and using fx hedging for forex money management and may wish to visit his website to consider his reviews on how to make money trading currencies
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