Welcome to our Forex Case Study on Happiness Is Better.

To ensure you don’t miss anything, be sure to subscribe to our free full RSS Feed!

I am being coached by Forex expert, Mindy Yost. She has been Forex trading for over 8 years and full time for 6 years. I will be detailing my progress through a monthly report. I opened a demo account and am currently trading under her guidance through Skype (wow, Skype is really handy!). Skype is essentially an internet-based phone/text communication service (VOIP).

To start off our training, Mindy had me read through a handy website, Baby Pips. If you’ve never heard of Forex before, it stands for the foreign exchange (currency) market. Forex trading is the buying or selling of a currency “pair” and the one that I am learning about is the Euro paired with the US Dollar and is called the EUR/USD. In the Forex world, there is a thing known as a pip. I had heard the term pip before, but I really didn’t understand what it meant. A pip is the increment by which a currency pair is measured for trading purposes. In the case of the EUR/USD, a pip is 1/100th of a cent and would be displayed as $0.0001. Baby Pips explains a pip as “if the EUR/USD moves from 1.2250 to 1.2251, that is ONE PIP. A pip is the last decimal place of a quotation. The Pip is how you measure your profit or loss.” The Pip VALUE however is a little different and is determined by the size of the trade you make. In Forex trading you cannot trade one EUR/USD at a time. Forex is traded in 100,000 units at a time in a standard account, and 10,000 at a time in a mini account. I am using a mini account so the pip value when I trade one mini lot is $1.00 ($0.0001 X 10,000). So, when I am in a trade, I will earn or lose $1.00 for each pip the market moves. If I were to trade multiple mini lots at a time, the pip value would be determined by multiplying $1.00 times the number of mini lots I made the trade for. Basically, the more pips the market moves in the direction of my trade the better! If the market moves against my trade, that can be a bad thing. But, as Mindy says, the market can only do two things - go up or go down, so if you are willing to wait it out, your trade will probably be profitable sooner or later (if you have enough money in your account to cover the loss before the market goes your way).

So what makes Forex trading so attractive? One major advantage Forex trading has over traditional stocks is leverage. Leverage means that when you make a Forex trade, you essentially only put down a small deposit for the trade. In most cases the Leverage Ratio is 200:1. So, when I do a one mini lot trade, instead of fronting $10,000 to make that trade, I only put up a $50 deposit to control the 10,000 units in the mini lot. Another new term to me is that of a “Margin Call”. In Forex trading, the Brokerage House will not let you lose more money that is in your account, so if your trade go so far negative, that you no longer have any more money to cover any additional loss on you trade, they will close your trade at the accrued loss. This means that you will have lost a lot of money and is a bad thing, but, unlike some other venues, at least they will not call you up and ask for even MORE money! Leverage is always a double edged sword, and can work for you or against you. One thing that Mindy has stressed to me is the importance of properly funding your account. The best way to protect yourself in Forex is to “over fund” your account and put way more money in it that what you expect to trade with and then make small trades. Also, remember these things: 1) do not open an account with money you can’t afford to lose, 1) do not open an account with “a little” money as a test-the-waters type of trial, and 3) don’t trade Forex unless you have nerves of steel. You can properly fund your account yet trade in small quantities to minimize risk while you are getting your feet wet. However, if you do not properly fund your account, you run into the possibility of having the broker perform a margin call and lose your money. Another attractive feature of Forex is that it’s a large market that can’t be altered or controlled by a few people. To give you an idea of the enormity of Forex, about $4 trillion is exchanged daily compared to $25 billion exchanged on the New York Stock Exchange. There are also no commissions charged by the brokers and you can trade basically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you are interested in Forex trading, it is advisable that you read through School of Pipsology on Baby Pips and if you want to contact Mindy for mentoring, let me know (happinessisbetter@gmail.com) and I will give you her email address.

It’ll be at least a month or two before I start trading with real money, but in the mean time I’ll be showing you the results of my demo account.