Tag Archives: forex

Forex trading is a wonderful opportunity to go into investment with less capital than most traditional markets require. What this means though is that many people who are interested in trading Forex will be doing so in the framework of another life—a life which may include a part time or full time job and additional responsibilities. It is not recommended that you quit your current job to start Forex trading, unless you are sitting on so much capital already that you can live off of your savings for a long time. Trying to make a living on FX alone in the beginning stages carries many fallbacks, dooming many traders who might have been successful otherwise.

It is tempting to think that the cons of part-time Forex trading outweigh the pros. After all, if you trade Forex full time, then you can concentrate 100% of your time to the market. When you trade part-time, you may lose out on a lot of trading opportunities. It’s rough to have to trade overnight (when the markets are most active in some parts of the world) and then wake up in the morning and go to a “real job” after all. It’s difficult to trade at work, and often times impossible. That leaves a fairly small number of hours in which to trade. Of course, you might be able to get around this by taking long term trades, but if that isn’t your style, you’re going to struggle to place interday and intraday trades in between work hours, and get out of them in time.

That sounds like a lot of cons, doesn’t it? Consider though that if you trade full time and you don’t have another source of income, you will need to make enough on your trades to pay your rent and bills. This means withdrawing constantly from your Forex account, so you may have a hard time moving forward. It also means that while you may be able to dedicate 100% of your time to Forex trading, you won’t be able to dedicate 100% of your attention. This is again assuming you aren’t sitting on a pile of savings. If indeed you aren’t, you may feel worried each month about how you’re going to pay the bills. Injecting worry and pressure into trading causes bad trading decisions in most cases. This is a hard enough business to succeed in without compromising your trades with a perpetual state of fear.

So how can you integrate trading into your life if you can only trade part time?

This used to be quite a quandary, and it’s still difficult to manage, but thanks to the growth of mobile technology it should soon be getting easier to manage your trades while you’re away from home. While you may not have access to a computer at work, or may not be able to use the company computer to trade, if you bring a mobile device to work, you may be able to use it to trade. More and more FX brokers are giving traders the ability to access their full platform via mobile, complete with all the rich features of their desktop platform. This means that many more people will be able to receive alerts and place trades while at work.

Supposing your job still doesn’t let you do this? In this case, if possible, try to find a job where you can do both at once, or find a way to make up for the loss of trading opportunities. You may be able to do this by choosing a new timeframe, or by looking at more currencies. If you only see a perfect trade line up twice a month on one currency, you may find two opportunities a week instead by looking at eight currencies.

Balancing part-time FX trading with another job can be a real hassle, but unless you have a lot of capital both to live on and trade with, it probably would be to your detriment to try to make a living off of your foreign exchange brokers in the beginning. Making a living off of FX is a responsible and worthwhile goal to aim for though. It’s a meaningful goal and may motivate you more than just “I want to make a million dollars.” So aim for that goal and keep working, and keep trading!