{"id":12921,"date":"2010-09-12T15:06:05","date_gmt":"2010-09-12T19:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/fx\/?p=12921"},"modified":"2010-09-12T15:06:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-12T19:06:05","slug":"an-invaluable-tip-for-forex-newbies-let-your-winning-trades-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2010\/09\/12\/an-invaluable-tip-for-forex-newbies-let-your-winning-trades-run\/","title":{"rendered":"An Invaluable Tip For Forex Newbies &#8211; Let Your Winning Trades Run"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By James Woolley<\/strong> &#8211; Forex trading was never designed to be easy. Just learning the basics  is hard enough, but then you have to come up with a trading system that  is able to generate consistent profits in the long term. So to help you  achieve this goal I want to offer one valuable piece of advice and  that&#8217;s to let your winning trades run for as long as possible.<\/p>\n<p>You would be amazed how many people are taking huge risks just to make  small profits. For example I&#8217;ve come across people who use huge stop  losses of say 500 points and are only targeting profits in the region of  50-100 points. Worst still there are some people out there who don&#8217;t  use any stop losses at all, which is just absolutely crazy, and will  almost certainly lead to disaster.<\/p>\n<p>The ideal trading system should keep losses to a minimum and use tight  stop losses so that any losses that are incurred are relatively small.  Furthermore you should only risk a small amount of capital (I personally  suggest no more than 3%) on any one trade. For instance if you have  $10,000 in your trading account, then your maximum loss on your next  trade (if your stop loss is triggered) should be no more than $300.   As I pointed out earlier, you should also let your winning trades run.  There are two ways you can do this. You can either patiently hold on to a  long-running position until a trend appears to be over, which is quite  hard to do in practice, or you can do what I do and that&#8217;s to scale out  of a position in two stages.<\/p>\n<p>I generally close half the position for around 50 points on the major  currency pairs when trading my 4 hour system and then let the other half  of the position run for as long as possible in the hope that it move  several hundred points in my favour.<\/p>\n<p>The beauty of this approach is that the second half of the position is  essentially a free trade because I will always move my stop-loss to  break-even as soon as I close the first half of the position. This takes  some of the emotion out of the trade and allows you to hold onto your  winning trades for a lengthy period until the trend is over or until  your long-term price target is reached.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway the point is that the longer you let your winning trades run, the  easier it is to make consistent profits (providing you use a tight stop  loss of course). This is because this style of trading requires a much  lower overall success rate. You don&#8217;t need every trade to be a winner.  You just need a few big winning trades every so often.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>About the Author<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Click here for more <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/\">forex trading tips<\/a><\/span> and to read a full <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/2010\/05\/08\/forex-mastery-20-review\/\">Forex Mastery 2.0 review<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By James Woolley &#8211; Forex trading was never designed to be easy. Just learning the basics is hard enough, but then you have to come up with a trading system that is able to generate consistent profits in the long term. So to help you achieve this goal I want to offer one valuable piece &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2010\/09\/12\/an-invaluable-tip-for-forex-newbies-let-your-winning-trades-run\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;An Invaluable Tip For Forex Newbies &#8211; Let Your Winning Trades Run&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}