Often, when you’re having a bad trading streak and you find yourself losing trade after trader after trade, you get a sense like the market is set against you. All you hear are success stories of people who make a ton of money with Forex trading and yet you seem to be unable to replicate their success.
I know that some traders actually start to believe that Forex is somehow rigged against them, as if they don’t really have any chance to succeed, as if there’s someone calling the shots and making all the money on their back.
Whenever I hear or read something of that nature I am reminded of how I was as a kid. I used to play in my brother’s old Apple computer and he had an old but fun basketball game that I used to like called one-on-one where you got to be either Larry Bird or Dr. J, and play against the other.
Anyway, when I was a kid I liked this game mostly when I was winning. I didn’t like it when I was losing. In fact, it quickly got very frustrating for me and I used to yell at the computer that it was cheating, that it wasn’t fair somehow.
I know this may seem lame but give me a break, I was just a kid. My dad used to laugh at me all the time because I just didn’t accept that the computer wasn’t cheating. It wasn’t able to. It was just a machine that does what it’s programmed to. It wasn’t rigged against me.
You know what? Neither is Forex.
The market isn’t rigged against any specific trader, whether it’s you or anyone else. It’s not able to. It doesn’t have any emotions or a mind of its own. It doesn’t single you out. It doesn’t even know you.
The worst thing about feeling that the market is somehow rigged is that it can make you quit out of frustration. This isn’t the way to go about things. When I was a kid I just kept on playing until I got better at the game, enough so I wasn’t frustrated anymore.
This is how you beat Forex. You get better at it. You play it safe and small at first, knowing that the money you lose is a tuition you pay for a trading education. You control your risk and you know that as you improve your skills, as you get better at trading, that you will find a way to beat the market at its own game. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow, but you should still be confident that it will happen for you.
Don’t be like me when I was a kid and yell at the computer for cheating you. It won’t help. Only by developing your skill will you truly master the art of Forex.
