RJo

I've only been trading spot forex for a few years, but I won't be ambiguous regarding what I've learned in this short time. Forget forex futures unless you have at least $10k due to minimum account size requirements. Avoid all paid services. Yes, they are straight up scams. If you had a system of guaranteed profits, wouldn't you trade it instead of leasing it? The self-proclaimed guru, Henry Leiu, comes to mind. Research your prospective dealer. In spot forex there are no brokers, only dealers. Brokering implies some sort of fiduciary relationship. There is none. Before US reforms kicked in, many dealers were straight up criminals. Bain Capital, formerly operating as CMS Forex and now operating as Forex.com comes to mind. There is no centralized spot market, so you have no access to contract volumes, only tick volumes. You are trading against giant international banks who fund your dealer in an off market exchange where your account resides. Think twice about going overseas to get access to low spreads, hedging, and low margin requirements. This is where the criminals went. Research your prospective platform. If you like freeware, MetaTrader 4 (MT4) can't be beat. I have a library of over 1100 indicators and only purchased one of them (the platform itself is also free). This is how many it took me to create a "better than half-profitable" strategy. For MT4, there is user friendly software out there allowing you to build custom indicators and automatic trading systems (if you think your strategy is that good). But even with frequent updates, MT4 is old and if you run to many charts with too much history and too many indicators, it can freeze up. MT5 is out there but the freebies for MT5 are much fewer. Before you even get into indicators and/or trying to build a strategy, I would investigate the various ways of viewing price data in the first place. MT4 only allows 9 time frames ranging from 1 minute to 1 month, and only half of those of useful for day trading. You can use time frames based on any number of ticks, seconds, minutes, hours, days, range bars, or renko bars (just google Flexichart, RenkoLiveChart, and RenkoRangeBarsEA). Your indicators and systems will display vastly differently depending how you display your price on the chart. For example, some traders use Renko Bar charts and no indicators at all! Unlike many traders, I no longer attempt to follow any economic calendars or news events. In reality, any news is probably too old to trade by the time retail traders receive it anyway. Besides, when a rate decision or a natural disaster triggers my technicals I either get stopped out or a profit run--same as always. Books are entertaining if you want to know why EU was nicknamed Cable, but again you will find better information for free in the multitude of forums online. By now it should be clear that I'm a day trader who feeds off volatility. If you want to be a long term investor, I don't have the slightest clue. Do your research, open a "demo" account, settle on your data display(s), and start trading play money. Keep reading, keep reading, and keep reading the forums. Good trading to you.