FOREX TRADING

Trading is the exchange of goods or services between two or more parties. So if you need gasoline for your car, then you would trade your dollars for gasoline. In the old days, and still in some societies, trading was done by barter, where one commodity was swapped for another. A trade may have gone like this: Person A will fix Person B’s broken window in exchange for a basket of apples from Person B’s tree. This is a practical, easy to manage, day-to-day example of making a trade, with relatively easy management of risk. In order to lessen the risk, Person A might ask Person B to show his apples, to make sure they are good to eat, before fixing the window. This is how trading has been for millennia: a practical, thoughtful human process.

This is Now
Now enter the world wide web and all of a sudden risk can become completely out of control, in part due to the speed at which a transaction can take place. In fact, the speed of the transaction, the instant gratification and the adrenalin rush of making a profit in less than 60 seconds can often trigger a gambling instinct, to which many traders may succumb. Hence, they might turn to online trading as a form of gambling rather than approaching trading as a professional business that requires proper speculative habits. (Learn more in Are You Investing Or Gambling?)
Speculating as a trader is not gambling. The difference between gambling and speculating is risk management. In other words, with speculating, you have some kind of control over your risk, whereas with gambling you don’t. Even a card game such as Poker can be played with either the mindset of a gambler or with the mindset of a speculator, usually with totally different outcomes.

Betting Strategies
There are three basic ways to take a bet: Martingale, anti-Martingale or speculative. Speculation comes from the Latin word "speculari," meaning to spy out or look forward.
In a Martingale strategy, you would double-up your bet each time you lose, and hope that eventually the losing streak will end and you will make a favorable bet, thereby recovering all your losses and even making a small profit.
Using an anti-Martingale strategy, you would halve your bets each time you lost, but would double your bets each time you won. This theory assumes that you can capitalize on a winning streak and profit accordingly. Clearly, for online traders, this is the better of the two strategies to adopt. It is always less risky to take your losses quickly and add or increase your trade size when you are winning.

However, no trade should be taken without first stacking the odds in your favor, and if this is not clearly possible then no trade should be taken at all. (For more on the Martingale method, read FX Trading The Martingale Way.)

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