Learning about the common mistakes made in foreign currency trading will help you to improve your skills and chances of being successful. Here are some common mistakes and assumptions new traders make:

- Misplacing Stops
Stops are necessary to avoid bad losses, however poorly placed stops can be just as bad. Before placing a trade the trader should consider the risk to reward ratio for the trade. The stop needs to be set with the traders money management in mind and should not be too close or too far away from the price. Traders should also consider moving their stop as the trade goes in their favor to lock in profits and reduce potential losses.

- Abusing Leverage
With Forex brokers offering up to 400:1 leverage, it’s easy for inexperienced traders to get carried away with the hope of making quick profits. When traders use a high level of leverage the returns can be astounding, but when the trade doesn’t work out the result can be catastrophic. Traders should always calculate the dollar value of the risk they are taking for each trade and ensure that this is appropriate for their account balance. Experienced traders rarely risk more than 2-3% of their account balance on any one trade.

- Placing Technicals On A Pedestal
Technical indicators are great tools that assist traders to make decisions. However making decisions for trades based solely on what the technical indicators are telling us can result in large losses. By considering fundamental information together with technical information you will have a much better chance at being successful.

- Day Trading
There are successful day traders out there. However, for new traders, trading with the longer term trend will be easier and have a better chance of making profits. Longer duration trades give the position more time to move in your favor, particularly if the market is volatile.

- Blindly Following A System
There are a lot of Forex systems out there that promise miraculous results. But if you start trading one of these systems without proof that it actually works you could find your account balance quickly reduced to 0. If you want to use a Forex trading system, a sensible approach is to backtest and forward test it using software or on paper before putting any real money at risk.

- Underestimating Emotions
Emotions can have a huge impact on your Forex trading. Keeping a trade diary will help you to understand how your emotions are affecting your trading, you can then learn to use them to your advantage.

- I Backtested It So It Must Work
A mistake traders make is to assume a backtested system will continue to work. Forex markets are constantly changing and are effected by global and political events. Before you begin to use a backtested system you should consider if it reasonable to assume that the market conditions the system has been tested on are likely to be similar to market conditions in the future.

Hopefully this article has given you some tips on how to avoid common Forex trading mistakes.