People are more interested than ever in the past couple of years in trading, but the fact remains lots of them stay bitter after a couple of trades because they didn’t have proper experience or guidance.

They usually act impulsively and believe in scam commercials that say you can get thousands in a day. The crucial thing is to get your facts checked and do as much preparation as you can.

Trading forex without any preparation or prior experience can be a daunting task and is usually a quick way to lose the money invested. In this article, we want to walk you through the best and fastest ways to learn how to trade forex to maximize your chances of success!

Theory AND Practice

One of the great things about forex trading platforms is that traders can combine their theoretical knowledge with practicing with real-time data and market movements.

This is due to most forex platforms having a “demo” or “trial” mode, where you can play around with a certain amount of virtual money. In “demo” mode, you have not invested any money and have a set amount of virtual currency (usually 50,000 – 100,000 USD) to play around with and experiment.

The free play mode will let you try your hand at some trades you might not usually contemplate and is excellent for learning about the specific platforms.

And if you don't know the differences between demo and live trading then read this guide: Demo vs Live Trading

Which to start first?

This would depend on you and your best learning approaches. Whether you prefer to read up before trying out what you’ve read, starting the two in parallel, or just wanting to play around the platform first before you start acquiring more in-depth knowledge, “demo” modes are accommodating for all learning styles.

Theory

The relatively recent proliferation of websites discussing and teaching everything from Fibonacci retracement and its use, basics of technical analysis and trading strategies have been a boon for the smart beginner traders.

You can learn everything you would need to know how to make an informed buy or sell decision on these sites.

Here you can also find people sharing their successes and failures, so you can learn directly from them about some of the pitfalls of trading and how to avoid them.

A lot of trading platforms will have their own training videos on how to use the platform, as well as videos or webinars on the fundamentals of trading, which could be great resources for those on the fence who need to see how things work before dipping a toe into the world of forex trading.

Practice

If you’re asking yourself: “Why should I not just trade after learning from different websites?” the answer is: “You can!”. However, it would also be useful to exercise some of your newly acquired knowledge and practice using the platforms themselves.

Some platforms like FP Markets will allow you to make significant changes to orders, stop loss, or take win triggers, so it would be good to know how to use those to protect your investments.

Using these orders will also allow you to automate some of your trading activities, so you would not need to be stuck to the screen at all times and react with the speed of a rattlesnake on energy drinks to make the best of the market.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you how to trade forex these days. It is no longer a niche of activity; it was a few years ago, which is a great thing! Why? Because all that wealth of knowledge is now available to new traders and will save them a lot of time and effort.

The “demo” account will also show them how easy it can be to learn how to trade, implement that knowledge, and encourage them to start trading with “live” accounts.