Diary of a Beginning Trader: GBPUSD is my first successful trade

Diary of a Beginning Trader is written by non-professionals trading with the Saxo Bank platform on no-risk demo accounts.  We encourage other novice traders to open free Saxo Bank demo accounts and tell us about their experiences.

I suppose that numbers are in my blood.  Both of my parents were accountants in my home country, Kenya, and my father always left lots of papers full of fascinating numbers lying around the house.  He always encouraged my brothers and sisters and I to take up careers that involved mathematics, and although he died in 2000, when I trade forex I feel a little closer to him.

The first time I ever made ‘money’ trading forex, it happened like this:  I was attending a managerial economics lecture at Copenhagen Business School.  Since I had studied economics in my earlier education at Roskilde Handelsskole, it was all repetition to me. Using the Saxo Bank trader I had installed on my laptop, I decided to trade during the class session. 

I put in a cable order, GBPUSD at 1.62406, with a stop loss at 1.62664.  I was eager to see how much profit I would actually make by the end of the session. The first time I checked, I had made a profit of 512, which got me really excited. The next time I checked it was at 580 and I felt my heart leap, it was very exciting, and then I followed the currency up to 1.61624, and sold at a profit of USD 609.  I remember I shouted ‘’yes!!’’ in class and everybody stared at me. The lecturer asked me if everything was okay. I replied yes, and further explained that I had reacted that way because I had finally understood what he was saying. Everybody in class laughed.  Bravo, 782 pips!  

Of course, it wasn’t really money, because I was trading on Saxo Bank’s demo account, which is what I intend to do until I get good enough to risk some of my own limited cash.  I am a student right now, studying finance at Copenhagen Business School.  My ultimate goal is to become a professional forex trader.

Kiwi trade did not go well
My very first trade, as part of a special forex training seminar at school, was kiwi – that’s New Zealand currency, for newbies like me.  It did not go well.  I got overly excited by the candlestick charts, and that was the only indicator I looked at.  I put in the order at 1.534, then it went to 1.784, then 1.201, and before I knew it I had lost 400 dollars! (Fortunately it was all on the demo account.) The teacher was very supportive, because he said at least it showed I knew how to put in an order.  He also pointed out that I needed to consider other indicators when trading, like the relative strength index and Bollinger bands. 

Now when I get home from university, I spend a lot of time practicing trading.  I have started to explore Saxo Bank’s MetaTrader4, and my favorite currency pair is cable. My strategy is considering the position of the navigators .i.e. checking the position of the RSI, candle sticks and the Bollinger bands after having checked the financial calendar on TradingFloor.com.

I am still struggling a little bit with the MetaTrader4 platform. Last week I accidentally deleted the Market Watch section, the part that shows which currencies you can choose from and trade, and of course I did it after 9 pm, which is when technical help closes here in Denmark.  But I tried to fix it on my own.  I am really determined to get to know the platform and learn how to effectively trade currencies.