Here we will look at some popular strategies and tools, traders use which either, don't increase the odds of success or even worse, will see you lose. Let's look at FX education to avoid in more detail.

The first area we will look at is very popular with novice traders but will actually see you lose money and involves traders trying to find a short cut to success and its the cheap Forex robot...

Avoid Cheap Software

If you want to guarantee losses in FX trading, use cheap software packages. These laughable programs claim you win with no effort by following them but there so cheap, because they lose money – avoid them.

Avoid Predictive Systems

Any system that tells you that you can predict prices in advance should be avoided you can't predict where Forex prices might go so don't try, or your predictions will end up as accurate as your horoscope. Prediction is another word for hoping or guessing which won't get you far in life or in FX trading. This now leads me onto some dead gurus which the people who promote them, all claim they can predict the future.

Avoid these Popular Dead Gurus

There are many of these and they are normally based on the work of dead gurus such as Gann, Elliot and Fibonacci. They all claim markets move to some higher force and can be predicted but this is rubbish – if Forex markets really could be predicted in advance there would be no market, as we would all know the price before hand.

Gann claims price is measured in time which is ridiculous and the fact his own son, said he had to sell courses to make a living, shows that perhaps this view was flawed!

Elliot is another who made no real money trading Forex yet, his wave theory remains immensely popular.

Last but not least, we have Fibonacci, his disciples claim that his number sequence is based on mathematics and if you buy retracements to certain levels you will increase your odds of success but sometimes they hold sometimes they don't. In fact, Fibonacci was a brilliant thinker but his Fibonacci number sequence, has nothing to do with Forex! It was originally devised to solve a problem to do with the copulation of rabbits and Fibonacci would be as puzzled as me, as to why his work has not been hijacked by the “Far Out” investment crowd.

Avoid Day Trading and Trading Market Noise

Day trading and scalping is very popular but is a great way to make a lot of effort and lose money because – all short term price movement and volatility in daily and hourly time frames is random. When you are trading random volatility, you can't get the odds on your side and this means, you can never win long term.

Candlestick Charts are Better than Bar Charts

I must admit I find candlestick charts fun, they have great names for various set ups but are any of the candles highly reliable or better than bar charts?

The answer is no. Also who really needs a fancy candle name to tell you that when a currency has made a new high and closes near its low its bearish? My view of candlestick charts if you find them fun use them but they don't give you an edge in your trading strategy, in terms of a particular formation on its own, increasing your odds of success.

Final Words

The above strategies are popular but none of them will increase your chances of success and most, will actually increase your odds of losing money.

If you want to trade Forex and win – trade long term trends and base your strategy on trading the reality of price change and never predict. Of course, you can use candlestick charts, there fun but don't expect them to give you an edge with a specific candle being more reliable than any other.