Forex Forums - A Waste of Time?

Many people look for hints and tips in forex forums when they first start out. There are a lot of forums online and you will find pretty much every currency trading question addressed there.

The word forum comes from ancient Rome where it was the open public space in the middle of the city where matters of great importance were debated. Meetings were held there and politics and other important subjects would be discussed.

On the internet, forums have replaced the old bulletin boards where people posted messages in reply to each other. Bulletin boards were hard to navigate and the new format is much more user friendly.

One of the best uses of a currency trading forum is to seek out reviews of software, ebooks and training programs that you are thinking of buying. Look for people who have used it and have left their opinion about it. This will help you to pick something that will be suitable for you.

Even if you are just planning to download something for free, it is worth looking for feedback. You will have to spend some time on the software or information and time is money. Plus if you start using something for trading and it does not work, you could lose money.

When you are doing this, however, be careful not to attach too much importance to one person's opinion, whether it is positive or negative. One view by itself is not very useful. The person might have had unusually good or bad luck with the product. Search a little further to find a balance of views.

A currency trading forum can be a good place to go when you have questions about trading as well. However, this does have some disadvantages that you should keep in mind.

First, you will be getting advice from different people who may not agree with each other. There are many ways to make money with currency trading and traders may give contradictory advice. This can be confusing. Be careful not to be diverted away from your system by somebody who happens to use a different system.

Second, be careful that you are not just kicking your heels and wasting time. It is easy to get interested in a debate that has nothing to teach you, or to hang out in forums for the social contact and nothing else. You can waste hours this way when you could have been learning from experience with your forex demo account or even making money for real.

Be cautious too when it comes to trusting the advice that you are given. Usually you will not know anything about the other forum members. Being active and having a high post count in the forum means nothing: some people spend more time hanging out in forums than they spend trading. Others may turn out to be only using a forex demo account and never even made a real trade. It is easy for anybody to sound like an expert in the forex forums, so watch out.

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Jason Cline writes on automated forex trading systems and the forex market for several websites. Check out his blog at http://foreignexchangetraining.blogspot.com