A Girl’s Guide to Getting Started in Forex
by Myra Druce
How I Started My Forex Journey
What Exactly is My ‘Job’?
I’m in the process of buying a new car and went along to visit the car dealer just recently to choose the model, colour, trim etc., etc., and, oh yes, fill in all that paperwork the dealer needs you to complete to get the car of your dreams. You know 
the stuff: name, address, date of birth (oh no, got to give the real one for a change girls!) name of employer.….. name of employer?
That threw me; I no longer have an employer, I’m free of bosses, I’m my own boss now. But the paperwork needs an answer and it has to know what my job is. So I asked myself, what is it I do? How do I categorise my ‘employment?’ A broad description could be ‘I work in the financial sector’ but that’s just far too broad.
Am I a currency analyst? Not really, the term analyst doesn’t tell people what it is I do on a day to day basis. These days, when people ask me what my job is I answer: I buy and sell money in the foreign exchange markets, and by my reckoning that makes me a currency trader or foreign exchange trader. Foreign Currency Trader is what went down on the paperwork and
having to think about categorising what I do for a job made me wonder how I got involved in currency trading in the first place?
Now what follows is an account of my very first tentative steps to become a currency trader; I do not recommend that anyone starts their journey as I did, every individual who decides to embark on trading currencies (or anything else for that matter) must be prepared to undertake and be responsible for their own due diligence.
How I Arrived Here
The world of corporate internal communications had just decided it could do without my services and made me a handsome offer, one I couldn’t refuse, to go and try out pastures new. I now found myself with plenty of time on my hands but with nothing much to occupy me. A little project is called for I thought, but what? Something that was going to provide me with an income would be good; the corporate parting handshake was not going to last forever. Now what do us girl’s do in this situation? Communicate of course; we were born to do it, where would social networking be without us?? Get onto the internet then, I thought, update your social network profiles; rekindle internet contacts; find out what people are up to and what ideas are floating around out there; go onto Google and search for anything related to money, working from home, home businesses etc., etc. and that’s where I stumbled upon foreign currency trading – literally stumbled, as a Facebook friend had pointed me in the direction of StumbleUpon.
I came across a lady who was telling me I could trade the foreign currency markets from my home computer and she had a ‘foolproof’ system for doing this. I was intrigued, money to be made, not just money though, foreign money. I’ve always loved foreign money, such fun to use on holiday, all those weird banknotes and coins, and the fun of working out what it would cost in ‘real money’. (Real money for me is the British Pound; your real money is your own country’s currency). I’ve always kept some coins from foreign trips, just to remind me of the visit. Now I could work from home, buying and selling foreign money from my own computer – what a great idea!
I sent off for the system and eagerly awaited its arrival, not as a PDF document but a published, printed and bound manual. I had researched the lady, I’d researched the publisher, and I’d decided the price for the system was both sensible, affordable and, more to the point, an amount of money I was prepared to risk loosing if it didn’t work out. After all, I knew absolutely nothing about trading foreign currency, so how would I know if the system would work unless I tried it.
There’s a little analogy here of course, unwittingly, without being aware of it at the time, I’d utilised a small part of risk management, by deciding if the amount of money I was prepared to spend from my available resources was an affordable risk against any potential future rewards – my risk to reward ratio in other words. In this case I didn’t know what the rewards might be, but I did know how much money I could afford to lose and not worry about it.
Not necessarily a conventional start to a currency trading career then, but if the shoes fit in the first place, then why not fly in the face of convention, at least you’ll be comfortable on the journey girls. You can read more about my journey to trading forex at my blog.
About the Author - Myra Druce
Myra has always been fascinated with the different currencies of the world, particularly what makes them ebb and flow. When the opportunity presented itself for her to give up her day job in Internal Corporate Communications to learn about the forex market she jumped at the chance. Little did she know that the currency market would become an all-consuming interest for her and she would become a full time forex trader.
She still retains a passion for communication and has started her own blog, www.forexforgirls.blogspot.com to record her progress and hopefully encourage any ‘girl’ traders out there who may come across it.
Outside of the forex world, she has two lovely and talented grown up daughters and lives in a beautiful part of the English countryside. Her hobbies include horse riding and hill walking, music, literature and the psychology of trading’.
