I have some newbie questions. Forex has scared me off for a long time, I'm all about safe, more auto pilot ways to make lots of money online. Forex seems as shady as gambling your life away in Vegas.

1. If you mess up, could you end up in debt? Or does it stop after you run out of money?

2. It seems that you need a large starting pot to even do Forex trading. Could you make a decent amount of money with $500 or less? Could you, with $200 realistically quintriple that in a year with Forex trading?

3. Those "mock" forex websites. Can you give yourself an amount of money and play around with it, testing out strategies? Do the websites try to trick you by making it so that in your mock trials, you do super well, so that when you do it for real, you get screwed over?

1.) If you run out of margin, your broker will close your positions so you don't end up in debt. Don't worry.


2.) Yes it is possible, however, you will fail - adding an extra few hundreds dollars purely to protect against draw down or to hedge against can be useful.


3.) "Slippage" is the key thing to look out for; on practice servers, everything is instant. On live servers, there's a 15-20 second "gap" sometimes between order place and execution. If you trade fundamentals, don't even think about it until you can afford a ECN at $50,000 or you'll piss money away! Plus the spreads are different and closing orders may take a few seconds so if your scalping pips, you'll get whipsawed and your profit wont exist when it closes. Broker will blame market liquidity and theres nothing you can do.

Agreed, it is like gambling. In the UK there are many licensed gambling bodies who "speculate" on forex; its the same as trading but the earnings are tax free as it's technically gambling.

My advice; save your money for another 2 years and wait for the economy to recover and go back to its old habits. I was making consistent return month on month of 20%. Then the economic downturn came in and wiped my strategy out - there's literally no way anyone could have known (look at how much the banks and stock lost!)

Good luck whatever you decide!

get a practice account at oanda, they are honest. what you practice with is what you get. I have turned $500 into $2000 in a few days but is just pure gambling for me. I have lost more than I made

if you have a plan, maybe you can do better