I first heard about Forex from a co-worker around July of 2007 while we were working together on a web programming project. I’ve never done any investing, but he was telling me that it seemed like a good deal because several of the brokerages were offering the ability to programatically make trades using a variety of computer languages. At the time, he discussed how
Forex.com (Gain Capital) had just opened up their programming API to traders. Being programmers, this intrigued me, as well as a co-worker of mine. However, at the time, we were too busy with work to do anything at the time. Fast forward to early 2008. I was working very few hours for my job and had a lot of time to research Forex. And research I did.
The first thing I did was to purchase a
book 
on Forex. I won’t mention it, because it was not very good. However, my co-worker Bill picked up the "Dummies" guide to Forex and said it was very good.
I ended up doing a lot of research online, and came across several great sites for Forex. The best site by far is
www.BabyPips.com as their "School" is second to none, and their forums are hands down some of the best out there. I spent weeks reading forum posts and going through the school to get up to speed.
After a few weeks I decided to take the plunge and open a live account with Forex.com and fund it with $250. I then made some trades, and did pretty well for the first month.
(Report of all trades in next post, scroll down)
As you can see, for the first 30 days I did really damn well. I went from $250 to $996, which is about a 400% ROI. After that, however, as you can see, I ended up losing all my money except for $74.
At that
point I decided to stop fooling around with real money and learn what the heck I was doing.
Looking back, I realized the mistake I had made - I got greedy. What happened was that I had a system that worked (unbeknownst to me) and I changed it. I had been opening trades with 1 lot of USD/EUR and had a trailing stop of 30 pips. This had been working very well due to the decline of the USD. You can see that on some days I made quite a lot of money. What happened was that I changed my strategy to a trailing stop of 50 pips. Well, as luck would have it, the 30 pip stop was perfect for making money. The 50 pip stop was perfect for losing money. Usually my positions would have a stop of 30 pips, and the market would move 30+ pips, so I would end up making a profit. However, with a 50 pip stop, the market would often move
less than 50 pips, so I would end up losing money.
That lesson cost me $176.
LESSON LEARNED: Pick a strategy, test it, understand it, and stick to it if it’s making you money! The education
Now that I saw how profitable Forex trading could be, and how quickly you could lose all your money, I decided I would get serious about learning about Forex and automatic trading.
The first thing I did was to Google for Forex resources, as well as set up some Google Alerts to email me any time a news article came out. I was specifically interested in the USD/EUR pair, so I set up my Alerts to send me messages when it saw "Forex" or "USDUER". To this day, I get about 3-7 alerts which help me keep in touch with the market.
Then I started to gather resources. I have found some great web sites, most notably:
BabyPips.com ForexFactory.com
These two sites have a lot of great people or information, and I check them often.
One of the most useful tools for me was to go through the BabyPips "School" section. The School has the most plain-English, down-to-earth, easy to understand information on Forex that I have found out there.
What I learned
One of the most important things that I learned is to have a properly leveraged account. At the time, my Forex.com account only had $250 in it, which did not afford me very good
leverage . What this meant was that I could only open trades for a few Lots and be able to withstand the movement of the market. Normally, when I made most of my money, I only opened a trade for one Lot. However, as I became more successful, I became greedy and opened trades with 2-5 Lots. The thinking was "If I am being successful with one lot, I will be two to five times as successful with more lots." In reality, the truth was far from my dreams. What ended up happening was my account would get "Margin calls" for dropping too low in value with all my open trades. Specifically, with one lot, I could withstand a sharp downtrend in the market of 100-200 pips (points, or thousandths of a penny of the
currency pair ) or more, because my
leverage was proportionate to how many open trades I had. However, when I had 5 lots open, then my
leverage was 5 times greater, and a 100 pip movement would really be 500 pips (basically) against my account. Because my account was under funded, and thus under-leveraged, I would get a "Margin call" (closing of my position) as it reached too close to going negative in my account. This is good because then neither I nor the brokerage lose money, but bad because I could potentially have made more money if the
trend had reversed.
LESSON LEARNED: Open your Forex account with substantial capital or you will be a loser. 
When I resume, I will open a MICRO account with $500 so I have lots of
leverage . Ideally, I would want to open the account with $5,000.
Yes, you can open an account with less money, but you will probably lose your money quickly due to being poorly leveraged . Don’t do it!
Next steps - Automated trading
After I learned that I know how to trade in Forex, at least on a very basic level, I wanted to research how to automate my trades.
As usual, I just jumped into something and figured I would try it out and learn by experience (which works well for me.) After doing some research, I came across the following platforms that would allow automated trading:
NinjaTrader TradeStation MetaTrader
I contacted TradeStation to see if they had a demo, and never heard back from them. Bad customer service, so I never bothered with them again. (So much for being so highly rated!)
I reviewed MetaTrader, but it seemed overly complex for my needs, so I passed on it.
I finally settled with NinjaTrader. I downloaded the program and started using it. However, I started to notice that NT would generate errors and have to be shut down. This was of concern to me - if it crashes all the time on a demo, can I afford to have it crash when I am working with real money?
NT’s customer support was excellent. I emailed them and they advised me that my problem was related to having the "My Documents" folder located on a network drive (I do this for file backups to a server, with offline file access when I travel with my laptop). Many of the user settings are stored there. The only solution was to install the .NET SDK, which was 300mb+. I asked them if I could install the software the "Program Files" directory, like the rest of the application, and they said it was not possible. After trying all their fixes, however, the program kept crashing. Looking at their forum, it appears they have known about this problem for at least 1-2 years, and never bothered to change it. As a programmer, that made no sense to me. The changes would probably be trivial, and would ensure the stability of their application for all users, but they never addressed it. Long story
short ,
I removed NinjaTrader .
LESSON LEARNED: Test any software platform you are going to use for live trading, and test it thoroughly. If it crashes even once, you could lose your entire account balance. 
After doing some more research, I stumbled across some more information about automated trading. MetaQuotes had sponsored a contest to see who could write the most profitable software to make trades over time using their MQL4 programming language. (See
http://championship.mql4.com/2007/ .) The contest was fascinating. Two winners stood out from the crowd:
From MQL4’s 2007 Automated Forex contest
Olexandr Topchylo
William Boatright
Olexandr’s code had made $130,000+ in 3 months. William’s code had made $55,000+ in 3 months as well.
Doing some research, it appears that Olexandr decided to be greedy and keep his code secret and no share any information with anyone, which is a terrible loss of education for the Forex community as a whole. However, William has graciously offered to lease his code for $40/mo, which at least allows one to use the code to make trades and see if it continues to be successful. Unfortunately, he won’t expose his source code, so again the community as a whole cannot learn anything from his experience and won’t be able to improve upon it.
The MQL4 programming language is very robust, and is based off of the C/C++ platform. Their is complete documentation and even a training course you can review on their site:
MQL4 course Programming in MQL4 overview (book) MQL4 technical documentation
This made me realize that
MetaTrader was in fact a good platform to investigate. I downloaded the platform and started playing around with it. I liked it - it seemed stable, well designed, and easy to use.
As it turns out, MetaQuotes also includes a
mobile version of their software, so you can view, place, and close trades from your smartphone.
MetaTrader downloads, including Mobile platforms MetaTrader mobile screen shots
Best of all, MetaTrader included a lot of indicators, some that I have never seen before, AND it allowed you to program your own indicators if you so choose. Doing some research, I found that MetaQuotes also allows developers to upload their indicators and EA’s to their site so every one can benefit from them.
MQL4 code repository
Now looking at all these EA’s and Indicators I had no idea what any of them did, or how to use them. That is when I found another link on the MQL4 site that had an overview of them all:
MQL4 Technical Analysis & indicators overview
There is a very clear description of each
indicator there. Take some time to read them, you will be glad you did.
Be smart! Read the 
How I got started in Forex 
Linear Mode
