5 Disadvantages of Full-Time Forex Trading

After talking about the advantages of the full-time Forex trading I’ve felt that it wasn’t fair without listing the disadvantages of such an approach to the foreign exchange market. Only few of the active Forex traders switch to the full-time trading and there are several good reasons for that:

1. It takes time. If you are a successful Forex trader you probably want to spend more time with family or for yourself personally. You earn enough for that but if you trade full-time you won’t have more time than an average non-trader. After all, Forex is good because it can offer a financial freedom, which should lead to more free time, and a full-time Forex trading approach just ruins that.
2. Overtrading. Following the market all day is a straight way to overtrading, which in its turn is a bane of many currency traders. Only emotionally strong and experienced traders will be able to avoid constant overtrading when sitting in front of the Forex trading terminal for all day.
3. Having to trade short-term. If you trade full-time you have to constantly search for the trading opportunities. The long-term trading opportunities aren’t that frequent in Forex and you’ll have to either take the short-term ones too or be bored with a simple monitoring of the market. Both choices are unacceptable for the long-term Forex trader.
4. Dependence on Forex profit. If you trade Forex full-time the chances are that you don’t have any other source of income. This means that if you enter a series of losses you won’t be earning money and you might even lose your initial deposit. If you have a daily job and trade Forex only occasionally you don’t depend on Forex earnings too much. So, if you plan to go full-time you better be sure that you’ll have enough money for living and upholding the necessary account balance even after several huge losses.
5. Focusing on unnecessary things. As it often happens when you have a huge inflow of information, you’ll get a lot of unnecessary data, which will mislead you. If you trade Forex all day, you’ll be trying to find the opportunities in the chart formations and fundamental events that don’t have anything important in them. It’s not overtrading because you’ll soon understand that these opportunities don’t let you trade on them, but it’s still a waste of time, your time, which is precious.

This list says my second and the last word about the full-time Forex trading. Although the number of disadvantages is less than the number of the respective advantages, it’s all about the importance of each of them for the particular trader. It’s up to you to decide whether the full-time trading is for you.

If you have some interesting thoughts or questions regarding the listed disadvantages of the full-time Forex trading, please, feel free to share them using the commentary form.