Many forex traders spend so much of their time looking for that holy grail forex system that will make them rich, but the fact is that if you can learn to accept your losses, then you don't necessarily need a system with a very high success rate in order to become a profitable trader.
Learning how to deal with losing trades is just as important as learning how to find winning trades. Most people new to forex trading initially find it quite hard to accept losing trades because obviously no-one likes losing money, but you simply have to accept that losing trades are inevitable. No trading system is perfect and even the very best forex traders suffer losses every so often.
The key to profitable trading is managing these losses. In other words you need to devise a trading system which keeps losses to an absolute minimum and lets winning trades run for as long as possible. This means that you need to use a stop loss when placing a trade and stick rigidly to this stop loss.
Lots of forex newbies make the critical mistake of placing an emergency stop loss a long way away from the opening price, or worst still not using one at all. Both scenarios usually lead to big losses and it's almost inevitable that you will lose all your trading capital trading this way. Everyone makes bad trading decisions now and then so taking big hits when you do will decimate your capital. So try and use tight stop losses so that if you do make a bad decision, at least it will only make a small dent in your capital.
Conversely you also want to make sure that when you make a correct trading decision you extract the maximum gain possible out of each winning trade. At the very least you should make sure that your target price is further away than your stop loss, as this demands a lower win/loss ratio from your forex trading system.
I personally like to close half of any winning trades at a given level (which is always further away than my stop loss) and let the other half run for as long as possible. This essentially becomes a free trade because as soon as my initial target is reached I will move my stop loss up to my initial entry point. Then I try and extract as many points as possible and I usually end up closing the trade when my favoured technical indicators indicate that the price move is running out of steam.
The overall point I want to get across in this article is that it's absolutely imperative that you keep your losses small and try and let your winning trades run for as long as possible. This will significantly increase the chances of you becoming a profitable trader.