About Forex: How Much Time Per Day Should You Spend Trading Forex?
A common issue faced by most new Forex traders is how much time to spend each day watching the Forex charts. The purpose of this article is to explore the pros and cons of spending more than 2 hours a day in front of the charts.
In his book "Outliers: The Story of Success" author Malcolm Gladwell suggests that it takes an ordinary person 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything. While plenty of intelligent people have countered that expert status can be achieved on many subjects in much less time, the point remains: in order to get good at anything, you must invest the time to gain the skills.
The rules are no different when it comes to Forex trading. The more time you spend in front of your charts, the better you will become at spotting trade opportunities.
However, each trader has an individual amount of stamina they can rely upon while trading. Some have more, some have less. But at some point in the day, the vast majority of traders are going to reach a point where they have spent too much time in front of the charts and are now in danger of doing more harm than good.
Since every trader is different, it's difficult to say that you should limit your chart time to "x" amount of hours or minutes. It really does fall on the individual traders to make that call for themselves.
When I started out trading Forex, I was in a position where I was not working at a typical "9-5" job, and I had way too much free time on my hands. As a result, I found myself staring at the charts 10-15 hours per day, and getting up from my various cat-naps to take a quick glance at the charts before heading back to the couch.
In retrospect, I can see that this intensive approach did me a world of good as far as Forex was I was a literal hermit for about 4 years, leaving my house for church and shopping and not much else.
This is not a lifestyle I recommend for anyone, and if I had to do it all over again, I would limit myself to 3 hours in front of my charts per day. Any more than that and I start to get a little fuzzy in my reasoning ability. Several friends who play poker professionally say the same thing: they play for 2 hours then take a long break to help regain some clarity in their thinking.
Certainly a 2 hour rule is a good rule of thumb to start with, and you can make any personal modifications to suit your own circumstances after that.
As you can see, there are some competing values at work here: the more time you spend in front of the charts, the better trader you will become, but at the same time, the more time you spend in front of the charts, the greater the chance you will start making mistakes due to fatigue.
There is no "one size fits all" answer to this riddle. Every trader must make the decision for themselves as to how much time can and should be spent in front of the charts in a single session. The best way to make that decision is simply start spending time each trading day watching the charts, but as soon as you start feeling tired, take a short break, or even call it a day. The great thing about Forex trading is that the markets are open around the clock for 5 full days, so you can come back to your charts at any time that the markets are still open and pick up right where you left off.
Just pay attention to the things your body and your mind are telling you in regards to the fatigue factor and you should be able to log in the time necessary to gain expertise as a trader without putting your account at risk due to bad decisions made under the stress of exhaustion.