The web is fairly filled with free resources for traders that are of very great value. Particularly if you are new to trading, it is very wise to take advantage of these in order to expand your trading education.

The first I would like to mention is Investopedia.com. This is a website run by Forbes Magazine and is of great use. See www.investopedia.com. Any time you have a question about what a trading term means or about what a particular strategy is, you can visit this website, put the term into its search engine and it will not only come back with a definition of the term but it will usually refer you to a series of explanatory essays written by experts in the field that it has published showing how the term may be used in practice. And this is all free to the user. You can also subscribe, again for free, to its “term of the day” and once a day you will get an e-mail from Investopedia explaining some technical trading term. It covers all trading, not just Forex trading. It is, as its name suggests, an encyclopedia for investors.

The second I would like to mention is ActionForex.com. This is a website which is published from Singapore. See www.actionforex.com. Twice a day, ActionForex sends you a Daily Technical Report which informs you of how things are doing in the market as a whole up to the minute and gives you an analysis of one major currency-pair that shows you how expert technical analysts tend to look at and analyze charts. If you visit the website, it contains news, analysis, education, articles, a bookstore, various products, a number of resources for traders and broker news. It is of enormous value and it is free. However, it supports itself by selling advertising and sometimes several times a day, you will receive e-mails from them containing ads for products and services relevant to Forex trading. This disturbs some people but it certainly doesn’t trouble me. Many of these ads are of great interest and there is no obligation to buy anything. The analysts they employ are highly skilled and make their work available to us. On Wall Street, people who can analyze charts like this can command very high salaries and we get the fruit of their work for free. I don’t mind paying for it by receiving a couple of ads during the day. I know where the delete button is and it is no effort at all to push it. Click on the link and look around their site. You don’t need to sign up for the daily e-mails if you do not wish to but I recommend highly that you do.

Finally, it is very useful to join a forum where Forex traders from around the world meet and share information, thoughts, strategies and idea with each other very freely. One of the best I know of is Forex Factory. See www.forexfactory.com. All you have to do is register for free and you can join thousands of other Forex traders in their search for profitable trading techniques. Plus, Forex Factory has one of the most remarkable and thorough Economic Calendars on the web. Again, you don’t have to join if you don’t wish to but I can’t see any reason why you would want to. Visit the site and look around and you’ll see what I mean.

There are many more free resources of value available on the web. I will cover more in future articles but definitely start with these three.

Knowledge is of very great importance to the trader but knowledge alone will not make you a successful trader because, as the great Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu pointed out thousands of years ago, “To knowledge there is no limit but to our lives there is a limit. To pursue that which is unlimited with that which is limited is not a good plan.” Don’t overload yourself with theories and ideas. Simplicity is the key. It usually takes years to discover that. All I can do is alert you to that fact. Excess knowledge leads to analysis paralysis. Trading is not difficult. Don’t make it so. What makes a winning trader is a winning attitude, a good method or technique, consistency of application and proper money management. And we will cover all these matters as this series develops.