Here’s a post going the other way – if you fancy yourself as a gambler, don’t learn about the forex business, it’s not for you.

Hey, it’s like poker.
It’s not like poker – just one of the many things it shouldn’t be like is poker.
You think that edge-of-the-seat stuff, adrenalin rushes, a bit of healthy panic are going to be integral and vital to the whole game? If you think that’s how the big guys do it, operating as if supercool, suave casino habitués, then you’d be way wrong. The big guys are nerds. They wouldn’t know what the hell they were doing in a real casino.
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The forex market? Predictable? – well, just at the moment, while we are hardly in normal trading conditions, that doesn’t necessary mean predictability is reduced…

For light reading, I have been checking James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds. The critical factor in this treatment of the subject is the consideration of a collection of individuals, all making independent decisions (given the same apparent input data) – yes, a bunch of forex traders, each of whom know it’s them against the rest – rather than the standard psychology of crowds.
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Spend your time looking at 1-hour candlestick charts and then switch to a 5-minute chart and what happens?

Suddenly, all these exciting trends jump out at you, making you think that here’s some action, better get on it… Major movements, established trends, breakouts? None of these. Remember the vertical scale – these are just a few pips here and there, the illusion is of faster, more dramatic activity. If you switch back to the longer period charts it all comes back into perspective.
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A lot of us are perfectionists, some of us are forex perfectionists – yep, probably fall into that category myself.
And where does our perfectionism get us? – we tend to be the ones slow into a trend. We don’t lose so often, we don’t get close to maximizing our trades.

So what to do?
There’s no point in going wild and completely throwing away all the caution that has kept us in the game up to now, that would be even sillier. It’s not simply a matter of a bit more courage and everything comes right – I’d rather have a bit of discipline than courage any day.
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