The most important aspects of becoming successful with trading are education, persistence and practice. There is no holy-grail or secret golden bullet that can make you succeed. There is also no use in buying a trading system to trade for you when you start out. There is no trading system that covers all the possible market conditions. The best way to go is to educate yourself and to get a lot of practice in analyzing the charts and placing trades. A good mentor can speed up the learning process.
School of Pipsology
A great place to start is with the freely available online e-learning course on www.babypips.com with their Online School of Pipsology.
Another great way to start or to complement the School of Pipsology is the book written by Anna Coulling called ‘Forex for Beginners: What you need to know to Get Started’. In this book, Anna introduces you to all the main aspects of trading forex including a well written introduction to Volume-Price-Analysis (VPA). She has written a separate book on VPA which would be a good second book to read.
Psychology of Trading
The Psychology of trading is probably the most important aspect to study well. It is one thing to trade in a demo-account with fake money or to analyse a possible setup. However, once you open a position and you have your own money at stake with the price going up, down or sideways, emotion will set in and you will be in a completely different ballgame.
Alexander Elder wrote a classic book on the psychology of trading. Read at least the first 17 chapters of this book. This first part of the book covers the psychological aspects of trading as well as other important issues such as money management. You can skip the remaining chapters if you like.
Candlestick Charts
Steve Nison discovered the Japanese candlestick charting technique that was in use for hundreds of years in Japan and used in the rice-trade business and introduced it to the Western world. Until then, nobody in the Western world knew about candlestick charts. Now, any piece of trading software supports candlestick charts. Candlestick charts provide you with a lot of valuable information and being able to read candlestick charts is an essential skill to learn. The classic book to read on this subject is the one from Steve Nison called ‘Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques’.
Further Reading
I have created a booklist on Amazon. You can find it here.