You should know the schedule of all data releases and news events most likely to occur during the anticipated time horizon of your trading strategy. Every trade strategy needs to take into account the upcoming news and data releases before the position is opened.
One important thing that you should not lose sight of is that forex markets are highly integrated with the other financial markets. You should have a good understanding of what the market is expecting in terms of event outcomes to anticipate how the market is most likely to react.
Forex markets function alongside other major financial markets like stocks, bonds, futures, commodities (particularly gold and oil). There are important and psychological relationships between these markets and the currency market. You need to develop the habit of looking at whats going on in other markets and trying to anticipate the fall out on the forex market.
After each trade, regardless of the outcome, evaluate your trading results. Look back over the whole process to understand what you did right and what you did wrong. How did you identify the trade opportunity? Was it based on technical analysis, fundamental analysis or a combination of the two?
For example, you should probably devote more energy to the technical trading approach if your winning trades are more as a technical trader. Looking at your trade this way will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a fundamental trader or a technical trader. You need to know what approach best suits your personality.
Did you rush to make hasty decisions? Were you patient enough in your trade? What tools you might have used to improve your entry timing? You should also ask yourself was the position size sufficient to match the risk and reward scenario? Was the position size too large or too small? Could you have entered at a better level?
Trading is more of an art than science. The more you practice it the more expert and experienced you will become at making winning trades. A winning trade can turn into a loser in minutes or seconds if you dont effectively monitor your position. You should have a mechanism to effectively monitor your position after it becomes active. After each trade, you should try to figure out were you effectively able to monitor your trade after it was open and active? If so how and if not, why not? The answers to these questions will reveal a lot about how much time and dedication you are able to devote to your trading.
These questions and the answer to them will reveal the role emotions play in trading. Controlling your emotions in trading is crucial to your long term success. Currency trading is all about getting out of it what you put into it. Evaluating your trading results on a regular basis is an essential step in improving your trading results, refining your trading style, maximizing your trading strengths and minimizing your trading weaknesses.
Now you can learn all these things on your real account by trading live and going through the roller coaster of trying to control your emotions while blowing it repeatedly. But in my opinion, the best place to learn and experience all these things is on your demo account. I keep on repeating myself; first double your demo account three times in a row, only then trade live.
Doubling your demo account three times in arrow will give you the level of confidence and belief in you to make it big in the fore market. You cannot double your demo account three times in a row without going through all the above that I have pointed out.