Forex trading is often a very lonely profession which is why so many traders like visiting forex forums and chatting with other like-minded traders. However, what a lot of people don’t realise is that forex forums can actually be responsible for making a dent in your bankroll.

Why?

Well there are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, if you visit any forex forum you will nearly always find that there are some posters who love broadcasting their trading positions to the other forum members and enjoy the attention they get from their loyal followers. It’s basically an ego trip. If they make a few good calls, then they seem to get instant adoration and inexperienced traders will start to follow them and even copy their positions.

This is a trap that you really don’t want to fall into. The minute you find yourself copying other peoples’ positions is the time when you should take a step back and have a good look at yourself.

You may not even realise you’re doing it. For example, you may consider taking a position but decide to go to the forums to see if other traders are taking the same position, for confirmation. It’s important to note that just because lots of people on the forum are all taking long positions, for example, the price will not necessarily go up.

I was on a forum last week and nearly all of the regular forum members were going long on the GBP/USD. However all of my indicators were indicating that we were heavily overbought, and despite being in the majority I traded using my own tried and trusted system, took a short position, and as I write this article the GBP/USD is about 210 points lower.

So always make your own trading decisions and then you only have yourself to blame. Don’t look to others for advice or confirmation.

Similarly, on the other side of the coin, you don’t want to be the one who goes onto forums and boasts about how good a trader you are and announce your positions to everyone. This may boost your ego but it can affect your trading.

For example, if you announce your latest position to the forum and it quickly moves against you, you may disregard your normal stop loss policy and stay in a position longer than necessary in order to justify your position to your loyal followers. This could lead to even further losses.

So please don’t become one of these people. After all do you really think the best traders in the world hang around on forex forums? No of course they don’t, they’re too busy making money.

Finally there is one other way in which forex forums can damage your wealth and that’s by following systems given on forums. Sure you can pick up some great ideas, but be careful about jumping in and blindly following the latest new trading system.

Always be sure to thoroughly back-test any system you may come across and either use a demo account to test it out for a period of time or use very small stakes.

Forex forums can be a very valuable resource for learning new trading ideas and strategies, but be careful about blindly following any one system or poster, and try not to start broadcasting your positions as soon as you achieve any level of success.

This is it folks! The web is about to die, at least this is what AT&T is saying in regards to the huge bandwidth consumption after high-speed connections were marketed and the capacity of their equipment or Internet backbone. According to the company’s statements without a drastic hardware upgrade the Internet we know and love would run out of bandwidth by the year 2010, while this may sound a bit far ahead of the go-ahead to remind you that 2010 is just around the corner!

It is human nature to point fingers or blame someone else when there is a big problem which is hard to solve, this is exactly what AT&T is now doing, they blame broadband for the entire problem, according to the company everyone was basically used to access the Internet through the narrow passage of a dial-up line, later on the high-speed communications revolution began (which by the way, was highly marketed by themselves) — with sites like Youtube and others which are constantly stream of their content in high definition are putting a lot of strain into servers and company routers.

According to AT&T, if everything remains constant AT&T’s Internet will crash by the year 2010, this is a very bold statement released by a company who heavily markets their high-speed products to consumers who now have to pay for all of the hardware upgrades which will need to be done. The estimated cost of the necessary upgrade comes close to $19 billion, why such a high amount of cash you may ask? — according to the company there was a monstrous increase in data transfers when broadband hit the market and taking in consideration growth projections the amount of data which will be exchanged by the year 2015 will grow to nearly 50 times as much as we experience today.

The Marketing Angle (correlation to Internet marketing):

AT&T knows what they’re doing, by the time they market it their broadband products they knew there was going to be a dramatic increase in the demand for such services, and they are now facing a huge overhead when it comes to replacing an upgrading all of their equipment. See the amount of money that will be spent in hardware upgrades is considerably large the company now needs a way to justify itself in front of consumers who will have to pay a premium on their bandwidth package.

Will the Internet crash? Absolutely not, AT&T doesn’t host the Internet per se, but they do provide services to a lot of American consumers who use their servers and fiber optic lines in order to get online, throwing this bomb on to consumers will only prepare them to pay an even higher premium for web services which is a great marketing strategy for the company.

With so many companies offering Internet services to American consumers this new announcement is a great PR strategy for AT&T which will now be under the spotlight after such dramatic way to spin expenses on a hardware upgrade they knew was imminent. Do you think you can use a similar marketing strategy to put your website on the map? — your ability to do so will determine how successful your internet ventures will be.