Thanks for the response Angelus.
I played around with a FX simulator 3-4 years ago in college. All I did was look at the graphs and tried to ride the trends and get out after I made a small profit. I was doing good, until I got bored/greedy and lost everything in one trade.
At a logical level, I convinced myself it was a waste of my time and stopped. Surely, to come out ahead at FX a person would need to be an expert in economics, be a mathematical genius and come up with complex models, etc.
Now, it's very tempting to try my hand at FX after reading your story.
I understand FX short-term market fluxuations is highly related to human behavior and emotions rather than the true values of the currencies. Assuming this is true, then a person ignornant of economics, the market, world politics, etc, could concievably be able to make money if they could somehow inutitively understand the social dynamics of the FX currency trends. And exploiting the social dynamics of FX is the only way I could see myself being successful in the FX market. Does anyone agree with this?
For example, so lets say hypothetically, it's widely believe a tsunami off the coast of japan will decrease the value of the yen. Whether or not this is true or not doesn't matter, all that matters is people believe it and they will sell off the yen. A person could realize this and when they see the yen being sold, they could jump in and jump out quick and make a small profit. Now it doesn't matter if the value of the yen decreased or not in the long run. You weren't making your decisions to buy or sell based on if the yen would actually devalue, you made your decisions based on how people would predictably react, thus your risk would be reduced because it's simpler to predict social trends rather than predict the multiple of factors that determine a currencies true value.