Hey -

This looks like a forum full of people up to speed, but I'm a n00b with some questions. I don't wanna bug people who have better things to do, everyone posting here appears to have a good handle on this market - so if you guys would rather me go learn somewhere else and return when I have something to contribute, I'm cool with that.

I'll leave some of my fundamental questions here though, and if anyone has time to give me some pointers I would much appreciate it.

Carry trades - I understand the concept of leveraging interest rates of different currencies against each other, but I do not understand where this interest gets realized - how it is paid out in other words. I read on fxstreet that the interest is paid daily, however - I don't believe I've held a position open long enough on my demo account to ever see if this interest magically appears in my account at the open or closing of business - or - if the demo account considers carry trades at all.

Which leads me to my second major issue:

I'm losing on ~9 out of 10 trades. I'm finding that I'm correctly assuming the overall direction that a currency is going to go in about 7 out of 9 of those losers, but that my trailing stops are closing out positions before the position makes it to profitabilty. So I tripled the size of my trailing stop, to account for the volatility, but then I've run into the currency not moving enough to make any respectable money before volatility ultimately closes out the position again. In other words, I set my trailing stop at 10 pips, the position changes in a favorable direction by 5 pips, then goes unfavorable by 10, and I lose to the tune of 5 pips - and then the currency moves favorably by 40 pips before I can get another order in... but I'm sure most of you guys are familiar with this sort of thing. I thought trailing stops were a great idea, but they don't seem to be worthwhile in this market.

I have read Ed Ponsi's book "Patterns and Probabilities" on interpreting chart data, and planning a trading strategy based on trend indicators among other factors, and would like to place a couple longer term trades to ride some trends and see if my predictive abilites really work, or if I'm just experiencing coincidences. Or maybe someone with more experience could tell me if this market is experiencing more fluctuations due to the global situation, or if it's always like this? I can definitely see the potential in this market (I've had 2 winners of $1300), but would like to be reasonably sure that my attempts to trade in it have a realistic chance of success - to date, I think my successes have been 100% attributable to luck, and not any correct assessment of how the market works.

I also read "The complete idiots guide to forex", but that's only a good book if you want to know what forex is. It is zero help when it comes to developing a trade strategy.

Thanks for any assistance, and good luck with your trading.