Wouldn't it be great if you could find a charting system that instead of focusing on minutes, half-hours, hours, days, and weeks, actually followed and tracked the value itself? Point-and-figure charts are charts that do precisely that: they follow the money.

Point-and-figure charts are charts that follow changes in prices, and not time.

Counter-trend trading is nothing new, but it still remains a mystery for many inexperienced traders. First of all, what exactly is counter-trend trading? This is trading when a market's overall movement is going neither up nor down.

You see, a market is trending regardless of what direction the price is moving. If the price is moving steadily up, then that's an upward trend.

Trend trading is where the big money is in the Forex market. While there is money to be made in counter-trending markets, there is only so much that can be made when the market is essentially moving sideways.

Trading when the market trends is where there is the opportunity to make (and if you're on the wrong side without a stop-loss, possibly lose) major money.

A "breakout" is when the market suddenly and quickly jumps out of its recently established range to either gain, or lose, price dramatically. Often times a breakout will occur out of a counter-trend market, but this isn't always the case.

In fact, many of the articles you will find about breakouts online will actually be focusing only on breakouts that come out of a counter-trend market.

One of the hardest skills for many traders to master is pulling the trigger on a potential trade. The potential in the Forex market for huge profits is also tempered by the fact that, like any investment or trading market, there is always the chance of large losses, as well.

The Forex market trades over $1 trillion a day world wide, attracting traders, but sometimes intimidating them.

Forex channel breakouts occur anytime that a price, either going high or low, breaks one of the set lines of a channel that is developed through technical analysis.

A channel occurs when two lines are made to show the range of a current market. This can be done whether the market is in trend or in counter-trend. One line represents the high of a current channel, while the bottom line represents the low.

Wouldn't it be great to be psychic? Wouldn't it be great if when you sat down to make your Forex trade you could somehow know ahead of time when and where the market was going to breakout, and ride that baby to maximum profits?

It's one thing to look back on a month of charts and point out where all the pivot points occurred, and see where the best pivot reversal points were, but it's an entirely different thing to be able to see and anticipate the pivot reversals as they are happening, and to make profit from them.

Common sense isn't common, more young kids know who's on the "Surreal Life" than know where Mexico is located, and if it's not new, it's not "trendy" or "hip." While this general foolishness seems to have nothing to do with Forex trading, why is it that long effective trading strategies are ignored because they're "simple" or "old?"

Why spend hours a day on an advanced, new fangled, supposedly cutting edge (read: complicated and confusing) trading system when the old "boring" version is profitable?

Isn't profit the point? Isn't it better to be old, boring, and profitable than new, flashy, and questionable? Isn't profit the bottom line here?

Gap trading is nothing new.

Interest rates can have a major effect on how certain currency pairs are traded. For some traders looking at a long term trade, the practice of collecting rollover comes into effect.

Rollover is when interest is figured out between the currency pairs each day and paid to you or from you. Different currencies have different interest rates, and collecting the spread between the currencies interest rates is where the Forex carry trade comes in.

If you're going to be a successful Forex trader, then part of that involves learning what profitable Forex traders already know. One of the major movers of the Forex market are the economic reports of each nation.

This isn't just restricted to the United States, either. Traders looking at the Yen, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, or Euro (or any currency, for that matter) will look at the economic news reports that are released by each of these nations.