With an over abundance of financial analyses going around in this age of financial shocks I guess you might read this with more background information than say four or five years ago. And with a little more wisdom too.

You see, even though you may still find it as a cached site, I have finally deleted http://forexology.blogspot.com.  It had chronicled a tense journey which started long ago and far, far away in the risky adventure of the $4 trillion a day currency trading market (forex) that I had figured that I was bright enough to master without an expensive read ‘proper’ course. So I did the BabyPips thing. Plus every other free site I could find. And made the cardinal mistake by disobeying a warning from BabyPips:

Leverage the Killer

Most professional traders and money managers trade one standard lot for every $50,000 in their account.

If they traded a mini account, this means they trade one mini lot for every $5,000 in their account.

Let that sink into your head for a couple seconds.

If pros trade like this, why do less experienced traders think they can succeed by trading 100K standard lots with a $2,000 account or 10K mini lots with $250?

No matter what the forex brokers tell you, don’t ever open a “standard account” with just $2,000 or a “mini account” with $250. The number one reason new traders fail is not because they suck, but because they are undercapitalized from the start and don’t understand how leverage really works.

Don’t set yourself up to fail.

We recommend that you have at least have $100,000 of trading capital before opening a “standard account”, $10,000 for a “mini account”, or $1,000 for a “micro account”.

So if you only have $60,000, open a “mini account. If you only have $8,000, open a “micro” account. If you only have $250, open a “demo account” and stick with it until you come up with the additional $750, then open a “micro account”.

Yep. I was under-capitalized but could not wait for better days, I told myself I didn’t have the $100,000 or the $10,000 to spare on trading so I launched out bravely with my small accounts, and the rest is history. Leverage is the killer. You see you will keep trading to try to restore a small account and that is a tragic cycle of account depletion.

I came to my senses over a year before writing this article but kept my forex blog just in case I decided to do Jared Martinez's course (still too expensive for me) and finally made it in the business of currency trading. Plus the the blog was earning residual Google AdSense income with its incoming RSS free signals, some great forex links, fantastic resources, and my own journal.

Eventually, I arrived at the decision that my online time was better spent on some more realistic income generating activities than forex. I conducted tons and tons of research on free online income and decided to pursue article writing. In my search I found Hub Pages, Helium, and Info Barrel.

Hub pages is wonderfully search engine optimised and is friendly to Google AdSense. I have been spending time at Hub Pages, which is very hungry for content before you get any realistic Google AdSense income, unless you are an out and out article marketer and stick to product reviews. But guess what, it is free. And there are at least three other sources of income in addition to Google AdSense. The supportive community of writers will keep you on your toes, and provide refreshing insights and nuggets.

Now that I have passed the 2000 page views mark on Hub Pages I have decided the time has come to do something I wanted to do a long time. The honest thing.

My forex blog was still earning residual Google AdSense income; in fact I believe that if I worked on it I could have recovered what I had lost.  Without the personal conquest of the market I would just be another empty archivist of directories and free signals.

But somehow that is not a noble thing. I felt like I was leading others down a path that I had not successfully tested. I felt that to keep that blog open I would be pointing others to an Eldorado that would vanish with their wealth, unless they had mastered forex trading. In which case they did not need the free resources in my blog. In fact many times I felt like I should create a red flag blog warning newbies of the dangers of forex.

So today I did the honourable thing. I deleted the forex blog.

Someday, God’s willing, I will do a new forex blog. After I have attended a comprehensive forex training course with mentorship, and traded successfully for more than six months.

Lessons learned:

1. BabyPips.com may be a free site but they offer a great advice: leverage is a killer.

2. Paper trade for three years if you have to; the market is enticing but your hard-earned cash can wait in interest-bearing accounts or be invested in less risky activities.