4 Factors To Consider Before Trading Forex In Your Retirement

Retirement - it’s a topic everyone needs to think about some point. In fact, if you’re reading this, you might be approaching retirement age or are already retired and are asking yourself, “what now?” A lot of retirees in today’s economy might be asking to themselves how they can augment their financial stability or how they can spend their time and money more productively - and one of the options on the table is trading Forex, or trading foreign exchange in layman's terms. Consider this the Forex Trading 101 guide for retirement - if you can check all the boxes below, you’re good to go.

Financial Risk

Trading of any sorts, whether it’s stocks, private equity or Forex, comes with risks. There are no risk-free trading strategies. If you have no pressure on you to perform and make profit, you’re likelier to make better decisions and ultimately trade better - so if you’re retired in peace and are not in a position where you’d have to care a lot about when the profit arrives, you’d be in a great position to do some Forex trading. If you’re in a position where in your retirement your money’s tight and you find yourself struggling financially, we highly advise you not go into investment but look for alternative ways to augment your income - the risk is there and given the state of the global economy, you could lose all your investments.

Free Time

Many retirees have levels of free time that they could not have imagined the years before their retirement. Some people in retirement have many things to do - things they didn’t have the time for while their life was still largely dominated by their working schedules. Forex doesn’t require 8 hours of attention per day, but there are peak times when someone should be paying attention to the market and its fluctuation as those are generally the best times to be buying and selling. Having something else to do in the off-peaks is ideal though, so one just has to keep one eye on the phone or laptop while still being free to do other things.

Health

A key factor many fail to consider in making decisions like these is the state of their health, both mental and physical. The recommendation is to be brutally honest here - if your physical and mental health isn’t 100% stable and you fear you might not have the capacity to make snap decisions under pressure or even have the expertise to navigate trading software in peak times, then this might not be the right thing for you.

If none of those are factors that would hinder you, then it’s time look at some Forex strategies that could specifically benefit those enjoying retirement.

The first thing to consider is aggression. How aggressively do you want to be trading? Are you looking to trade every day, and if so, in what markets? The most important trading times are when the New York, London and Tokyo markets open in their respective time zones. Some people will hop online to trade over every day (or in the time span that the major markets open), while some will monitor charts that update every few minutes with the latest market rates to make the best trades. Regardless of preference, retirees have the luxury of time to structure their trading approach to whatever suits them the best. Some trade daily, some hold onto several currencies for a long time and monitor the country’s overall performance in the forex markets - forex is a very large market and there are many good and proven strategies as long as one follows the same rules as any applicable to all types of trading.