The minimum viable kit
You need five things. Everything beyond them is optional, and most of it is a distraction dressed as an edge.
- A charting platform — to read price.
- A broker — to place trades.
- An economic calendar — to know when not to.
- A position-size calculator — to get the stake right.
- A journal — to find out what you're actually doing.
Notice what isn't on the list: paid signal groups, indicator packs, "algorithms" sold on social media, and anything promising a win rate. If a product's marketing leads with returns rather than method, you are the product.
Charting
TradingView is the standard, and the free tier is genuinely sufficient to learn on. You get all the timeframes in this manual, drawing tools for zones, and moving averages.
Two things worth doing on day one:
- Set your timezone to your own. Session timings only make sense if the chart agrees with your clock.
- Turn nearly everything off. A clean candlestick chart with one moving average is easier to read than a chart with six indicators, and the six indicators are mostly saying the same thing in different colours.
Choosing a broker
This manual won't name a specific broker, and you should be wary of any free educational content that does. Broker recommendations are very often affiliate arrangements, the writer is paid per signup, and you cannot tell from the page whether the recommendation survived that incentive.
Judge one yourself against five criteria.
1. Regulation — non-negotiable
If you're in the UK, use a broker regulated by the FCA. Other credible regimes exist (ASIC in Australia, CySEC in Cyprus), but UK regulation brings two protections that matter: client money must be held separately from the firm's own, and the FSCS may compensate you up to a limit if the firm fails.
Check the register yourself at register.fca.org.uk. Don't trust a badge on a website — cloned firm details are a known scam. Match the firm reference number.
The offshore red flag
Brokers registered in jurisdictions with minimal oversight can offer enormous leverage — 500:1 or more — which is exactly why they advertise it. If the firm fails or simply refuses a withdrawal, your practical recourse is close to zero. The leverage is the bait.
2. Spreads and costs
The spread is the gap between buy and sell price, and it's the cost you pay on every trade. On EUR/USD, under 1 pip is competitive; over 2 is expensive. Check whether there's a separate commission and whether the spread is fixed or variable. Also check overnight financing (swap) if you hold positions for days — it compounds quietly.
3. Execution quality
Ask about slippage and whether they guarantee stop-loss fills. In fast markets your stop may fill worse than requested. Some brokers offer guaranteed stops for a premium, which can be worth it around known events.
4. Product type
In the UK you'll typically meet spread betting (profits currently free of capital gains tax for UK residents, and you stake per point) or CFDs (taxable, but losses can be offset). Tax treatment depends on your circumstances and can change — check the current position rather than relying on a page like this one.
5. Getting money out
Before depositing anything meaningful, deposit a small amount, trade it, and withdraw it. How a firm behaves during a withdrawal tells you more than any review site.
Execution platform
Most brokers offer MetaTrader 4 or 5, and many offer their own web platform. Either is fine. What matters practically:
- You can attach a stop and a target at the moment you enter, not afterwards. If placing a stop is a separate step, one distraction becomes an unprotected position.
- It works on your phone, so you're not forced to sit at a desk to manage a trade.
- You can see your actual position size and current risk without doing mental arithmetic.
A common and sensible setup is to analyse in TradingView and execute in your broker's platform. Don't feel obliged to do both in one place.
Economic calendar
ForexFactory is the long-standing free option. Filter to high-impact events only, set it to your timezone, and look at it before you trade rather than after a candle has surprised you.
The events that reliably move markets:
- Interest rate decisions — the biggest by a distance
- Inflation (CPI) — drives expectations of the above
- Employment, especially US non-farm payrolls on the first Friday
- GDP and central bank speeches
Knowing the number is not the edge. Knowing when not to have a position on is.
Position-size calculator
You can do the arithmetic from Chapter 4 by hand — risk ÷ stop distance — and you should understand it either way. In practice, doing it manually on every trade is where mistakes creep in, particularly when you're hurried, which is precisely when the mistake is expensive.
Free calculators exist on most broker sites. Use one, or use a tool that does it automatically as part of the setup.
Journal
A spreadsheet is entirely adequate: date, pair, setup, entry, stop, target, size, result in R, and whether you followed your plan.
The hard part isn't the tool, it's filling it in on the trades you'd rather forget. A journal with only your good trades in it is worse than no journal, because it tells you a flattering story with the authority of a record.
Where DEALFx fits
Everything in this manual can be done by hand, and people did it by hand for decades. Being honest about what a tool changes:
| The job | By hand | With DEALFx |
|---|---|---|
| Watching seven pairs | Charts open, or you miss setups | Checked hourly, alerts when something changes |
| Position sizing | Calculator, every trade | Worked out from your £ risk automatically |
| Knowing if a signal is stale | Guesswork | Signal age, with an entry window |
| Testing whether a rule works | Scrolling back through charts | Backtest with out-of-sample data |
| Avoiding news | Remember to check | Calendar built in; auto-pilot skips the window |
| Moving stops to breakeven | If you're at the screen | On a timer, logged |
| Journalling | Spreadsheet, if you're disciplined | Reconciled against your broker automatically |
None of that makes a bad strategy good. What it removes is the gap between the plan you wrote and the plan you actually followed on a Thursday afternoon when you were busy — and for most traders that gap is where the money goes.
Try it without spending anything
Paper trading runs on live prices with simulated money and needs no broker connection and no card. You can run the whole framework in this manual, see the evidence, and decide for yourself. Start free →
One last thing
Most people who trade FX lose money. That is not a marketing line we're obliged to print — it is the reported outcome at every regulated broker that publishes the figure, and it usually sits somewhere between 65% and 80% of retail accounts.
The ones who don't lose tend to share a short list of habits, none of which are exciting: they risk very little per trade, they follow a written plan, they keep records, they accept losing runs without changing course, and they trade less often than they'd like to.
Everything in this manual is in service of that list. The entry techniques in Chapter 3 are the part that feels like trading; the arithmetic in Chapter 4 is the part that decides whether you're still doing it next year.
Start on paper. Keep the records. Risk less than you think you should.