This is a slightly humorous guide about some of the common mistakes that new traders make, which will usually lead to them running their account down to the level of a margin call in the window of just a few weeks. You should be able to read through this article, see what unsuccessful traders do, and then do the opposite. Unless of course you are actually trying to lose money, in which case you should follow these instructions verbatim.

The first thing you will want to do when you are trying to wipe out your forex trading account is to make sure you fund your account with the money that you need to pay next month's rent. This will lead to placing trades based on emotion, and because you are feeling emotional you will enter the market without any defined reason, and then you will have no exit strategy. When you start to lose this money, you will panic and your thoughts will become more incoherent, leading you to make even worse trading decisions. This is a great way to lose your trading account, so make sure you trade with money that you cannot afford to lose.

The second thing you should do is make sure you choose a high level of leverage for your trades. 100:1 is a good place to start, but if you can get leverage as high as 250:1 or even as high as 400:1 then this is definitely what you should do. Then when you have 400:1 leverage, instead of using your $1,000 to control one standard lot, you can use this same amount of money to control four lots or $400,000.

Using a ridiculously huge amount of leverage is a good thing for a number of reasons. First, you will get nailed on the spread, and if you were trading GBP/USD in the example above with a 4-pip spread then you would end up paying $160 on a trade that you are only using $1,000 on. A 16% commission is good, this means it will be harder for you to make that money back. Now if you are following the first instruction and using your rent money to trade with, then you should be getting really emotional right now because you just lost $160 before the market has even moved at all. Being emotional is a good thing when you are trying to wipe out your trading account as fast as possible, because you will start to trade on impulse.

The third thing that you should do is to never trade with a stop-loss, and in fact don't even try to come up with an exit strategy. Most forex traders use stop-losses to mitigate risk and make sure that they never lose to much on a single trade, but you will want to take on as much risk as you possibly can. When you have a trade that is losing alot of pips, you should make sure that you never try to stem the losses so that you can run your account down to the level of a margin call as fast as possible. Remember that when you do not trade with a stop-loss, your available margin effectively acts as the level that you will get stopped out at.

The fourth thing that you will want to do is to trade randomly and not follow a trading strategy, but if you are going to follow a trading strategy then make sure you completely ignore fundamental announcements and only focus on technical analysis. Only profitable forex traders combine fundamental and technical analysis, so you will want to create a strategy that is purely mathematics-based. While this by itself is not bad, and in fact there are many successful forex strategies like this, it will also tend to give signals prior to economic anouncements, which can cause big losses.

A simple strategy would be to use a MACD indicator and follow the moving average crosses for your buy and sell signals. You might get a few good trades this way, but what you really want to get is a trading signal right before a fundamental news announcement. This will cause the market to spike wildly while you are in a trade, and you will have absolutely no idea why, and you will probably end up losing 50-100 pips when the market goes against you. And then you will say to yourself, "But, but, but... my MACD indicator TOLD me to trade!" And if you are following the third rule and not trading with a stop loss then you should be losing alot of money right now and be very close to your goal of wiping out your trading account.