Forex strategies are essential for a forex trader to profit from the market. Forex trading strategies make a trader more sophisticated and confident by helping him in making right calculations about the market. In a market with always changing exchange rates it is foolishness to trade hysterically by just following the emotions or advices from unreliable sources.

There are lots of forex trading strategies followed by forex traders. They can be broadly classified in to two type of strategies are profit maximizing strategies and risk minimizing strategies. The strategy differs with individuals as each trader has unique needs and has unique trading abilities. A trader must design a forex trading strategy according to many factors such as his or her initial investment, account size, trading ability, risk tolerance, currency pairs trading, geographical limitations/advantages, the broker to which he is affiliated, the trading system he/she uses, the profit goal (short-term profit or long-term profit), etc.

The most followed forex profit maximizing strategy is the leverage. Leverage allows forex traders to trade with more funds than in his or her account. The leverages are provided by the forex brokers to their clients. The usual leverage is 100:1 i.e., for $1 in account the trader can borrow $100 from his broker. Day traders get much more leverage than other traders and the ratio leverage differ with brokers and also with the account minimum, type of contract trading etc.

The most popular forex risk minimizing strategy is the stop loss order. Stop loss orders help traders to limit their loss by stopping a trade at a preset price. Forex trading systems allows traders to set their stop loss order prices. One related strategy is the trailing stop losses, which are proportional stop loss prices that come into play only when the prices are falling. There are also many other types of stop loss orders available which mainly depends on the broker to which the trader is affiliated to.

One another related strategy is the automated order entry. Automated order entry enables a trader to enter into a trade at a preset price rate automatically. The trader can set the price at his trading platform. Automated order entry methods help traders to enter the market at most favorable time. Apart from these strategies forex traders can use forex futures and forex options to cover the loss and well as to cover the profit. These contracts help forex traders to buy or sell currencies at a predetermined rate at a point of time in future.

Apart from these trading strategies, forex trader follow many other strategies for choosing currency pairs, trading hours, entrance and exit prices etc. Irrespective of the type of the strategy, all forex strategies involve risks. The success of a forex strategy depends on many factors like the market condition and the discipline of the trader.