Do You Need a Mentor to Learn to Trade Forex?

If you’ve ever Googled anything about forex trading, I’m sure your browsers and social media are now full of posts from Forex mentors and gurus alike, looking to sell you their trading course and exclusive trading group. In such an unregulated space, such as online education, it’s hard to gauge whether a forex trading mentor is legitimate and whether you actually need them to help you become consistently profitable within the markets. So, let’s discuss whether you really need a forex mentor…

Is Mentorship Really Needed To Learn To Trade Forex?

Simply put, you do not need a forex mentor or any kind of educational course to learn to trade forex. Trading, much to the dismay of many newbie traders, is a game that takes many years to master. You will constantly see ‘traders’ selling courses or even just strategies that will promise to pass a funded account challenge and make you ridiculous returns in the market. You need to consider their motives, as mentors.

If it were true that a trader could consistently generate these earth-shattering returns with a strategy that you could learn in 2 weeks, then every trading firm in the world would be snapping at their heels to take them on as a trader! They’d have plenty of opportunities and huge sums of trading capital at their feet, meaning they wouldn’t need your £200 to teach you to trade! In 2023, you’ve got to also consider the huge amount of free resources online. Whether it is on websites or YouTube, many traders publish their learnings online, meaning you can pick up strategies and build profitable trading systems without ever spending a penny!  

This isn’t me saying that there isn’t value in forex mentorship. In fact, I think there can be a huge amount of value in forex mentorship if done correctly. I’ve done both over the years – I had gone out on my own to become a self-taught forex trader, then paid for courses to try to learn from specific mentors that I thought to be great within the industry.

So, let’s discuss the benefits and drawbacks of paying to learn forex.

What Are The Benefits Of Forex Mentorship?

If you manage to find a profitable forex trading mentor, there is a huge amount of potential benefits that can come with this! It’s crucial to really take your time during this process and ensure that you conduct your full due diligence before putting faith in the trader, as you would with any other investment.

Let’s assume you do manage to find a legitimate forex mentor, with a great track record of profitability – this is what you’ll gain:

• You will decrease the learning curve. Learning from someone that can teach you exactly what matters will mean that you can greatly decrease the learning curve in the markets. This usually takes years to navigate.
• You will get profitable faster. Due to this reduced learning curve, you will most likely start to net profits faster.
• You will recoup your cost of learning. Your cost to learn will become a small expense, compared to the potential profits you will be pulling out of the markets.
• You can go on to become prop firm funded. Your new-found profitability allows you to become a funded trader and increase your capital under management!

These are the primary benefits of working with a legitimate mentor! It goes without saying that this can open the doors to a huge amount of success in your trading career if done correctly. 

What Are The Drawbacks Of Forex Mentorship?

There are a fair number of drawbacks when it comes to forex mentorship, but these primarily come back to choosing the wrong mentor to work with.

It’s important to understand that most mentors are just failed forex traders, looking to monetize the industry, seeing as they weren’t able to turn a profit trading. Many legitimate and profitable traders wouldn’t even take your money, as it wouldn’t be worth their time!

To that end, here are the main drawbacks associated with paying for forex mentorship:

• It can be expensive. The cost is fairly high, with some mentors charging up to £5000 for courses and mentorship.
• It’s often repackaged versions of content already online. With so much free content online, these days, most trading courses or packages are just rehashed versions of content that you could get online for free.
• It can waste years of your learning. If you’re being ‘led down the garden path’, so to speak, learning the wrong things will cause you to waste years of your life where you could have been applying yourself to something else.
• You rarely have proof the strategies are profitable. The lack of proof means you will most likely not be profitable and will lose faith in what you’re doing, often claiming forex is impossible to trade or blaming yourself.
• A lack of success may cause you to give up on the industry. This is ultimately where 90% of traders end up going, out of the industry!

For these reasons, please spend your time doing due diligence on the mentor you’re looking to work with!

Where And How To Find A Good Forex Mentor?

Sadly for us traders, it’s not an easy feat to find a good forex mentor. In fact, you might manage to find one truly profitable trader offering mentorship, out of every 150 traders selling their online courses. Something to bear in mind is ‘you wouldn’t learn a language from someone that cannot speak the language’. This rings very true within the forex market. If a trader cannot prove a verified track record, then it’s not worth engaging with them. By proof, I don’t mean sending you a screenshot of an account on MT4 with £1,000,000 in it. I mean seeing an auditable, third-party track record in their name, on a platform like MyFxBook.

So, where can you find a mentor like this?

Sadly, there is no marketplace for truly profitable forex mentors, and it can take years to stumble across the right one. I’d strongly recommend being active within the forex trading community on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Keeping an ear to the ground will help you identify any potential mentors that may be able to improve your trading, rather than just taking your money.

Just to clarify, the hallmarks of a legitimate forex mentor are:

• Making the bulk of their money from trading, not mentorship.
• No flashy lifestyle, no ‘laptop’ lifestyle.
• No quick win strategies or promises to pass funded account challenges
• Verified track record on MyFxBook (In their name)

If a mentor has all of these traits, there is a chance that they’re the mentor for you!

In Summary – Do You Need A Forex Mentor?

In conclusion, you do not need to pay a forex mentor to teach you how to trade forex if your goal is to be a profitable trader. There is, obviously, value in working with the right mentor. If you can find a mentor with a verified track record on a third party platform, then I would fully recommend conducting further due diligence and seeing if they’re worth your time. Finding the correct mentor may save you years of trial and error – but take your time in doing so, as the wrong mentor can set you back years!  

Are you looking to become a prop firm funded trader? Work with Lux Trading Firm now!