Your first step should be to educate yourself about the market and trading in general. Read books, take a course, learn strategies, and practice, practice, practice! Most brokers offer demo accounts which will allow you to practice trading without risking real money. The downside of that is that you often don't trade the same way that you would if you were trading with real cash! For a general background on the foreign exchange market, see the Forex Market Snapshot.
Trading Tips
Rule #1. Learn or Develop a Profitable Trading Strategy
This is rule #1. Without it, you are not going to go anywhere! For strategies and system ideas, please visit forex ebooks, forex courses, forex books and manual forex systems sections.
Rule #2. Use Low Leverage
Using excessive leverage may be the most common reason why many traders blow out their accounts. A good rule of thumb would be not to leverage your account more than ten times its value. For example, if you had a trading account of $1,000, you would not open trades worth more than $10,000. For a more detailed explanation of leverage, see forex basics.
Rule #3. Only Use Risk Capital
What this means is that you should only use money that if lost, would not affect your lifestyle in any way. Though it has been said many times before, this is a simple rule that can avoid any harsh lessons being learned further down the track if learn now.
