You can get into Forex on your own, though it can be easier if you have a mentor. A Forex mentor can provide you with insight from his or her own experience, become your accountability partner, and help you develop your own trading method. Your trading mentor can be someone you know or someone you pay — or no one at all. It is certainly not a requirement that you have one, although it is good to be accountable to someone, whether or not that person is also your mentor.
Your Forex mentor should be someone with demonstrable experience and a good track record. A lot of Forex mentors have never actually traded currencies. This may or may not make them unsuitable, but you should approach anyone without a track record very cautiously indeed. There are many reasons why someone may never have entered the market, though, and incompetence is not always the culprit. If your mentor has never actually traded live, they should at least know the market inside and out and have a great record in demo.
Paying a mentor is something else, which should be approached with caution. It can be a very good move or a very bad one depending on what you end up with. Research thoroughly before opting to sign up for any trading program. A lot of programs are scams designed to prey on people who do not understand what a mentor is for. A Forex mentor is not going to give you the holy grail of trading, and any mentor who claims to have a perfect system is not someone worthy of your money. A Forex mentor will not do your trading for you, or make you a better person — he or she can only help you along the way as you work to do both those tasks on your own. Any Forex mentor who guarantees your success is being dishonest, since your success ultimately depends on you.
Find out what tools a mentor will provide you with and what kind of community you will be joining when you pay for a program. Learn how much one-on-one help you can expect, and what strategy the mentor takes regarding not just Forex but also teaching. Find someone who will suit your personal style, and who will help you develop it — not try to replace it with his or her own.
Finally, be wary when reading reviews online. You will find a lot of honest reviews, but you will also find a lot of crap. There is a lot of competition in this sphere, and that means there are a lot of people out there who are posting dishonest reviews (positive and negative) about different Forex mentors and training programs. It will be up to you to evaluate the reviews you read in light of what you can find out about the program. If you can, get in touch with other students who have participated in the program and find out how it helped them personally to succeed.
