There are various ways to trade the currency markets. You can try and get a job in the City where you work for a bank and they will pay you to trade the markets (using their money), or you can trade the markets yourself using your own money. It is important to note that working in the City is a lot different to working from home.

For a start you will find that there are a lot of barriers to entry with regards to getting a job in the City. You can't just walk into the centre of London and ask for a job with a top bank. You often need at least a very good degree, and often a postgraduate degree as well. It is possible to get a trainee job without a degree in some cases, but you often need very good contacts to get these kind of jobs.

If you want to trade the markets from home, however, it is a lot easier. All you need is access to the internet and some capital that you can trade with. It doesn't have to be thousands of dollars, but you do need a decent amount if you are going to live on your profits.

This itself is a big difference because when you work for a bank you can trade the markets using the bank's money. You will be expected to make a profit, and will be rewarded handsomely if you do, but you can still rest assured that you will receive a very good salary in the process.

When you work for yourself, your salary is totally derived from your profits. So if you don't manage to make any money from your trading, you will not have any money to live on (unless of course you have other sources of income).

This means that there are totally different pressures involved with each job. When you work in the City, you have an incentive to perform because there are big bonuses on offer if you do well. However this also means that traders often adopt a different mindset to those people who work from home trading their own money.

Traders in the City can afford to take more risks because they know it is not their money at stake. Self employed traders, however, have to be a lot more conservative and have to find a way to make money on a consistent basis so they can remain self employed and earn a good standard of living.

To some extent those people who work in the City have a much easier job. Whatever happens, they know that they will be well paid, and they also have a lot more tools at their disposal. For example they can use a top of the range terminal that can display lots of different charts at the same time, and they may also have access to live order flow data, which helps them predict the future direction of the markets.

So the point I want to get across is that working in the City and working from home is completely different, and involves totally different mindsets. The pressures from working from home are immense because failure simply isn't an option. You can of course get fired from your job in the City if you consistently lose money, but at least you will have earned a lot of money and received a generous compensation package before getting the boot.