If you're lucky enough to make some decent profits from forex trading, then you have the very nice problem of deciding what to do with your winnings. Everyone will have their own ideas about what they want to do with their money, but one thing you should do is to withdraw a large portion of your trading account so you don't risk losing it.

This is exactly what happened to a forex trader here in the UK a few years ago. If I remember correctly, he deposited £10,000 into a spreadbetting account and managed to turn this initial deposit into something like £260,000.

I don't know how he did it. He must have taken some high risk trades and leveraged himself up to the hilt, but the point is that he never withdrew any of his winnings and you can probably guess what happened next.

His good fortune suddenly came to an end and as his trades started to conspire against him, he lost the plot completely and ended up losing pretty much all of his money.

I feel sorry for the guy but the point is that if he withdrew say £200,000 or even just £100,000 of his winnings, he could have invested it into shares or property and given himself a nice recurring residual income for the rest of his life in the form of dividends and rent respectively. He could also have benefited from any long-term capital growth as well.

So you really should look after your money and try and invest for the future. I myself have recently loaded my share portfolio with UK utility companies such as Centrica, Severn Trent, Telecom Plus and United Utilities because they are all massively oversold on a technical basis and they each pay out handsome dividends of between 5% and 8% per year.

They're not the most exciting investments in the world admittedly but they're still excellent long-term investments in my opinion at today's prices (this is only my opinion and does not constitute financial advice).

The point is that you shouldn't try and make your fortune solely through forex trading because then you're always at risk of losing it all. Withdraw some of your winnings and put some of it into shares or property, or even just a high interest savings account, because you need to think about your long-term financial security as well.