Swing/Intraday Fx Trading - Trading News vs Naked Trades? & Leverage?

Hi Wso,

I just found out that I had a part of my savings invested in a mutual fund since 1999 - So I can only guess my grandparents and parents started it when I was 3 and I was told they pulled it out a week ago. Mainly KR Blue Chip stocks, and it performed well and now I have 20,000 USD in my hands.

I am usually very interested in portfolio management, rather than trading, but I believe portfolio managing with 20,000 is quite meaningless. I practice daily trading forex via demo account and make around 1% profit consistently. I trade naked just with price action, because of lack of experience trading the news and I don't have that light speed reaction to news like professional traders yet.

If you do intraday trade, how beneficial do you find trading news - if you believe it has far greater advantage than trading price action, do you recommend to novice traders?

Also I would like to know how much leverage do you use and recommend for novice traders. (My offshore broker offers up to 1:1000)

Cheers,

Phillip