Quote:
Originally Posted by pipo
Maybe it would have make more sense to ask this question into another forum category than Newbie forum, I would have more answers  |
I only know a few other forex traders personally. One is learning like me, one lost quite a bit of money and appears to have given up, one trades to supplement his income and a friend of his trades for a living. The last two seem to be doing quite well and are the ones that introduced me to it.
I think it comes down to your approach to the market. If you come in to get rich as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible you'll probably lose as greed and unrealistic expectations takes over and blurs your vision causing mistakes. I've seen it happen.
If like me your goal is only to replace your salary so you can make better use of your time then to make your boss rich then how many positive pips each day do you really need to average in a week? Using 1 standard lot I can replace my salary with 18-20 pips average per day. Of course I want to see more then that to allow the account to grow over time and compensate for bad days/weeks but you can see how little is actually required to get out of it to live on. You can browse the forums here and see people posting their gains for example, James' live trading group for his 40-100 pip per day system with days where people in the group are making
16-80 pips in a day or
40-60 pips in a day with James getting 300 pips. Another example, Elang's posting for
consistent FX trading where they posted a weeks trading report and even with 52% losing trades still pulled out $2600 in a week. That's a months salary in one week.
I believe it's possible to make a living from it but it's not something you can just jump into. There's a lot to learn, a lot to practice and a lot of mistakes to be made along the way. I've wiped out a small live account once already figuring I'd demo'ed long enough boy was I wrong. Now I've re-funded my live account but I'm back working on the demo again for some more practice. I obviously wasn't ready to make a living at it yet but I'm not ready to give up either.
Persistence, determination, patience and most of all ... good money management. Being successful at it to make a living comes down to not how you enter a trade but how you manage the trade once you're in it. We manage risk. That's really what traders should be calling themselves. Risk Managers. Without learning this skill there's no way to making a living at it and Elang's week of trading in the link above demonstrates that perfectly.