Nobody can call Donchian breakouts “unsound” in principle, anyway - this much is for sure. It appears that Turbo has come up with an interesting “take” on them. 
I agree that there are many brokers who trick their clients but cannot agree that Forex is gambling. It is a tough business, yes, and it’s not for everyone. It takes years, lots of practice, analysis and research to eventually be able to make significant profits. But not everyone have the time and patience to do that as in the end, you really need to commit to it. Otherwise you might indeed lose too much. And I am really sorry that you had such a tough experience. Perhaps it would be better if you take a small break and give yourself some time to decide whether you really want to continue trading and if it’ll be worth it for you. And if you feel that your broker hasn’t been honest with you, withdraw your money and close the account, there is no point on losing even more.
No, all of trading strategies are not unprofitable actually; here money management is very important issue! But it’s true; there is nothing like 100% in Forex business! Even, if you get only 70% success by your strategy, till now you have a chance to become a successful Forex trader, it’s all about money management and risk management knowledge!
Well I wouldn’t say it is[I][B] ALL [/B][/I]about money and risk management. But you are right that without this then even the best of trading strategies may not actually succeed.
But, of course, all trading has to be based on a sound approach to actual position-taking that has a track record of consistently producing the risk/reward parameters on which the risk/money management criteria are based.
Without that, the best that your money management can do is ensure that your account disappears extremely gracefully in a series of well-planned, smoothly executed, and beautifully homogenous losses, 2% at a time… 
There’s no discrimination whatsoever between institutional & retail environments as far as those terms & labels are concerned.
Politely, to their face & in any correspondence, they are of course clients or customers, but in reality & in-house, they’re all punters whether they’re transacting via institutional brokers or retail bookies.
They all simply place bets on the movement of financial instruments but generally the only crowd that gets sniffy about these labels & what it is they’re [B]actually[/B] involved in, is the retail sector. The vast majority of professional players really could care less & quite often refer to themselves as punters/gamblers.
They’re simply industry terms that get bandied about every day of every week & which just so happen to accurately describe the endeavor that’s being undertaken.
Underfunded & ill-prepared retail punters are by no means the exclusive donors of broker profits. Professional punters swell the satchels too on a very regular basis.
A little late to the party but here is my two cents, if you are going to trade/invest in any market you must have an edge, without one you will lose all your money, a blackjack player who counts cards has an edge over the casino, a roulette player chasing patterns has no edge and will eventually lose. In markets an edge could be something as simple as buying the S&P or DOW and holding for years, while reinvesting the dividends, this strategy has a 100% success rate. For my Trading Edge in Forex I employ the following, Trade with the Trend, Match a strong to a weak currency, trade against the crowd, patients to wait for ideal setups, and final sound money management
Is Forex a scam? No it most certainly is not.
Is Forex an area littered with the corpses of the clueless? Yes, it most definitely is.
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Hey Kadhiem,
Like many have already said, an experienced trader looking at your story will feel sorry for you but won’t be surprised. It’s the same with most jobs or careers, I’m sure that what people think you do all day based on your job title is very different to what you actually do day in, day out.
If you are going to trade for the next 10 or 20 years can every day or trade be life or death? Can you be stressed or under pressure each time a trade doesn’t go your way? That would be a miserable life.
With time, learning and experience your expectations become more in line with your ‘reality’, you then decide, or it is decided for you, if trading is for you or not.
Trading for a living is very different from hobby trading. I trade full time and feel no pressure to generate a set figure each day or month, if i did i would be miserable. When a trade loses it’s because it was supposed to, i don’t feel it. When a trade wins i don’t feel that either, it was supposed to win. Of course it wasn’t always like that and it’s taken a lot to get here, but in order for it to be a viable lifestyle for me i had to learn. Yes i do get quite pissed off at something trade related a couple of times a year but that just means it’s time for a week off.
Trading is a lot of work and there is a lot of going backwards to go forwards, but like any job if it suits you it’s way more enjoyable than it is a chore, it can even feel like a privilege at times. (Mostly it’s just pretty ‘normal’)
This is not only nonsense, but [I][U]scary[/U][/I] nonsense: as with several of your other posts, you have [B]absolutely no idea[/B] what you’re talking about.
I’d imagine that brokers have a fairly good handle on which clients are consistently profitable and which are not. I’d even venture a guess that some brokers may even piggyback their best clients from time to time?
You are gambler, not trader bro, that’s why you are losing. Genuine trader never feels addiction to trading, its like a daily routine job for you. When you will try with new deposit just imagine for a second that you lose everything. Think about that for some time. If you are ok with this losses then you can proceed. You DON’T have to feel joy from winning trade and sadness from losing trade. If you lose emotional poise you are doomed to lose.
As an option, spend two weeks for analysis and a couple of days for a trade. I do 1-3 trades monthly and after 9 months of trading just slightly above the breakeven. Because emotions gained control over me forcing me to make wrong decisions.
mh,
Absolutely & they’re rarely opposed, especially those who continually identify & surf strong dominant short & medium term flows, because usually when they’re (the minority) surfing those strong waves the mug punters (the majority) are frantically swimming against them.
And in the main, that type & flavor of activity denotes which group or characteristic of punters you lay & which group you play! These days the machines sort, filter & stack all that stuff out, but in theory that’s still how it plays out.
It’s really rather simple. Just trade a micro account for 0.01 lots per trade, only cents per pip. Do that until you learn to make a consistent profit. You could have paid for your entire Forex education many times over for much less than what you lost at the very beginning. The only tough part is that it will probably take 5 to 10 years of steady learning before you learn to trade for a profit. Most traders do what you did and try to trade for large profits before they know what they are doing. That’s not a scam, it’s just a very common fault in human nature. The first thing you need to learn is patience.
Great post Graviton
Indeed: excellent post, there, from Graviton.
Couldn’t agree more …
Well I am going to play the devil’s advocate and say that what the OP has proposed is not so far-fetched. I notice that everyone without exception in this thread has put up no proof of numbers or long-term consistent success. Why so shy? If you know someone who isn’t shy why not share their success (with some kind of elementary proof of course) or have them post here?
My trading experience is very similar to OP, and I even asked a similar question to this one over on Quora - you can find it here.
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-long-term-forex-trader-with-a-verifiable-record-of-profitability
The answers I received there were very unsatisfactory as you can see if you have time to read the postings. The answers given here are intuitively satisfying, and are designed to give one hope but they aren’t definitive, and haven’t proven that OP is necessarily wrong when he says retail forex trading is a sucker’s game over the longer term. For me that would be a matter of years, let’s say …5-10?
Then again, here is another Quora question that seems to indicate that at least a few have managed to find success in FX.
https://www.quora.com/Who-are-successful-Forex-traders
Who am I to judge? I’m still just a beginner.
As for the assertion that trading robots don’t work, I can say with some certainty that’s incorrect, but like with everything else the way most people use robots is strategically unsound. If you had a genius cousin who didn’t need to sleep, and knew how to trade one Forex strategy perfectly, but didn’t have any other skills (at all), would you put in him charge of your bank account, your research and development division, your product development division? Would you make him the CEO of your company and leave him to make all the decisions for your company, checking in on his progress only occasionally if at all? If you answered yes to any of these you deserve to lose all your money, and yet this is precisely how most people use Forex robots. They are a great tool to add to a trading arsenal, but they are not a one-stop shop solution. Also paradoxically the best trading robots are not the ones you can buy. They are freely distributed among groups of like-minded traders/coders who are working together to develop something progressively better. You need to find one of these groups and contribute something - testing, programming, etc. You also should learn how to trade manually so that when the robot inevitably fails (they always will eventually just as any piece of machinery is vulnerable to failure over time) you can recover the trades, or at least, salvage the account.
I’m still not sure if it’s possible to trade on the Forex market, long-term, consistently profitably, but I don’t see why it necessarily wouldn’t be, I just find that there are lot of talkers, and not many show-ers. As others have pointed out the Babypips school and a fat bankroll are not enough to ensure success, but I probably won’t say the answer is no, for another 10-15 years as I’m still learning.
Hi Clemmo,
I understand what you are saying and agree there is not a lot, if any, concrete proof that anyone trades profitably long-term…but that is not [I]really [/I]what the comments here are addressing in a general sense.
The OP starts with a specific account of his trading experience as follows:
I am not quite a newbie, in short I started GBP/USD forex last Oct, made £7k by mid January and so was “really unlucky”. Lost that 7K plus 12k by end of Jan. restarted with tiny deals then lost 2k on Brexit, another 2k on Pound flash crash, finally moved to EUR/USD and lost another 2.5k last week after a patient waiting of 3 months of open mixed hedged deals.
…and then goes on to conclude from this experience that therefore[I] no one [/I]can make money.
This is clearly not a rational conclusion from this evidence and the figures demonstrate that his position sizing and risk control are totally out of order, especially for a relatively newcomer to both forex and trading.
I think the comments that followed from [I]numerous [/I]traders are consistent in this assessment of his claim.
Whether, as a [I]general [/I]issue, trading can be profitable, well there are umpteen threads here rolling that very question over and over and over again - and of course it has no answer until people find out for themselves.
a) even if one trader is successful it does not mean another will be, b) why should any successful trader be expected to open his bank account details to prove a point for others?, c) if someone is [I]really [/I]interested in trading then they should work at it and discover for themselves if it is for them instead of playing lazy and expecting others to spoon-feed them. Afterall, with demo accounts and microlot live accounts it does NOT cost thousands in losses to determine[B] if[/B] it will work and [B]how [/B]it could work - before diving in the deep end with one’s life savings!
There’s certainly no proof of profits here on BP, or any other website that I’ve seen. Ironic, but true…!
However, lots of profits with proof of ‘hindsite’ 
Well I [I][B]did [/B][/I]post the charts confirming my trades on Turbo’s High 5 thread - for what they were worth and they [I][B]did [/B][/I]include the green arrows proof and pip values!! - but no I didn’t tell the position size or USD result - why should I? The point was to show the trades not the personal profits - and I think therein lies the answer to your statement…:
If someone has a difficulty or a question about a loss situation then it is pertinent to give all the details in order that others can offer help. But when one is working profitably what possible purpose or value is there in parading it in front of others? Or indeed what possible justification is there to expect people to print their personal financial matters on a public web site forum!!!
Afterall, one sees a doctor because one has a [I]health [/I]problem and obviously describes one’s symptoms. In the same way people post here about their [I]wealth [/I]problems and their symptoms. But the doctors don’t go around shouting how healthy or wealthy they are!
Naturally, if someone is promoting or offering a method for others to copy then there is certainly a justifaction why they should prove its results. But if people, such as most regulars here, are offering advice or suggestions based on their personal experience or knowledge, rather than a specific trading strategy, then its intrinsic value should be evident without the need to prove one’s credentials by posting one’s bank statements!
I am sure that there are many regulars here, like yourself, who wish to help genuine newbies in their early stages so that they do not all need to reinvent the wheel independently, and that hardly requires a set of audited financials with a certified tax statement in order to do so, or to prove the inherent value of your advice 