Please help me set my goals and review my plan?

At the moment I have been playing around with trading212 and just getting a feel practicing.
I have primarily been trading oil and some FX.
I really want to try make $2k a month. What capital would be required and also how much time would it take as I am a student. At the moment I have got about $500.00 to invest. It is not much but I also do not mind starting off smaller.

Thank you and all advice is appreciated :slight_smile:

It’s not easy to predict an answer to that, but I’ll offer a “guideline” …

Eventually, after many years’ education and work, and a few thousand hours of screen-time experience, a [I][U]small minority[/U][/I] of traders eventually manage to achieve a steadyish 5% return per month, and they’d therefore need an account of about $40,000 to achieve that.

I was, too, when I started. I had plenty of well targeted, well-focused education and 4 years’ practice on demo accounts (most people do considerably less than this), then started live trading with a funded account with which I became profitable within only 2-3 months (most people take considerably longer, but I’d already had that 4 years’ practice), but it was still another 3 years after that before I was steadily enough profitable to make a living from it.

According to Dr. John Borman, who has studied such subjects as trader education and performance extensively, 3 years is, on average, the time-scale at which it all starts to make sense for those who go on to become successful … so that’s about the same, on average, as a degree-course? You can see what he said about this (as recently as yesterday!), in this thread.

This is also a good thread: [B]301 Moved Permanently

5% per month return on this amount, if/when you eventually achieve it, will be $25, so you can appreciate that the purpose of trading with a $500 account shouldn’t be “to make significant money” but to get practice, and to learn to trade without monthly losses (as most people make, when they start).

These links could also possibly help you …

This was how I learned.

These were my most reliable and helpful information-sources.

And these are the five classic mistakes which all successful traders [I]must[/I] eventually learn to avoid, in my opinion.

Good luck, and welcome to the forum!