Forex trading as a career?

I must say it will be a stressful career.

Long shot for anyone - I’m sure you know the stats, 90%+ fail…

If you are are just starting out, make that closer to 99.99999% chance you will fail. trading takes thousands of hours of screen time along with analysis to gain an edge.

Forex is a good way to start though because it will give you an opportunity to get your feet wet with a relatively small capital outlay. Unfortunately, I trade futures but if I was new to the game, i would start with FX.

Best advice I can give (IMHO) paper trade for a bit and backtest to see if your strategies have potential. If you feel comfortable, go live only with $$ you are ready to lose… think of it as an education and everyone must pay their tuition :slight_smile:

No Idea in your country, just google brokers and their reviews. Elite Trader or Trade 2 Win are a couple of good sources of info.

Best of luck to you!

Word for word! And if Newbies don’t know what "paper trading " means , it’s just another (older) term for trading on a demo acct.
Btw buddy, why did you switch to futures…Was it to avoid market makers or something else…

That is my goal, to support myself and my family through forex trading. Now though, forex helps a bit but not that impactful… still a long ways to go for me.

And as long as you stick with it and are willing to work hard, you’ll get there! It’s a long but very rewarding road. :slight_smile:

SerenityFX

it all depends on what you get at the end of the day and you schedule. if you know you can live off the profit you make in forex why not. but this days one is not content with what we have at the moment, we always need more. so making forex your full time job is a choice you have to make. what to do with your spare time. it will be nice to have something doing.

Yes, i have considered to quit my day job and continue the forex trading business for full time to make good amount of money and work at the time i wish so that there is nobody to boss me.

It is very unlikely that one can successfully trade FX and have a full time job too. Not unless your full time job is with a brokerage firm or maybe an office in a bank where your supervisor won’t mind you having the charts and news opened non stop. Be free to add other possible scenarios that I can’t think of right now, lol.

Forex is difficult to achieve consistent profit. One will in danger position if the respective month is a losing month & he or she don’t have other income. Cash flow will be in trouble. Forex better to be part time.

Although, of course, make enough money at it part time and it will naturally become full time on its own. You can make a great full-time salary without putting in anything like full time hours.

Jee man, after 43 posts and nobody had mentioned that! I thought I was the only one thinking like that. Thanks for your post…it’s truly reassuring to me.

This sounds great. But when can we achieve that mark ? It’s a long road for me …

[QUOTE=“brendad;555377”] This sounds great. But when can we achieve that mark ? It’s a long road for me …[/QUOTE]

Well, quite. That’s different for all of us. I was lucky enough to be able to start full time, was profitable inside a year.

Starting around a full time job would be trickier but perfectly doable.

Starting part time around a job and self-taught for free? I wouldn’t fancy that tbh.

I was telling someone about Forex trading the other day and the question of investing into it full-time came up… My answer was that more time trading does not equate to larger profits; as a beginner, I thought that I needed to put a lot of trades on, be very much involved with it 24/7; in truth, I got too involved and overtraded myself into (demo) losses.

Again, everyone is different, but a newbie trading full time is like a learner rider being handed a Ducati 1098 and told not to crank the throttle on full… The temptation would be very strong, and your sense of restrain/awareness not quite as strong to keep you from harm…

Before you quit your job to trade the market full time, you need to ask yourself two important questions:

First, have you been consistently profitable every month trading the market?

Secondly, are your profits enough to pay for your expenses every month?

If you are going to rely on trading as your source of income, you need to know with absolute confidence that you can bring in the profits at the end of each month to pay for your monthly expenses and more.

If you are just starting out as a trader, I would strongly suggest that you keep your job and learn to trade the market on the side. As you trade you will improve your trading skills and gain valuable experience on how to trade the market profitably in the long term.

Psychologically, you will also trade better if you are not worried about your next paycheck. Learning to trade the market is challenging enough. Do not give yourself added stress and pressure to perform well in your trading just so you have enough profits at the end of each month to feed yourself and your loved ones.

There is nothing wrong in keeping your job and trading the market at the same time. You can use the profits from your trading to supplement your income rather than seek to replace it.

Very agree with codester, but I think need several months with real profit to confirm you can pay for your bills

Whenever clients of mine say this, it triggers off the alarm bells! If you’re thinking of quitting your job and trading fulltime, it may be worth doing some serious thinking.

How big is your trading account?

How much do you reasonable expect to make in percentage terms?

Would your “conservative” percentage figure, translated into a cash sum be enough to keep you in the manner to which you want to become accustomed?

The problem with trading for an income with a smaller sized account is that you put pressure on yourself to make money. If you’ve quit the regular income you get from your day job then this pressure is even more acute than before so it will most certainly influence temptation boredom, frustration and anger trades. Remember, the market doesn’t owe anyone a living. It will simply do its thing regardless. I always recommend people trade for capital growth and simply have it in collaboration with other income streams.

For the reasons stated in the post above, I prefer to view trading as a way to make great capital growth rather than income (unless, of course, you have a whale sized account!!)… sometihng you can set, forget, and have running in the background. The fact that I trade end of day only is a large part down to this.

I think to actually be a full time trader you need to be able to make enough profit in 1 day or hours to live off of the rest of the year, then the real fun will begin.

It seems that people are binary in their thinking - either full-time trading income, or permanent employee income.
There are many industries where people don’t get a permanent employment nor fixed regular salary. I’m an ICT contractor and do 6 months here, 12 months there. I have to manage my income to span [U]every[/U] week - not just weeks I’m working.
To me, trading would effectively be the same. You’ll lose sometimes and you’ll gain sometimes. As long as your overall position is cashflow positive, you can figure out where the buffers need to be and pay yourself a regular “salary” to live off regardless.