Greetings! I have many years of on and off option trading experience, but none with currency. Opened my Forex account and netted 44% over a short few weeks of trading. I would consider it a good year if I stopped there and just booked the gain and left it alone. From those who have been at this awhile, I know there are all kinds of comments and conversations about monthly gains, expectations, reality etc. Im looking for a real answer, if you booked a 44% gain over the course of a year, would you consider that a success? This gain was over several dozen trades where I closed my position in the positive 95% of the time. Is this kind of result normal? I think many people get in trouble at this point and just keep risking things, I am not risk adverse, just the opposite but this kind of gain makes me want to just take it and run…
I would consider anything better than the 10% average annual returns from the stock market to be a success.
The answer depends on how much money you’re trading and how attached you are to it. A few weeks is a blink of an eye in the world of relevant sample sizes, and you could very well just be seeing variance.
What I would do in your situation is withdraw most of the account. Keep enough so that you can trade micro lots (.01 lot = 1000 units) with proper position sizing. If you’re still profitable after 3 months, then you can start thinking about increasing your account size and volume. I would recommend gradually scaling in your balance over time rather than just dumping the lump sum in all at once.
Hi Novenogan,
You’ll here all sorts about profits in forex, but (imo) I break it down to, if you’re risking 0.5% per trade, and you win more than you lose, it shouldn’t be unreasonable (if you’ve got a positive strategy) to make 2.5-5% per week, so say 20% per week. And that’s only at 0.5% per week, so if you got onto some huge runners, 40% for a month wouldn’t be unreasonable, but I wouldn’t say consistent.
As long as you’re happy with your risk/consistency, keep doing what you’re doing! (But also feel free to share the strategy here!) 
Hi Novenogan,
I experienced similar success in my early stages of forex before I went on a 9 month losing streak. I have now recovered all my losses and cashed out my initial capital with some profit.
From my mistake, I would advise you to cash out your initial capital and trade with only your profit if you are trading a sizeable amount. The idea behind this is that a successful system could be repeated indefinitely. Note that this idea is not always true because I have had to abandon the system that made me profitable this summer during low volatility because I can feel volatility returning and currency behaviours are bound to change.
Alternatively, you could risk it like I did. Losing real money helped me to be able to understand the psychology of the market movers better. It also gave me a lot of sleepless nights and tear-filled days.