Hello all! I am going through some major changes in the coming months, and need to find a way to supplement my income. My goal is to make at least $300 a week trading Forex. I have tinkered with Forex for many years, along with my late father, but neither of us has ever been able to find any consistent success.
If I find an account with $500 (the most I could realistically spare), what advice would you be able to offer me about how to grow that into an average weekly profit of $300?
I understand this is a long shot, but I would love to hear what works for you, if you’re willing to share.
If i am in your position and i need an extra $300 a week using FX, i would not imagine making that amount consistently using $500 as a beginning investment. That is 60% per week. That is possible, but i dont think it is consistent. To make 60% a week (12% daily) you will need to expose a lot of your capital (high risk). This is basically bad money management. You may succeed a few times but eventually you ll be wiped out. To make $300 a week i would either find a part time job, or start a small business (services sector or trade).
If however you choose FX trading to make $300 a week, then i suggest your starting capital is $100.000. In this case you can easily and consistently make $300 per week ($1200 a month - 1.2% per month) provided you are an experienced trader.
If we apply this on different capital size scenario’s, this is the result:
Starting capital: $100.000 (1.2% per month)
Starting capital: $50.000 (2.4% per month)
Staring capital: $25.000 (4.8% per month)
Starting capital $12.500 (9.3% per month)
Starting capital $1.000 (120% per month)
Starting capital $500 (240% per month)
As you see, the lower the capital the harder it gets. For consistency and for a more realistic vision, it is better and easier to start with a bigger capital .
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I completely understand it is better to start with more capital. However, if I had $100,000 to invest, I wouldn’t be concerned about $300 a week. With a $200 demo account, I closed 4 trades for a total profit of $32.72, or 16.36%. That was just one day trading an inside bar setup. I realize those results will not happen in the same manner every trading day, but if I assumed 5% a week I could withdraw the original $500 after 16 weeks, and then trade more aggressively.
Am I thinking about this wrong? It doesn’t seem that unrealistic to me.
Hello FJL, and welcome! Can I ask, is that you on the bike with your (late) father? It makes such a nice change from the usual avatars
On to your question: I agree wholeheartedly with my fellow poster, Oceanmen… In fact, the ‘start small,
make it big’ (no puns intended) is often the very cause of early ‘trading death’ for many people who open a forex account…
The truth is that it takes money to make money (unless we talk about playing the lottery and hitting the jackpot, but that is a different proposition altogether)… and for as many who choose to ignore the warnings and think that ‘it will not happen to me’, there will be relatively few who will ignore these warnings and not blow their accounts due to overleveraging their positions…
I started my first account with a few hundred Pounds, and tried to grow it too quickly, taking on too much risk/exposure, and yes, you can guess what happened to that account…BOOM…
The second account, with only £500 in it, was also damaged, rising to over £800 in a relatively short time and then falling very quickly to about a tenth of that… Carefully, from the £74 I had left, I reviewed my bad ways and, since Christmas, I now brought it steadily and carefully up to about £150, thus doubling it up.
Perhaps what saved me was reviving my dormant demo account, which I started in 2012, and which I had reduced from the initial $50,000 to just over …$11,000(!!!)… It is now up to nearly $30,000, again thanks to more careful money management… I trial trades on the demo account first, then if the signs are right, I go on to trade them live… Doing this meant that I would not have to fear ‘trader paralysis’ and just be free to try medium-term ideas risk-free first, and then do the same live… I will still get it wrong, of course, and I have, but it has worked better that way.
You mentioned supplementing your income… I have just turned fully self-employed this month, and I can tell you that I now completely understand what people say when they talk about ‘underinvested’ trading: you could not open a shop with $300, or start a building trade with that amount, so why would could anyone start a forex business with that? I like to think that my trading is a business, but I could not see it giving me any income any time in the near or distant future, because even if I grew that £150 to £1500 in a few years, it could never be enough to provide or supplement an income… What I would prefer to do, would be to win the lottery, for example, and then put a more sizeable investment into forex, and choose a conservative trading method to re-value that investment…
Until such time, you could say that although you can treat a $300 account with a business-like respect, people around you will think of this as a hobby, because it will have no material impact on your bank account, on your monthly income, on your quality of life, on the number of presents you can buy, on how many lattes/wine glasses you can consume out in town per month… you get my drift Do you see what I mean?
So why not try a high-risk method on a demo account, and see how it performs over a number of months? You may be the best trader, better than a lot of us, and actually find the key to making that $300 multiply quickly and steadily… but until you have proven that to yourself, it is too early to say…
There have been a few threads like this, where people have great plans… but they inevitably hide away into eternal silence as their grand plans obviously never came to fruition; here is one:
I do not mean to sound condescending, and I myself was lured to forex trading by early successes which gave me false confidence in my somewhat overestimated trading skills… I now realise, about 3,000-4,000 hours later, how much time it takes to understand the ‘business’ of trading, which is actually rather dull. When I tell people about this hobby of mine (it is a hobby, with my account balance, let’s face it), I can see that even an accountant would get a more enthusiastic response … Charts, candlesticks blah blah it is hardly exciting stuff for friends around a dinner table! And if you did find someone who was interested, their first question inevitably would be: “How much money does it make?”… At which point, if you traded your, say, $300 to even $600 in a year (which is a 100% gain, which is spectacular/fantabulous), you would find your tongue a little shy, as the only thing that impresses a crowd is the magical word: “million(s)”. So the reality of retail trading (like you and me, trading from home) is that it is not glamorous, it does not provide an income, and it does not impress at dinner parties. . .
What keeps me going is the thought that I will keep growing my account slowly(!) and keep up my skills and awareness of the area of the market that I trade, and, when I am ready, I will invest more in it. Currently, I am in my eighth month of a yearly plan, reviewing how this new way of trading is working for me… When I get to December, if the equity curve has been smoothly to the upside, and I am happy with the gains/performance, I will then decide, if I can, to invest some money tucked away into my account, basically making a yearly or monthly deposit on my account, to give it a fair shot… It is important not to pour money into an expensive dream, as it must work like a mini-micro-business, in the end… It may never elevate itself to give me an income, and may just be a hobby, but perhaps, as I see it, it could give me more for my money than a bank account (with average 0.5% yearly interest) could give me… The only thing is, you have to work for it… all those thousands of hours I put in since I started my demo trading in late 2012, of course, I could have put into fitness, into more time with my girlfriend, more time reading books, etc. etc. and it has had an impact on my trading but also taken time from other things… My average time is about four hours a day, spent between these forums, looking at charts, keeping an eye on open positions, making some trading videos, listening to forex strategy videos, etc. I have managed this with a full-time relationship (my girlfriend of five years) and a full-time job (not to do with finance), so you can imagine how motivation can waver, when you see the small returns from your time investment…
I hope that some of this resonates with you… It is as honest as can be… but, over to you, now, what do you think about it all?
The thing with what PipMeHappy has written and Oceanmen too for that matter is that for someone in your position fjl3 it makes for very uncomfortable reading but it is also true.
The journey that PipMeHappy describes is as far from get rich quick as you are going to get but it does contain something very important. The process that PipMe has gone through is now, or is soon to be a business that is scalable.
He has put in the work, created the systems, practiced and honed his skills. By adding the necessary capital to his trading; in the manner which Oceanmen described in his post, PipMe can generate the returns worthy of his efforts. Of course there is no guarantee.
Forex is full of illusion, however whether you look at simulations and statistics, listen to anecdotal evidence from more experienced traders or even your own past experiences mentioned in your post, none of it backs up your statement of “It doesn’t seem unrealistic to me.”
The good news is that if you spend time focusing on study and learning to become a good trader, put in a lot of practice and overcome the many setbacks along the way you’ll get to a point where you too can add some capital and make the returns you are ideally looking for.
In the meantime there is probably a much better way of making that extra $300 per week you need.
In a way, I’m hesitant to add anything (not wanting to water down PipMeHappy’s outstanding reply, above), and reluctant to add to the chorus of “It’s unrealistic”, but …
Be aware that you’re asking how to make over $1,200 per month from working capital of $500 (that’s [B]240%[/B]), while at institutions like Goldman Sachs, the top, professional forex-traders (who have all the right qualifications and experience, have put in their “10,000 hours” of learning, and are being paid 7-figure salaries based on their profits) are aiming to clear, typically, about [B]6%[/B] per month.
So - for all that your situations aren’t quite analogous, in a number of ways - you’re actually asking about [I]regularly producing 40 times as much profit as the worlds’ top professionals[/I].
In the world of forex-trading, nobody can tell you that anything is “impossible”, but if it helps to provide you with some context for your question, be aware that that [B][U]is[/U][/B] exactly what you’re asking. Apologies if it’s a dispiriting response, but it [I]is[/I] a realistic one. :19:
This post literally speaks to me because I also started with a small balance hoping to make it big!
With proper moneymanagement it’s totally possible to make $300 or more but I’d like to give you a few tips from my experience to get you there.
Firstly, wanting $300 is great but WANTING $300 FROM FOREX is bad.
Meaning, it’s realistic but the want of $300 will make you enter less than perfect setups because the pressure of having that extra coupla hundred from forex makes you scope out every trade to get it.
Secondly, I would recommend finding a trading style that gets consistent X amount of pips per trade (not per day)
When I say not per day an per trade, there are gonna be bad days and no trade days and days with great days, it all depends on how you handle them.
I’ve seen a money management table that risks quite a lot but gains a lot too.
Say with a $100 dollars the risk on stop loss is over 10% but the reward is atleast 15% and the objective is to compound for about 70 trades and the balance ends with a million.
Sounds farfetched but the maths doesn’t lie and it is possible.
But you gotta have 70 trades to get there, not 70 days.
First focus on your trading, and the money will come.
Trust me on this, wanting money just gets you wanting more.
But improving your trading, the consequence of being a better trader is consistent profits!
Firstly, thank you all so much for even taking the time to respond. All information is valuable, so it means a lot that so many would go into such great detail. Thank you.
PipMeHappy, yes that is me and my father on the bike. He passed away July 3 of this year. He was laid off about 8 years ago or so, and spent his final years programming indicators, experts and scripts, trying to find his slice of the Forex pie. Sadly he never did. So, I am more motivated now than ever to find something that works, and prove to him that all his efforts were not in vain.
I should clarify something. I wrote the original post here yesterday while I was in a pretty dark state of mind, and after desperately searching Google for a while looking for a way to make a consistent income independently. I can find other work, but I’m at a point where I want more out of life, so I want more independence to pursue things I truly enjoy. That just doesn’t jive with traditional employment. My father just died, and my wife is leaving me, if there was ever a time for something drastic, this is it.
With that being said, my intention is not, nor was it when I made the post to deposit $500 into an account and make $1,200+ immediately every month from here to eternity. I realize how preposterous that is, and since my father got me interested in Forex for it’s programming possibilities several years ago, I know how difficult it can be at times to turn around a measly 1.2% as Oceanmen suggested. Rather, my plan would involve depositing an initial amount, and then adding a small amount to the account per week until such a time as I can stop the added deposits, and start withdrawing half of the profits each week.
For example, if I deposited $500, added an extra $10 a week (very manageable), and averaged 5% on the account per week I could theoretically start withdrawing at least $300 a week by week 62, having only invested a total of $790. It works in theory, and I realize a lot of the time you can take theory in toss it in the garbage, The numbers work out however, and the added deposit each week would help keep the process somewhat on track when the profit doesn’t reach 5%, or in the inevitable weeks that are negative.
My thinking is that there are lots of people, retail and otherwise, making money trading Forex, and most of people (at least that I know) don’t have $100,000 laying around they could use to invest. If I had that kind of money, for example, I would clearly be making a good amount of money somewhere else, and probably wouldn’t be looking to invest in Forex. There must be traders who started with next to nothing, who are no successfully trading full time. That’s the crowd I’m looking to join. Work a normal job for now, building up my account, until I can quit and earn a living solely from trading.
In the meantime, I can also create indicators and sell them on the MQL5 Market, and put any money from that into the trading account.
In summary I guess I’ll just say, if you’re going to dream, dream big. I’m okay with risk, especially when the amount at risk is relatively small. Even losing 20% of a $500 account would only be $100, which would be a set back but not a soul crushing disaster. I know from others and my own personal experience that if you trade because you NEED money, you will fail. Rather you need to have a strategy and stick to it, with no emotion.
Thank you all again for the wonderful words, and I agree with all of you. There is no perfect execution, I’m quite certain about that, but I know there is a way to succeed.
[QUOTE=“eddieb;714168”] Come on, this must be a wind up. Do you know anyone who has achieved 70 successive winning trades? Anyone who has turned £100 into £1m? Thought not![/QUOTE]
That’s the thing.
It sounds far fetched but the maths doesn’t lie.
If you multiply 100 by 1.15 (that’s 15% gain everytime) then the 66th time is a little over a million.
And altho the risk is hilariously high, if you WAIT for the BEST setups as in the trades that meet all your trade criterias, then you can get there.
I’m not saying you’ll have 70 successful trades in a row.
You will lose and that’s okay cause losses are a part of trading.
You gotta know and accept that to succeed in trading right?
But if you have 15% targets to reach every time and keep at it, you’ll get there.
But every time a target is achieved you gotta increase lot sizes too and that’s how it’s achieved.
Instead of trading every day, if you wait for the right trades then you can get there slowly but surely right?
Tell us what you’ve [I][B]actually done[/B][/I] — not what you’ve [I][B]fantasized[/B][/I] about.
[B]To fjl3,[/B]
I’m sorry that this is going to sound harsh, but facts are stubborn things. You said —
Now you’re asking us for advice on how you can start with $500 [I]— which is all you can afford to commit to this venture —[/I] and somehow (for the first time in your life) start making [I]consistent profits[/I] in the forex market.
Your plan depends on making, not only consistent profits, but [I]fabulous profits, consistently, week after week.[/I] Do you see the flaw in this plan?
I’m not done with being harsh.
Some pipe-dream is luring you back to this market, in the same way that dreams of getting even, or getting rich, lure desperate gamblers back to the poker table. Put the pipe-dream aside for now. Come back to it later, if and when your financial situation has stabilized.
Trading forex [I]— because you need the money —[/I] is a recipe for failure.
Expecting to become a profitable trader [I]— because you need the money —[/I] is a recipe for disaster.
Just about any alternative plan you can come up with, will be superior to this forex plan of yours. A part-time, minimum-wage, job at a fast-food restaurant will put more money in your bank account, week after week, than your forex trading plan.
No doubt, that’s not what you hoped to hear, when you came to this forum. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But, the facts of your situation are harsh.
[QUOTE=“Clint;714216”] C’mon, pal. Tell us what you’ve actually done — not what you’ve fantasized about. To fjl3, I’m sorry that this is going to sound harsh, but facts are stubborn things. You said — Now you’re asking us for advice on how you can start with $500 — which is all you can afford to commit to this venture — and somehow (for the first time in your life) start making consistent profits in the forex market. Your plan depends on making, not only consistent profits, but fabulous profits, consistently, week after week. Do you see the flaw in this plan? I’m not done with being harsh. Some pipe-dream is luring you back to this market, in the same way that dreams of getting even, or getting rich, lure desperate gamblers back to the poker table. Put the pipe-dream aside for now. Come back to it later, if and when your financial situation has stabilized. Trading forex — because you need the money — is a recipe for failure. Expecting to become a profitable trader — because you need the money — is a recipe for disaster. Just about any alternative plan you can come up with, will be superior to this forex plan of yours. A part-time, minimum-wage, job at a fast-food restaurant will put more money in your bank account, week after week, than your forex trading plan. No doubt, that’s not what you hoped to hear, when you came to this forum. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But, the facts of your situation are harsh. .[/QUOTE]
+1 for telling it like it is to the jokesters who come to my business expecting easy money only to get their asses handed to them.
Thanks for your feedback, but I feel I have addressed it. Plus, 5% is hardly fabulous profits, as you put it. Prove to me there is no one who has started with $500 or less, and is now taking in thousands or more a month, and I’ll give up on the quest. But you can’t, because it does happen. I have failed, I’m certain in the future I will again, but I learn from my mistakes and I will continue trying.
First and foremost, I don’t appreciate being referred as a jokester. And second, you yourself started at one point and had to learn, so perhaps be less quick to turn your nose up at others trying to do the same.
[QUOTE=“Clint;714216”] C’mon, pal. Tell us what you’ve actually done — not what you’ve fantasized about. To fjl3, I’m sorry that this is going to sound harsh, but facts are stubborn things. You said — Now you’re asking us for advice on how you can start with $500 — which is all you can afford to commit to this venture — and somehow (for the first time in your life) start making consistent profits in the forex market. Your plan depends on making, not only consistent profits, but fabulous profits, consistently, week after week. Do you see the flaw in this plan? I’m not done with being harsh. Some pipe-dream is luring you back to this market, in the same way that dreams of getting even, or getting rich, lure desperate gamblers back to the poker table. Put the pipe-dream aside for now. Come back to it later, if and when your financial situation has stabilized. Trading forex — because you need the money — is a recipe for failure. Expecting to become a profitable trader — because you need the money — is a recipe for disaster. Just about any alternative plan you can come up with, will be superior to this forex plan of yours. A part-time, minimum-wage, job at a fast-food restaurant will put more money in your bank account, week after week, than your forex trading plan. No doubt, that’s not what you hoped to hear, when you came to this forum. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But, the facts of your situation are harsh. .[/QUOTE]
Okay.
What I’ve actually done isn’t risk this.
But my post was actually to give some hope to people starting with small balances hoping to make it big in forex.
I’m not saying this isn’t impossible, but it’s a hard and long journey to get there.
Thing about small balances I’ve noticed is, is that when you start forex with a small balance you ALMOST ALWAYS need to start making money from this RIGHT AWAY!!
While the people starting with big balances (like a $100,000), a return of 10% to 20% PER ANNUM IS OKAY!!
So the small money has pressure to do well and also the pressure to do magic in place from the start while the big money has the calmness of trading properly for them.
I know when starting forex what hopes and aspirations of millions you have cause I’ve been thru all that.
Sadly the people staring with small balances gotta work extra hard to compound earnings and make the balance bigger before actually enjoying the profits of it.
Now in this case, the best way would be to set some targets to achieve (could be $10 or $20 or whatever) and go to that slowly.
I mean to determine how much you need as a balance to withdraw the monthly target of $300?
Getting there is first step.
Withdrawing is secondary in this case (sadly)
Yaniu.
Assuming he can achieve better than average consistent returns of 12% p.a., that would be 1% per month since he can’t compound as hes withdrawing every month.
To earn $300 with a return rate of 1% he needs to deposit 30, 000.
Going for ridiculously high returns will only blow his account, probably in month 1, almost certainly by the end of month 2.
I understand you want to give the OP hope, but expectations like this are just throwing good money after bad
I am going through this stage recently. I have a plan of a reasonable capital from which I become able to withdraw monthly profit. Yet that target is very far. I have the patience, it can take 2 to 2.5 years theoretically according to my plan. Let see what happens in real.
[QUOTE=“forexcrisp;714245”]I am going through this stage recently. I have a plan of a reasonable capital from which I become able to withdraw monthly profit. Yet that target is very far. I have the patience, it can take 2 to 2.5 years theoretically according to my plan. Let see what happens in real.[/QUOTE]
