Here's KIERAN!

Hello my fellow traders! My name is Kieran Marshall, I’m 28 years of age and have been trading for nearly 5 months now. I haven’t yet ventured into the realm of the ‘real money’, but plan to very soon. By day I’m an Aerospace engineer - I graduated from University in 2011 with a first class aeronautical degree and have been working in the industry ever since. To cut a long story short I want out of engineering so badly!! In July this year I enrolled onto the Savi trading graduate program conducted on their London trading floor. The course was three months long and was a combination of class room style teaching and ‘on the job’ one-to-one tuition. That’s not to say I didn’t spend every waking moment outside of my current job hugging my laptop with a tear in my eye hoping for the ‘take profit’ indicator to turn that milky green we all love.

I’ve recently handed my notice in for the 24th Decemeber 2014 as I plan to become a full time trader on the 1st January 2015. To say I’m nervous is an understatement, but hey! “who dares wins my son!!” I’m investing 10K sterling and have a target of 20% profit per month - returning 60% of the profit and taking the remaining 40% as a wage.

Any advice or even just a friendly chat is something I welcome. Happy trading!

Brave move and ambitious target, the very best of luck with it. Keep us posted on your progress

Demo accounts aren’t worth much. They don’t account for slippage. Plenty of news trading strategies work on demo accounts but not on live accounts when the fills aren’t there.

You paid £5k for their course. In return, all you got was an illusion. All of the material they taught you was freely available on the Internet. And look how [I]well[/I] people here are doing with it. By that, I mean take a serious look around on this forum. You will see that pretty much nobody is making consistent profits by trading. They are mostly salesmen who want your cash, gamblers looking to justify their addictions, or pathological liars who seek validation on forums. Not a single one of them has a verified track record to back up their tall tales.

Gamblers do the same thing.

Is this for real? You are quitting a well-paying career to play pretend trader? Look mate, if you go through with this, it’s the most foolish decision you will make in your life. I guarantee it.

Do you realize what 20% per month returns are? Annualized and compounded, that is 900% per year. The best hedge funds in the world struggle to produce around 12-15% returns per year on average. People who are much smarter than you and I, with much more experience in the financial markets than you. And in aggregate the majority of them fail to even beat the returns of a simple hands-off S&P 500 index fund!!!

Look, I am not trying to be rude here or insult you in any way. I am really just trying to help. Because [B]you are me.[/B] I am an engineer who fell for the lies too. I paid a few “gurus” for their advice and spent years trying to crack the Forex market on my own after I realized the “gurus” for what they were. In the end I realized what a waste of time it all was. The greatest minds in the world (PhDs from MIT in quantum computing, financial engineering, etc) can not consistently beat the market - what hope do we have?

You’re a fellow engineer, so I’ll put it in the way it was put to me (by another engineer who talked me out of trading). Everything we are taught in school is to base decisions on empirical evidence. Why should trading be any different? I urge you to look around this forum and other Forex forums. Look for any evidence of a [B]broker-verified[/B] track record which shows beyond a doubt that somebody, anybody, is actually making money as a trader. I guarantee you will not find one. This is a suckers’ game and the sooner you realize that, the better off you will be.

Engineering degrees are flexible. The jobs pay well. Find a new job. Pursue trading on the side if you don’t believe me. It does you no good to dive head first into the shark tank. If you want out, pursue early retirement the proper way:

  1. Learn to live simply. Be happy with less. Don’t waste your money on frivolous things, but don’t skimp on the essentials.

  2. Save as much of your take home pay as you can, ideally 50% or more. If you can save half, you only have to work for 15 years.

  3. Invest properly. Don’t gamble with speculation on Forex or stocks. Buy and hold. Follow a simple 3 fund portfolio approach or a dividend growth approach. Learn to accept 8% average annual returns. They become significant as your egg grows.

  4. Pursue a marketable skill in your free time, like programming. Freelance work could easily add $20k+ to your annual income. The more income you get from it, the less you need from your investments and you may be able to retire even sooner.

Well said Jolly Roger, it is very difficult business to master. Market is very random there is no guarantee of any system that will make you money for sure.

It is your decision to take what you want to do but leave a good job and start full time trading is not a good decision.

Keep the job and start trading on the side line, once you are making money more then you are loosing then you can think about leaving the job or do part time job and trading. Just an opinion because I am doing part time job at the moment while trading, but I am not a professional trader or made huge amount of money yet.

Agree with this but you are young enough and clearly smart enough to land another job, I just hope the money you are using isnt your life savings or borrowed. If you cant afford to lose it, you cant afford to use it.
Ignore jolly roger, he’s only just joined babypips and seems hell bent on trolling (perhaps Trolly Roger would be a better name) I don’t pretend to know him, but for some reason he has got it in for some of our main contributors here. Ignore him and hopefully he will move on and troll somewhere else.

I am not trolling. Playing devil’s advocate if anything. It’s high time that [I]many[/I] different FX forums on the WWW stop being echo chambers.

Why do you say that?

Well isn’t it obvious? People are being misled about what it takes to really be a successful Forex trader. For most of us, it will never be possible no matter how much hard work you put towards this thing. It’s the cold hard truth. The chances of you finding an edge in this market through reading free or paid material and trading live are so small as to be negligible.

Newbies pop onto forums like this and start reading posts by forum hotshots with hundreds of posts under their belt. These hotshots either imply that they are profitable, or in the case of the “gurus,” outright lie about it. Other hotshots come in and add to the fire (the echo chamber at work), and soon enough newbies are drowning in a miasma of replies about how “all they need to make it in this business is hard work.” That simply isn’t true. The oft-quoted “5% of traders make it” rule is a gross overstatement.

When people step up and begin to challenge the hotshots and gurus, they lead by example. Of course the rebuttals from the gurus are without substance and it is clear for everyone to see. It encourages others to question what they are really being presented with. To wonder why - for the tens of thousands of posts on this forum - there has not been one single example of a broker-verified track record displaying consistent profits earned through Forex trading.

But isnt that true of most area’s of business, indeed life itself? For every one who succeeds there are many failures but that doesn’t stop them trying. Sure, there are many innocent and gullible folk out there and scores of scam artists waiting to take advantage of them, but I feel the ‘hotshots’ and ‘guru’s’ you refer to are offering their honest opinions, with no hidden agenda.
I think you do the majority of forum readers an injustice if you really believe they are incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff for themselves.

"The argument of many academics is that you can’t make money trading; your best bet is to put your money in a diversified fund and reap the baseline drift compounded over many years. (For most investors, this is not a bad plan for at least a portion of their portfolios.) Even large, professionally managed funds have a very difficult time beating the market, so why should you be able to do so, sitting at home or in your office without any competitive or informational advantage? You are certainly not the best-capitalized player in the arena, and, in a field that attracts some of the best and brightest minds in the world, you are unlikely to be the smartest. You also will not win by sheer force of will and determination. Even if you work harder than nearly anyone else, a well-capitalized firm could hire 20 of you and that is what you are competing against. What room is there for the small, individual trader to make profits in the market?

The answer, I think, is simple but profound: you can make money because you are not playing the same game as these other players. One reason the very large funds have trouble beating the market is that they are so large that they are the market. Many of these firms are happy to scrape out a few incremental basis points on a relative basis, and they do so through a number of specialized strategies. This is probably not how you intend to trade. You probably cannot compete with large institutions on fundamental work. You probably cannot compete with HFTs and automated trading programs on speed, nor can you compete with the quant firms that hire armies of Ph.D.s to scour every conceivable relationship between markets. This is all true, but you also do not have the same restrictions that many of these firms do: you are not mandated to have any exposures at any time. If you are uncomfortable with the market environment, you can sit fully in cash for weeks at a time and no manager or investor is going to complain. In most markets, you will likely experience few, if any, liquidity or size issues; your orders will have a minimal (but still very real) impact on prices. Most small traders can be opportunistic. If you have the skills, you can move freely among currencies, equities, futures, and options, using outright or spread strategies as appropriate. Few institutional investors enjoy these freedoms. Last, and perhaps most significantly, you are free to target a time frame that is not interesting to many institutions and not accessible to some.
One solution is to focus on the three-day to two-week swings, as many swing traders do. First, this steps up out of the noise created by the HFTs and algos. Why compete with a machine on its own terms? Similarly, many of the largest and best-capitalized funds actually cannot participate in this time frame because their position sizes are too large. They may enter and exit positions over multiple weeks; your profits and losses over a few days are inconsequential to them. Rather than compete directly, play a different game. As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War: “Tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural state runs away from high places and hastens downward … avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak.” " by Adam h Grimes