Hi everyone,
Let me waste your time with a little bit of a background here before I start asking for advice ;):
I’m 21 years old, wrapping up my junior year of college. Last year I was an intern at a large bank’s FX trading desk. Prior to that I had messed around with demo accounts to varying degrees of success.
Now, my take on this is a little biased, obviously, but for whatever reason it’s looking more likely that I’m not going to come up with a summer internship. The last one I did through my school, so I was only competing against my fellow classmates, but this time I thought I’d go out into the real world and compete against the Harvards and Princetons of the world. Which was apparently a mistake I’m learning, as a lot of these banks won’t even look at you unless you’ve got an in through your school (which is insane, because I have trading floor experience, a 3.8, honors program, etc, but I digress). My school is good, but not great, and certainly not Ivy. It also only offers six month placements, not 10-week summers, which if I want to graduate I don’t have time for. Anyway, as I’m sure you can tell from my tone I’m not thrilled about it.
With that rambling done, here’s my plan. I need to make money, obviously. I figure I’d make about $6,000 on an internship. I’d lose roughly $2,000 paying rent in my city, leaving me with $4,000 that I’d have. I was trying to come up with ways for this to happen without having to do something degrading for the summer, until I realized that I’d been cleaning up in my demo forex account. For a couple years I’ve planned to open a live account, but because of work, school, etc. it never happened.
I can only come up with $10,000 to open the account. Maybe 15, but that’d be pushing it and would involve selling some stocks. If I lived at home for the summer I wouldn’t pay rent (just mental rent in the form of being away from all the fun, but I deserve that for letting my summer work plans get butchered), so I just need to make the 4K . Is it reasonable to think that I could make 40% in four months? To be honest, in the last month I’ve been on that pace but I’m not sure if it would be intelligent to believe that it’s not just a hot streak.
Now, here’s where I hesitate. In my account I’ve never really bothered to learn money management strategies. I just trade currencies. Using a $50,000 demo account, just 1 lot trades with no concern for margin or risk management. Keeping track of my “score” with just pip P/L, rarely looking at cash. I’ve been working to learn the ins and outs of margin and risk recently, and I’m thinking this all sounds good:
$10,000 principle
If I never want to risk more than 3% on a trade, I need to calculate what will be a $300 loss. I want that loss to be roughly 15 pips so I can create a reasonably spaced stop loss. If I’m trading the EURUSD, for example, with 1 lot each pip is about $10, so I want to be looking at trading 2 lots so each pip is $20.
When people refer to not risking more than X% on a trade, is that how it’s done? Just calculating what that X% is and creating a stop? And the margin I’d be using is 20:1, since I’d be controlling $200,000 with my 10? That seems low, seeing as I read 100:1 everywhere.
Also, does that sound like a normal way to trade? Correctly done, and not overly risky, not overly cautious?
Thanks for any advice. Please feel free to tell me this is just stupid idealism too, I’m dealing with my real money and would like to know ahead of time if I’d just lose it all 
Edit: Remember math? yeah, because apparently I don’t. Had to go and change a few numbers, I wrote this originally late Saturday night and for some reason thought 1% of $10K was $10. Awesome. Anyway, fixed now.