Making money on Forex and trading for a living

Great. forex is very hard to do. You should learn the forex and this article can help a lot to make good impression in Forex trading.

Good for you Gasanvill! Nice post! It is good to see something positive here… :smiley:

It is a great post indeed, I fully agree with the mentoring thing as its considered a side income besides trading.

@thread starter, you may be right but it is not a must for every successful trader (successful trading on his account) may lead to a huge fund which he can manage. There are very less chances of getting huge funds by every successful trader.

Great post! I’m currently in the position of making the decision whether becoming a fulltime trader or stick with my current job (freelance IT). I’ve been trading Forex for 7 years, with a lot of ups and downs…

Do you have a family to support? What was their reaction on you becoming a fulltime trader?

So far still comfortable to treat forex as part time for me, because forex trading is risky business, which we may losing money in forex trading transaction, I think as long as we comfortable to manage our business, forex also can treat only as part time, but this is about option, each trader they have own choice whether will treat forex as full time and trading for living or only as side business

Hello Emilio,
Thanks for your comments.

If you want to become a full time trader, then you should definitely take a look at the two suggestions I made in my first post, for people that want to quit their jobs and trade their own funds (1year of expenses and a big capital).

Another thing you want to consider is to have a back up plan in case things go wrong. In my case I have 3 strategies, A, B and C, all of them profitable. Strategy A is better than the other two so it is my main strategy, and I have the other ones in case something happens. So what is the plan? For example there has been a couple of years where I started trading but had a long downswing (bigger than my historical downswing) indicating that some conditions in the market are not favorable for my mainly strategy. So I have to switch to my alternative B strategy, and I was able to recover and made some money at the end of the year. And there has been years where I made money trading only my main strategy. The important thing to remember is that making consistant money is not the only thing; you can not follow your strategy blindly and think that it will work forever. You have to be always analyzing, improving it and developing new strategies that help you when the bad times comes. That is the key to survive in the long term.

My family was skeptical at the beginning, which is totally understood because this is speculation so there is not guarantee of a regular salary, at least not at the beginning. But when you have good results, and people see that you are successful, then all the worries disappear. It takes time for family to get used to. In my case, I am married (not children yet) and I can tell you that the first years are the hardest one. Then it gets easy.

Good luck with your decision and plan every little detail.

Cheers,

Yeah, it’s open for all but that doesn’t mean, anyone can make money here! Reality is, only knowledgeable Forex traders are able to enjoy their live trading sessions! But obviously, anyone can be a successful Forex trader! Obviously, all of new Forex traders start their learning session from zero level! In addition, Professional traders get enough financial freedom here!

Yes forex opened for everyone, all new trader they can learn forex, and I think now already easy to access forex and learn through internet, with reading from babypips on school section also as new trader can understand about forex, and with practice I think as newbie also obtained experience and start from experience they can learn more about trading fx

Yes bearish, ice can be melted and re-used as water. Yet another pointless post saying nothing brought to you by the good people @ bearish and Co!

Admittedly, the post to which he replied was just as fatuous - these two guys deserve each other: they should “get a room”, perhaps, where they can each inflate their post-count to their hearts’ content, without troubling the rest of us by filling the forum with meaningless nonsense.

It is easy to get access on all tools of forex trading . Even learning knowledge and rules are given on all sites that are created for knowledge purpose. It is up to a trader’s interest and passion , how he learn forex . He has to work hard to get earning form forex trading. Babypips is an excellent forum to know all about forex. I am one of those who started from here.

Hey Lexy

Looks like we got the triple play from the three wise men.

Yes with gather together in forum forex community, might we also getting motivation because we are not alone here, and I think every us want to become success trader that able making trading for living and to achieved these goal hence we learn and keep learning

And an encore, too, it seems. Little wonder, with the board covered with all this trite stuff, that people like “Truth” decide to stop posting here. Very sadly, because this situation has now been left uncorrected for so long in the face of all the explicit warnings and explanations, it’s become self-perpetuating: it’s no longer possible for the forum to attract [I]and retain[/I] many of the potential member-participants it needs.

This has got to be the most uplifting post I have seen in the last 5 years of looking into Forex/cfds/spreadbetting etc.

Here is my story. I have looked into trading over the last few years on and off and never really got into “it”

I have good career in IT as an architect and have just hit a milestone birthday :slight_smile: I wont say. I have a family too.

My plan is to share the pain with some close friends. I am getting together a small group and will do the following

Sign up to Baby pips school,
go through the various instruments to get an appreciation of FX.
outline some good risk management steps. My ethos will be to focus on loosing as little money as possible NOT making money.
sign up to dummy account - discuss potential trading strategies we will each try. - Discuss, compare notes
and after 3 months open a real account. try and repeat

from previous exp i have settled on the following inidicators let me now if you agree or not.

MA
MCAD
RSI
Stochastic?
Ichimoku cloud
fibonachhi to backtest

Im planning this for the longterm, 2.5 to get comfortable and 5-10 years to be tracking in the mulahh! :slight_smile:
I would be appreciative if any one in here would offer some advice in what I have said

thanks

Sam.

Hi Sam, welcome to the forum. (Nice to see something of interest creeping back into this thread.)

This excellent approach will put you way ahead of the crowd, in my opinion. :cool:

Of the indicators you’ve mentioned (if you’ve already decided that “indicators” are the way you want to proceed), I always found MACD and the Ichimoku cloud the most useful, by far. Just a personal perspective.

Both, however, are [B][U]very[/U][/B] easy to misunderstand and misuse, and a large proportion of the “information” offered about them online seems terribly misguided, to me.

If they help, there are some observations (and links, I think) about Ichimoku settings in this thread and about MACD in this one.

I never found very much use in “stochastics”, and would put them at the bottom of the list, myself.

I’d also omit Fibonacci from the list altogether. For myself, after studying it for quite a long time, I never found any more than anecdotal, cherry-picked evidence that it has any more value than randomly drawn lines (and am aware of some independent, academic studies which report exactly the same), and can see no sensible probabilistic/statistical/mathematical reasons why it would - for me, it’s about as rational as a horoscope (and plenty of people base their trades on those, too!).

Just my perspective. Those of others, doubtless, will vary. :wink:

Good luck!

Thanks for the links much appreciated :slight_smile: The fib and Stochastic are there as I want to use them to eliminate them from the arsenal. I want to keep this like I like my ****tails - simple but sophisticated.

What platform do you trade from? Also is there anyone who uses tradingview.com for analytics?

thanks

I happen to use NinjaTrader, myself (in spite of its occasional problems) because I like it, and for other reasons mentioned here.

My view is that, in general, it probably doesn’t matter too much as long as you [I][U]avoid[/U][/I] Metatrader (MT4/MT5 - there are specific reasons for this: I’m not saying it [B]just[/B] because I think it’s a piece of junk, though that’s also true).

This thread (including post #13, which actually deserves far more weight than its appearance suggests) may be helpful: [B]301 Moved Permanently

Gasanvill, that is a great post. Thank you for sharing your story. The decision of whether becoming a full time trader or not is really hard indeed as the risk is huge and there are so many other factors that a person should consider. And yes, if you have a family to support it becomes even harder. But like you said, we should never give up and we should keep trying until the right moment comes. By joining a community will help very much as well. I agree with you to always have a back up plan, it can saves us so much trouble.