What is the least amount of money you need to start trading?

What is the least amount of money you need to start trading?
:53:

You can open an account at FXCM for $50 and start trading, but should you is a better question.

Very small accounts limit what and how you trade and are almost certain to end in a margin call

If you canā€™t afford a $500 starting balance then you would be better off to stick with your demo account

Thanks for the info.

Look, a Pip is a Pip, thats what your after. If you cant gain a pip on $5, you wont gain a pip with $5,000.

Go to Oanda, deposit $20, Use 10 units a trade to practice with and aim for the Pips.

You get margin called if you use all available units, and about 60 pip Drawdown. But using so fewer units, gives you wide margin of course.

If your in the practice stages, use 20 pip stoplosses and figure a fixed TP or system related TPs.

Good Luck

Now many broker offer low minimum deposit and as retail trader also they can trying to trade forex with start from small capital, maybe if any trader have 10$ also they can start trading with choose cent account, if only for learning purposes and get fail, 10$ is only small money and if any trader can increasing money itā€™s possible they made big money start from small capital

Dear Kevin and Josh,

please use the Search functionā€¦ this question has been asked about a million timesā€¦

Plenty of answers here, for example:

http://forums.babypips.com/forextown/79515-how-much-minimum-capital-required-real-trading.html?highlight=trading+capital

or here:

http://forums.babypips.com/forex-brokers/79215-opening-account-small-amount-capital.html?highlight=trading+capital

or again, here:

http://forums.babypips.com/trading-psychology/68435-how-what-amount-new-traders.html?highlight=trading+capital

Good luck, anywayā€¦

I would say that you will need a minim,um of 200 USD in order to start doing trades in the Forex markets ā€¦

The problem I see with these very small opening account balances is they make the FOREX market into a penny slot machine, and people are just trading for the thrill, I guess that is okay if that is all you want, but if your intent is to learn FOREX and become a serious trader I think you need to trade amounts that will cause you a little pain when you loose, like the old saying ā€œno pain no gainā€ there is a world of difference in how you will trade when risking $100 vs 50cents

Agreed 100%

[QUOTE=ā€œPipMeHappy;760698ā€] Agreed 100%[/QUOTE]
What pipmehappy said .

Dennis makes a good point about starting balances. :22:

At the low end, a mere 21 percent of traders with average equity $1,000 turned a profit in the 12-month sampling period of a DailyFX study on trader profitability.

[B]Percentage of Profitable Traders Grouped by Average Trading Equity[/B]

Those with more than $10,000 in average equity were more than twice as likely to be profitable at 43 percent.

Well, who the heck trades with $10,000 disposable income if they cant trade to start with?
I fully expect the bigger account to be better traders, lolā€¦

I betcha, $100,000 accounts probably has a success rate of what, 85%??

Very good result making steady profit itā€™s might already proven if you are expert trader and might manage huge money already, I am never trade use 100000$ in real account and only as retail trader with small capital.

I always looked t $20k as a minimum

What you say makes a lot of sense. While I donā€™t have stats to confirm this, there probably is a (rough) correlation between higher account balances and more trading experience/success. However, that would not change the fact that new traders could benefit from modeling some of the best practices of more experienced/successful traders.

Stats from the article I mentioned previously, show one of the biggest problems smaller accounts have is with overleveraging.

[B]Average Effective Leverage Used by Average Trading Equity[/B]

Excessive leverage can have key detrimental effects related to the mechanics of trading and a traderā€™s psychology.

In terms of trade mechanics, using excessive leverage will give a trader a smaller capital buffer against losses. If the trade initially goes against the trader there is a higher probability that the trader will run out of excess margin and receive a margin call. The trade does not have full room to draw down before it might ultimately move in the traderā€™s direction.

From a psychological perspective, controlling outsized positions can force a trader to act differently and less rationally than they would otherwise. Natural human emotion might get in the way of trading success. With greater leverage comes greater individual risk on a tradeā€”likely amplifying the effect of this key psychological bias. How might we look for a solution?

The good news is that overleveraging is an avoidable problem. Even a new trader who starts with less than $1000 can make a conscious decision to limit his effective leverage to 10:1 as many successful traders do. That would mean trading no more than one micro lot (1k) for every $100 in his account.

[B]Trade Winning Percentage Became Worse as Leverage Increased[/B]

Traders were considerably more likely to turn a profit on a given trade than a loss except when using over 25:1 leverage. The chart above shows that trades with leverage below 5:1 were profitable 61 percent of the time. On the opposite end, those with effective leverage above 25:1 were only profitable on 48 percent of all tradesā€”a significant difference.

I also have no proof of it, but it seems ā€œintuitively apparentā€, really, for quite a range of reasons. Itā€™s one of those things that simply ā€œmust be soā€, in my opinion. To allege that success-rates are unrelated to available funding is a bit of a nonsense, really.

its really very simple and common logic

you want to make living out of trading. soyou need a yearly surplus of 40-50.000$ tobe sucessfull.

now, if you start with 20.000 you are likely to make your investment times 5 if youre sucessfull

if you start with 500 you are very unlikely to make your investment times 100 even if you are knowledgable

commmon logicā€¦ no need to ellaborate over days about it. who doesnt understand math should find another hobby or plan b for life sucess.

same like in casino. you go casino with 5$ expecting to win 5000?

or you go casino with 500 hoping to win 1000?

we dont need stats to see who is on the mathematicaly right side in this equation.

the thing is that we want to make living out of it, and living is in the western world always around the same sum (40-50.000) so we ALL HAVE THE SAME GOAL in this apprach. trying it with 500 gives you less chances.

opening a business with 500 or 20.000 is aswell comparable, how far will you get by opening a business with 500?

One of the best posts Iā€™ve seen, would make a good ā€˜stickyā€™ so future newbies can find it early

Great post, Jason :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=Jason Rogers;760742]Dennis makes a good point about starting balances. :22:

[B]Percentage of Profitable Traders Grouped by Average Trading Equity[/B]

Hi Jason, long time FXCM client here. Thanks for backing me up with facts and charts. Is there a sweet spot for account size, seems like at some point that upward sloping trend would need to level off, I would just like to know where that point is. And using TurboNeroā€™s number of 50K a year as the number needed to make a living trading, my math says you would need trading capital of about 500K, with this you would only need to make 10% annually to make that 50K, a very conservative trading plan should be able to achieve that kind of return. Much of that 500K could be sitting in other conservative investments until needed making that 10% number even easier to obtain

Thanks