Well I am going to play the devil’s advocate and say that what the OP has proposed is not so far-fetched. I notice that everyone without exception in this thread has put up no proof of numbers or long-term consistent success. Why so shy? If you know someone who isn’t shy why not share their success (with some kind of elementary proof of course) or have them post here?
My trading experience is very similar to OP, and I even asked a similar question to this one over on Quora - you can find it here.
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-long-term-forex-trader-with-a-verifiable-record-of-profitability
The answers I received there were very unsatisfactory as you can see if you have time to read the postings. The answers given here are intuitively satisfying, and are designed to give one hope but they aren’t definitive, and haven’t proven that OP is necessarily wrong when he says retail forex trading is a sucker’s game over the longer term. For me that would be a matter of years, let’s say …5-10?
Then again, here is another Quora question that seems to indicate that at least a few have managed to find success in FX.
https://www.quora.com/Who-are-successful-Forex-traders
Who am I to judge? I’m still just a beginner.
As for the assertion that trading robots don’t work, I can say with some certainty that’s incorrect, but like with everything else the way most people use robots is strategically unsound. If you had a genius cousin who didn’t need to sleep, and knew how to trade one Forex strategy perfectly, but didn’t have any other skills (at all), would you put in him charge of your bank account, your research and development division, your product development division? Would you make him the CEO of your company and leave him to make all the decisions for your company, checking in on his progress only occasionally if at all? If you answered yes to any of these you deserve to lose all your money, and yet this is precisely how most people use Forex robots. They are a great tool to add to a trading arsenal, but they are not a one-stop shop solution. Also paradoxically the best trading robots are not the ones you can buy. They are freely distributed among groups of like-minded traders/coders who are working together to develop something progressively better. You need to find one of these groups and contribute something - testing, programming, etc. You also should learn how to trade manually so that when the robot inevitably fails (they always will eventually just as any piece of machinery is vulnerable to failure over time) you can recover the trades, or at least, salvage the account.
I’m still not sure if it’s possible to trade on the Forex market, long-term, consistently profitably, but I don’t see why it necessarily wouldn’t be, I just find that there are lot of talkers, and not many show-ers. As others have pointed out the Babypips school and a fat bankroll are not enough to ensure success, but I probably won’t say the answer is no, for another 10-15 years as I’m still learning.