Questions

Hi, my first post was can I make decent income off forex, majority of replies were negative, “the only way to be a millionaire off forex is to be a billionaire” is what one guy said. Fair enough.

I am young and have alot of time on my hands, I have just completed the whole pre-school course and I found the math a little bit complicating but I have learn’t a bit more. What I want to know is if I can make profit off forex like £30+ profit each trade, I’m not asking for too much but is this achievable, I accept some days you make losses but overall trading would a small guy like me in the big forex market be able to profit it doesn’t seem so easy. It looks like the market is here to eat up guys.

Let me know your thoughts, anybody that can mentor/guide me I would be grateful for!

First off, congrats on completing the school. Im going thru it the 2nd time myself.
You can make $30 per trade, but that largely depends how big your account is-it would need a risky strategy and risky money management on a $300 account, but much less so on a $30, 000 account.

The metric is to rather focus on how little you can lose as possible.
The profits will vary based on market conditions.

Im new to this too trading on demo for a month. After completing the school trade a demo get a feel for what its really like in the fx market. Statistically fx traders are right 50%-70% of the time so its about cutting your losses and letting profits run

You won’t be right every time you trade maybe only half the time but overall you can be profitable depending on your trading style and risk management

Keep a journal and write lots of notes about the trades you make then see if you can learn from past trades and see where you can improve. Also sign up to all the babypips feeds these will guide you to where and what opportunities are out there in the market

Good question.

That’s also a very specific question, so let’s see if we can give it a very specific answer.

To see how to make an average profit of £30 from each trade, let’s simplify the maths by making some assumptions, and see if that helps you.

It won’t necessarily be 100% accurate, but it will show you how to work out whether or not it’s possible, anyway.

Let’s assume that every time you take a trade, your profit from it, if it wins, is the same size as the loss you’d make if it loses (everyone has some losing trades, and you have to allow for those, too!).

Let’s also assume that you win twice as often as you lose (big assumption, here!), so out of every three trades you do, you win two and lose only one.

To make an average profit of £30 per trade, allowing for one third of your trades to be losers, that would mean that over the course of three trades you’d need to win £90, so that two losses and win come to £90, collectively.

You’d therefore need the size of each trade’s win or loss to be worth £90: that way, over three trades, you win £90 twice (+£180) and you lose £90 once (-£90) and your balance is therefore +£90 (that’s £180 - £90) over three trades, or £30 per trade.

So, as you can see, you’d need to making “£90-size trades” to average £30 per trade if you’re winning two thirds of them.

The next question is how much money you’d need in your trading account to make “£90-size” trades.

Here, we’ll assume that every time you make a trade, you’re risking 1% of your account capital, so that if a trade loses, it takes away only 1% of your funds. That means that your account size needs to be £9,000.

So the answer’s yes: you can average out at +£30 per trade, if you have a two-in-three win-rate for your trades, and a £9,000 account.

You might be able to do it with a smaller account than £9,000, by risking more than 1% per trade, but that would be much riskier.

Note also that we haven’t allowed anything for dealing-costs (spread/commissions): we’ve just assumed that those were included in the net results of each trade.

So, that shows you what’s involved, and (roughly) how to work it out.

The question is: can you develop a trading style that has a win-rate of two thirds (66.7%) with equal-size targets and stop-losses? Well, the answer is that you [I]can[/I], and there [I]are[/I] people who do that or something very like it, but it takes a lot of education and a lot of practice, so it’s a [B]long[/B] learning-curve.

What you need next is a realistic perception of how long it takes to get it together, and what it involves. These links may help you, in that context …

[B]301 Moved Permanently

This was how I learned

These were the resources that helped me most

These are the five main mistakes people make and the reasons why they make them

Good luck!

Nobody considering forex as a source of income should be put off by the warnings of failure rates but it almost always requires more capital than you think. Logically, for new traders, it should therefore be an additional income, not a sole one. This relieves the psychological pressure that each trade or each day should make a certain profit. Being employed somewhere probably also eliminates the time available for intra-day trading but that’s a major plus for new traders - avoid day-trading.

lexys’s posts are fabulous. Liked it.

Well that’s not very pleasing.

No specific numbers, I just want to profit from forex and make some money, at the moment it seem’s very complicated is this normal?

There is a lot to be aware of but actual trading should be simple.

e.g. I understand its actually quite simple to fly an Airbus. But to make it that simple, the designers have to know and be aware of a ton of information they just don’t send the pilot’s way.

Well, I think most completely “new subjects” probably look complicated, at first? We’ve all been there. Nobody was born knowing how to do this stuff, so in that sense I think it’s probably “normal” for it to look complicated; yes.

As Tommor says, the [I]trading itself[/I] becomes fairly simple - it’s more the [I]learning-curve[/I] of becoming able to do it successfully that’s complicated and time-consuming: according to Dr. John Borman’s research into this “learning-curve process”, the typical/average time-period for “getting it” is something like 3 years, so you might think of the typical forex-trading learning-curve as being roughly equivalent in terms of duration to a college degree? But I’m sure it varies quite a bit, too.

I’m also a newbie and I think that if you’re looking for what’s pleasing then Trading isn’t for you.

If one guy has an opinion about something (“the only way to be a millionaire off forex is to be a billionaire”) It doesn’t mean that he’s right. How could he possibly know that only billionaires win in Forex? Can’t he think of anyone (who isn’t a billionaire) who is successful in Forex ?

Everyone has his own biases. Don’t believe what other people say in forums unless they give you a good reason/proof/logic of what they’re talking about.

The failure rate in Forex seems scary BUT it’s about the same as the failure rate in startup businesses! Should people be scared to start a business ?

Most people (+90%) fail in about everything worthwhile !

You want to make 30£ on each trade. Does that mean that you want to win every trade (100% win rate) ? That’s highly improbable, especially for a newbie !

I think what was meant wasnt that only billionaires can succeed, but that the only way to become a forex millionaire is to start with a billion and lose most of it, leaving you with just a million

Lexys post r power!!! Really enjoy reading it.
Hope I don’t miss out anything??? yeppy…

Trading is not a game. It also not a job. It is a business, it your very own business. Will u start a business when u not familiar with the kind of trade u want to do? I’m sure u don’t want get busted in your pocket buddy. And forex is a kind of business which u also must hv interest in it. The more interest u have in it, the more u want to know more about it, understand it and conquer it. Less speed u b smooth. Cheers***

I have £300 max capital to invest into a account, what can I expect from this?

If you learn how to trade, practice on a demo account for some time until you are sure you have a strategy that works, a good return would be 5% per month - doesnt sound much but when banks are offering around 1-2% a year its actually a lot better

If your return is 5% per month (which seems very little), then you can expect your 300£ to be +1,000,000 £ in 14 years !

Or 1 Billion £ in 25 years. Or 1000£ in 2 years !

That’s called Compound Interest.

Also called ignoring tax :wink:

Yes 5% a month return seems very little. “Seems”…5% appears to be little but actually it is NOT ! You said it yourself in your previous reply “doesnt sound much”.

Maybe words like “seems”, “sounds” mean different things to us ! We all meant the same thing.

However, I don’t know any place where one can get a better return than 5% a month.

Im with you now. I hate the Internet, so easy to misunderstand others