Indeed, take it a step at a time. The market isn’t going anywhere.
I don’t see Forex as exciting, it’s down right boring watching prices go up and down for no fathomable reason most of the time.
Exciting is the last thing it should be, getting excited is getting emotional and we all know where that gets us.
It looks as if you were actually for real.
You married? I don’t know any sane wife that would allow their husband who just got laid off to gamble away their life savings.
I was reading this thread these last few days and was 100% sure this was a joke.
I don’t know if you realize this but the forex market doesn’t exist to make YOU money, it exists to take money away from you.
It doesn’t take pity on those who trade with emotion like yourself who trade to put bread on the table.
If your going to do this try trading with $1/pip at least. This way you might make $40-50. You also probably get unemployment insurance so it should provide good adequate income for the upcoming weeks while you search for another job.
Seriously don’t be like that father in Boiler Room who bought $50K of worthless stock from his families life savings thinking he would double his investment overnight. It doesn’t work like that.
I normally don’t ever post on these forums because its a pissing match. I find that forums actually do more harm than good with all the garbage that they contain. But I had to make this post because if you kept this up you would seriously lose your life savings and you would give up Forex forever thinking its a scam.
Since you do seem to be for real, I will add my thoughts.
I like seeing that you decided to limit your risk to 1 lot trades, very smart. I have been trading on a demo account for about 2-3 months now and started out the same way you were talking before. I blew over 10x the amount that you have in yours by using the “all in” strategy looking for those few pips that would make me thousands. I became very familiar with margin calls and they taught me valuable lessons that I will never forget. If I had started trading live with only a few weeks of training, I would have failed and I have a lot more money than you to start with and a steady job. Using a 5% rule on my trades and it is a working great. I don’t think my rule is exactly what people have talked about on here but I like it. Example, I start with a 50k balance and trake 10 lots (50k is 5% of $1,000,000). My lot size increases with my balance size proportionally, every 5k increase adds 1 lot to the trade size (I have my scale down to $100 increments). This gives me plenty of breathing room for my trading style if things don’t go my way for a temporary period of time. Hope my comments help you or maybe someone else. Also, have you considered using mt4pips.com? That has been a good tool for me to track my progress and share it with others.
That is definitely luck, and now you can use some of those winnings for your trading account. But I’d take the rest out of there and put it into cash equivalent holdings until you get a steady income going again. This is the “emergency fund” you always hear financial advisors pipe about, and full-time traders definitely need to have one.
I want to make clear one thing about my comments, when I said 10% I meant 10% of your liquid net worth as total capital used in all high risk financial activities. This does not mean 10% risk per trade!
The general consensus “risk per trade” figure you hear most traders mention is 2% of your trading account per trade (not 2% of your entire liquid net worth!). Some risk a bit more, 5% is usually the tops, some risk just 1% and make very good money doing so.
So let’s say, you have a $25,000 liquid net worth now because of your fortune in the first wave of trading. 10% is $2,500. If you want to play it conservatively divide that in half, put $1,250 in your trading account and $1,250 into a 6 month CD that you will roll over and add when you either blow out your first account or when you are doing very well for a long period of time.
If your account is $1,250 in size, a 2% risk is $25.00 per trade. If your account is $2,500, then its $50 per trade. With 2% risk per trade, you have to lose 50 times in a row to get cleaned out. If you are trading with an on average 1.5:1 risk reward, you win 3% for every hit and lose 2% for every loss. With a long term average 50% success ratio, that’s 1% gain in your account per trade. Do 1 setup a day, and you can potentially make 10% a month ($125 for the $1250 account, $250 for the $2500 account). It might not make you terribly ‘excited’, but if you kept that success record on average month to month, you’d be considered an excellent trader.
when you start making big money you’ll find it exciting … give it a few years