5% monthly?

Hello everyone,
I am new to this forex adventure.I have been messing around with it for about 6 months,and I was wondering if anyone can give me a little insight on profit percentage. I am currently demoing and treating it like real money.I am making around 8% monthly.Is 5% a good average you can pretty much count on a month?I want to some day go full time with this but I need to know from the veteran traders out there if this is something that is possible.I am wanting to bring in around $1,500 a week with trading.What kind of capital would I have to have to reach this goal?I hear 2% at most to risk on a trade.Would $20,000 be close to where I could do this ?I know a live account is much different than a demo.I plan on starting with a mini account to get my feet wet.And I don’t plan on even trying to go full time for at least a year or longer I just want some feed back on what I will be looking at in the future.Your input is greatly appreciated!!

i make an average of 10% a month, but i have also been trading for 3 years and it took almost 18 months before i was making consistent profits.

5%/month is an annualized return of 79.6% and is not sustainable. Berkshire Hathaway’s BEST year ever featured a return of “only” 59.3%. His average annual gain from 1964-2006 is “only” 21.6%. His old partnership (from 1956-1969) averaged a “paltry” 30%/year (which multiplied an initial investment by a factor of 30 over 13 years).

5%/month means multiplying your money by a factor of 349 over 10 years, 122 thousand over 20 years, 42.6 million over 30 years, and 14.9 billion over 40 years.

If sustaining 5%/month over the course of a career were so sustainable, then where are the armies of trillionaires who should have taken over the world by now?

That’s the statistic. Frankly, I find the statistic awfully optimistic. Of course, it’s possible that the other 5% use no leverage, but I don’t think the FOREX brokers would want people to know this. When you consider the leverage, the trading costs (magnified by the leverage), and the inevitability of seemingly-random fluctuations, I’m surprised the statistic isn’t more like 99.99%. If I tried to do what everyone here is trying to do, I’d soon get to know the local welfare office. Even if daytrading works, it sounds far more stressful than most real jobs can possibly be. I know I’d earn better pay in a third world sweatshop than I would daytrading.

i know im new and that i may not be knowing what i am talking about…so please…anyone correct me. i opened a demo account. 50K…forex.com…in a week i made 6000. i know i know’‘its wasnt really your money’’…isnt that 12% profit in one week? my math may suck and that would def. make be unsuitable for this business. i dont have a SET system but i hav a system that needs alittle perfection

trading is very stressfull - which is the reason traders as humans cannot achieve consistencu in trading performance unless they use automation.

I don’t agree with you dima,I think it takes a very diciplined trader to make it.Look at the cowabunga system on this website(the blog)he is at 2,256 pips for the year so far.With the right amount of lots,(money managment) that could give you a decent living.He is human and he is doing it.As far as the automated systems,I cannot say much becuase I don’t know about them.I know if they worked so great there would be allot of uneducated rich people.What I have come up with is it takes patience and a will to get threw the learning curve and great dicipline and williness not to stop learning,or should I say “changing with the market” to become succesful trading the forex market.

jlmac27 has the right mind set, attitude and idea. Forget what freecashflow is jabbering about. He is just filling you up with his negitave attitude. 95% of traders do lose money, because they 1) do not have a plan. 2) are too greedy and 3) they are under edcauted.

I suggest opening a micro account befor you do a mini account. It will easy the transaction into a live accout.

Well this just isnt so. Although the big players have automated a number of aspects of their trading my reading suggests it is in the order of 20-40%. The rest is still carried out by traders. Once you know what you are doing the stress frankly disappears. Look at this afternoons trades on GY, EY and possibly GU. Where was the stress if you had a plan and knew what you were doing. Its those who dont know what they are doing, are undercapitalised, overleveraged and have no plan and are usually desperate to make some dough that are stressed