Hello everyone. First, I just want to say that this site is a great resource for beginners. I had no idea that such a market existed until a friend referred me to here, and in the last three days I have been pouring over the content here, opening demo accounts and deciding what I want to do. Thanks for creating this resource - if its goal is to take someone completely new to Forex and give them direction then it certainly accomplished that and more.
But I have questions and uncertainty about what I can get from this. First, a little about me:
I live in the Pacific Northewest (PST/-8GMT). I turn 18 next month, and have plans to move out on or around then. For the last five years I have been dedicated to programming. I started out with the interest of being a game developer with C++/DX but later found myself hired as a PHP developer and moved over into web technologies. For the last 6 months I’ve been working fulltime as a web developer (my second web development job) and make enough income to be self-sufficient on my own - which is certainly a goal in my life. However, the town I live in is small and filled with many older retired people and as such the cost of living is uncomfortably close to what a web developer here makes (despite us being the primary developer of websites for towns, chamber of commerces and companies in or around our city).
So I make enough to live and eat and a little extra - but I’m not rolling in dough and I’m certainly not a doctor or lawyer.
From a “personal fulfillment” perspective though; what having a job for over two and a half years “in the industry” has taught me is that any job can make your dreams boring and lifeless. I can’t focus on code outside of work - and it’s killing me that my dreams are essentially draining… themselves! All this effort I put into a skill is being replaced with languages and technologies that don’t interest me… yeah, I can go on for this forever so I’ll stop now…
What I really want is a job that I’m good at, comfortable with, and is self sufficient so that I can turn programming back into a hobby indefinitely, or until I can find a job that works better for me from a sanity standpoint.
Now; I understand that trading is a skill. I understand that there is a requirement of capital upfront. I understand that it is in no ways a method of earning quick cash. When I find beginner posts on forums asking “how long does it take for me to be able to make WoW but with better graphics?”, I sigh as much as most of you probably do when someone asks how long to turn a $250 micro account into $50k. So I’m here as a fraction-less-ignorant-ignorant beginner 
The reason why Forex is so interesting to me is because it’s just a bunch of numbers. Or rather, one number per currency pair. And it goes up or down. The really interesting and “cool” things that I see in it are the incredibly brilliant ways to interpret and predict these numbers, and reading though this statistical theory was very interesting to me. I know that this will be coming later, but I’m sure that I can find some very nice ways to integrate my programing skills into the market.
You now know my life story, so I would like to say what I understand about the market and how I believe there is potential for me to, eventually, succeed in what I always wanted to do:
In the next few months, or as long as necessary, I will continue with my demo account until I can sustain profits at a 10:1 leverage. At that point, I want to open a mini account at $1,000 and trade at no leverage until that account becomes sufficiently profitable. I would then increase the leverage of my deals to something around 10:1 and continue with that to increase my account balance. Once I have proven to myself that I am capable of making money at 10:1 I want to invest $20k of a trust fund that I will have access to. Start trades, again, at 1:1 and then go back up to 10:1. If I become capable of trading a $50k balance at a 10:1 margin at, an average (counting losses) over three hundred dollars a day, then I will of succeeded in my end goal - which is to make enough money, purely on the market, to both sustain my dreamed middle class lifestyle and to continue to feed my account balance to make more future trades.
My account balance will never be touched, at any step before the last one, unless in case of extreme emergency. I also want to try and fund my account as little as possible - because if my end goal is to make a living, then self-sufficiency and discipline is a must and I don’t want to introduce bad habits; even if takes longer.
One thing that I am going to tattoo in my head right now is to throw time out of the window. “Sufficiently Profitable” will be a hard limit that must be hit, no matter how long it takes, before I continue with any steps above. And if I fail, it will hopefully happen early on with little to no loss.
I understand that if everything I stated about in my high-level goals is even attainable, it will take years (if I’m lucky) before I am up to that point. But even if it’s 5 years, being 23 and living off of this kind of work is the dream of many people - I just hope that my plan is capable of working. And that’s where, finally (phew), my questions come in
- is anything that I said unattainable, unrealistic, idealistic, idiotic or just plain wrong?
Actually… that about sums up my questions. Please be merciless to anything that I said. I spent money and time and effort to learn programming and understand the hardship of what I’m trying to embark on. I fully intend to trudge though this as diligently and slowly as needed - but before I do that I want confirmation that my efforts won’t be in vain.
Oh! And before any of you ask me how someone who just learned about a market three days ago and has no formal education in statistics (though I have much practical knowledge of logic) can even suggest or plan such a long term thing - I have been thinking about similar opportunities for a long time now - but this is the most “down to earth” (ironically, by that I mean accessible purely on the Internet) opportunity I’ve discovered.
