A full-time student studying @ University of Economics, Krakow. Ive got a decent amount of time on my hands, I wanna use it to do something productive, learn a useful skill and make some money. I heard this is the place to be. Introduced to babypips and the idea of trading by a good buddy of mine. Day 1, ready to learn.
What’s your current understanding of the markets / investing?
Day 1. Lesson 1. Forget about making money. Forex trading is speculative, and the lesson is NOT TO LOSE money. Tattoo it on your forehead because it could take upwards from 6 months or more to become a break-even trader, let along a profitable one.
Without capital you cannot trade. Money management is critical, as is a low risk mind set. Never risk more than 1% on any trade, and don’t overtrade, or it would cost you.
Start your journey to eventual success by pressing the green education button above. Take it easy, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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Hello Daniel, welcome to the place where you can make the most of your time by learning about forex in detail. Get started by clicking on the green education button and invest a few months just understanding about currency pairs, pips, leverage, margins, candles, how to put a stop-loss limit, and when to enter and exit the trade to avoid losing money.
Your real learning starts when you go live. Before that, you are just preparing yourself for trading. It’s obvious that when you go live, you will make profits and losses both. That’s when you understand the real things. You learn that forex trading is a lot more than you read in your books.
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This would be like Michael Jordan stepping onto the court saying “fellas, forget about winning”.
Any instrument where you are making a wager against an unknown unknown (e.g. future price fluctuation) is speculative. No instrument is inherently risky.
It takes however long it takes. Stay away from putting a number on anything. Some people get it month 2, or month 3, or month 18, or month never. You can’t accurately quantify this claim because you have 0 access to the hundreds of input variables that define someone else’s success.
Maybe for you…? This is not the only way.
What? Why not?
How do you define overtrading for someone else? Your definition of “overtrading” is going to be 90-100% subjective and based on your risk tolerance, capital, strategy, mindset, screen time, etc etc etc etc.
I’d delete everything in your post except for this. This is the only partially objective statement.
Too many people on this site try to impose their own personal experience on other people who are new to the game. The path to becoming consistent is nearly 100% subjective and no two traders will ever have the same journey. To me, trading reveals who you really are- if you can stay in the game long enough.
It’s pretty simple to gauge where someone is at simply by looking at the advice they give others.
Respect.
Jake.
I guess that says it all.
Perhaps it would be better to post YOUR wisdom to newbies, instead of picking my post to pieces. I would respect that approach, thank you.
IMO, newbies fresh behind the ears need a definitive starting point with built in parameters, which is low risk to prevent them from blowing their account on day one. Boot camp approach. As they progress, they’ll go their own route, as we all do.
My argument- why wait until day 100 200 or 300. We all blow accounts. The faster you do it, the faster the real lessons begin.
Well Jake, it seems you’re still carrying a chip on your shoulder from your account ego blowout. Pain from losing hurts, doesn’t it.?
And that explains your negative attitude towards risk - you want others to suffer as well as you. Now you’ve learnt the difficulties of trading, try and reset your mind to help others by explaining what you did wrong, and for them to avoid that. It will make you a better person, that’s for sure.
It might come as a surprise - or not - that I’ve never blown an account and don’t intend to either. I may not make a million either, but if I can help others not to lose, that’s my reward.
Best of luck.
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It’s my fault for re-engaging with you thinking I could spark a discussion. My intent is to challenge others and hopefully create some novelty/new ways of thinking about things.
I’ll zig and you zag from here on out.
Take care and stay safe.
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Hi @danielchristopherlalewicz
and welcome! 
Considering your background, I would assume that what you have learned and absorbed so far from this thread is that there is no standard approach to learning forex trading!
However, the main mutually agreed element here is that trading is generally a high-risk venture if one does not know the basics of what one is doing. For example, the general evidence from various sources indicates that something like 70-90% of retail traders lose money trading. But there are many basic reasons for such a high percentage and there is no reason why you should not be capable of reaching the level of the 10-30% that do succeed. But it is just worth being aware that risk is present.
I am sure you already know this, but the best way to start is to parallel your theoretical studies with a demo account so that you can freely explore the basic mechanics of market trading and the features on the platform used, without being concerned about losing any money. During this period you can discover what kind of trading suits your character and circumstances and evolve a strategy that fits. This will also help build up the confidence to then go live when the time comes.
Some people may, however, recommend opening a live account immediately and just trade microlots because demo trading can be very misleading due to the absence of emotional action/reaction to market movements and their impact on your account balance. Personally, during the early learning stages, I think it better to exclude the live financial and emotional aspects and just focus of trying out all the different trading scenarios and opportunities.
But if you do use a demo account then I would suggest you use it on a similar scale to your eventual live trading. I.e. don’t trade a USD500,000 paper account if your live account will be USD1000. This is not a big issue but it just helps keep the learning stage as close to your own reality as possible.
Unfortunately, the learning materials widely available for trading are totally without professional or peer group vetting, unlike your university course study materials, and you will need to sift the abundance of books, Youtube videos, courses, and forums, etc with a very objective and critical approach. But your demo account is again a way of testing things for yourself. Try to be systematic with your demo account and work out what you need your charts to tell you and find the appropriate tools and settings that fit the need. Keep what works and reject what does not. But don’t just jump from one suggested set-up to another without any analysis.
What we are talking about here is you trading for yourself and making your own trading decisions. There are other approaches such as copy trading, but I have no experience of these to be able to comment. Maybe someone else will?
I should add a disclaimer here that the above is only my personal view and is based only on my personal experiences and opinions. Others may, and probably will, suggest entirely different approaches - which is very healthy from your point of view!
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