Are there many housewives involved in day trading and if yes, what is your advise to a newbie.
Trade all you want…but have dinner ready when I get home! 
Oh Baz, now you’re just looking for trouble!!!
Jessey 
This article is 5 years old — but, some lessons are timeless:
Hahaha… Do you know it is more attractive when the men CAN cook or they cook for their wife ?
Great article Clint, thank you!
Thanks Clint for sharing the article.
However, these article /story is nothing new to me. You hear it all the time… Everyone loses money when starting out no matter if a person is a housewife or not. It is rarely to see housewives do trade thats why when an article comes out like this is very interesting to read… Like those other Japanese women (granted I myself is Asian too by the way ), I too will not back down until I succeed just like everyone else who wants to be successful as trader…
It takes time…
Hi, PipNRoll
You are absolutely correct.
I didn’t mean to imply that these women had problems because they are women, or because they are housewives, or because they are Asian. I hope you didn’t take it that way.
I noticed several “fatal” errors made by some of the women in the article, and I hope that you noticed them, too.
Let me point out three of them. Maybe you can add a few more. Let’s use Ms. Itoh as an example:
B[/B] The first thing that comes to mind is that rule about trading [B]only[/B] with money you can afford to lose.
She lost nearly all her family’s $100,000 in savings.
“I wanted to add to our savings, but instead I got in over my head,” Ms. Itoh, 36, said.
B[/B] There are two more rules that Ms. Itoh didn’t know, or decided to ignore:
Never, never, never trade without stop-losses. — and — Cut your losses, and let your profits run.
Ms. Itoh recalled that she had wanted to cry as she watched the yen jump as much as 5 percent in value in a single day, Aug. 16.
“But I had to keep a poker face, because my husband was sitting behind me,” Ms. Itoh said.
Consider the loss that she held onto: Not 5% of her account value, but a 5% change in the value of the yen. That’s huge.
And, if she was trading the AUD/JPY (a popular pair among Japanese retail traders), the loss in the value of the pair (as the yen rose) was over 8% on just one day — 8/16/07.
And between the high (103.64) on 8/9/07 and the low (87.76) on 8/16/07 (one week later), the AUD/JPY pair lost over 15% of its value.
There’s no gentle way to say this: It’s just insane to hold onto a bad loss, and watch it get worse.
B[/B] Needing to be right, and believing that you are right, can be deadly for a trader.
When you are being totally [B]rational,[/B] and the market is being totally [B]irrational,[/B] remember this: The market can remain irrational much longer than you can remain solvent.
She did not sell her position, thinking the yen would fall again. But by the next morning, only $1,000 remained in her account, she said.
The tragedy here is that, on a slightly longer time-frame, she was absolutely right. By October 1, the AUD/JPY was back to its August 9 high — meaning that the yen fell again, just as Ms. Itoh expected.
But, none of that mattered to her anymore. By August 16, she had basically wiped out her family’s savings, because she hadn’t followed the Rules of Money Management, or the Rules of Trade Management.
These mistakes are not female mistakes, or housewife mistakes, or Asian mistakes — they’re newbie mistakes.
The great bull market in the yen-pairs (due to the relentless decline of the yen currency) over several years was one of the greatest carry-trade opportunities of the retail forex era.
It went on for a very long time, offering traders [B]currency appreciation plus positive interest[/B] on LONG positions held for days, weeks, or months.
It was the only sort of market the Japanese housewives had ever traded, and they weren’t prepared to cope with the volatility that entered the market when that party started coming to an end.
No trend — no matter how long it has run, or how durable it seems — can last forever. And you can’t know in advance when it will end.
It’s funny, the BP data says that you posted this in September 2012, yet on reading it I could swear that it is the 1950’s?
My wife has a very big career job with a high salary. When each of our kids was born, the company gives just under nine months’ full pay maternity leave, during which Claire has done most of the day-to-day childcare. When our eldest was born in 2004, I worked full time for the British Government, again in a management role. The UK system offers up to 14 months Unpaid Special Leave (USL) to anyone with a child under five, in order to assist with childcare. Unlike your post, this is not gender-specific. So I took the 14 months when Claire returned to work after our first. Then I returned to work a year later, when Claire took maternity leave with our second child in 2006. Then I took a second run of USL, during which time I again looked after our kids - they were one and three when my ‘shift’ started), and during which time I learned to trade. I never returned to ‘career’ work as it turned out, I focussed on our other business, built a property in Portugal, and learned to trade.
Now we both work largely from home, Claire is still with her corporate employer, we still run the business, and I trade ‘full time’. I do the bulk of the childcare during the week, I have done for the two years since Claire returned to work from maternity leave with our third child in 2009. Our fourth is due in February.
One of the principal reasons we picked trading for me is that it works so well around other life commitments.
To give you an idea of how this works in the real world for a full time trader - I work 0530-0830 four days a week (Tuesday-Friday), with a slightly later start on a Monday. I do an evening scan of the market looking for end of day setups some time around 11pm, this take 15-45 minutes depending on how the markets are. I also do a weekly scan during the day on a Sunday. All these times are GMT. If my youngest (who has preschool now one morning and two 9-3 days a week, he’s three) is around I am with him, if he naps in the afternoon I drop on the markets for a couple of hours after lunch.
During my 0530-0830 sessions, Claire does the kids’ breakfast, homework etc., then I take over at 0830. I leave for the school run then. I also pick the kids up from school in the afternoon, and my youngest (Arthur!) at lunchtime on on his half day. After the afternoon school run Claire stops work and does tea, bedtime, etc.
So when the kids are around, I am with them. When they are not, I am trading. I still manage to put in a lot of hours a week, plenty enough to make full time money at this. The life of a full time trader is not one of sitting at the screen 10 hours a day, it just can’t work like that over the long haul for most of us.
The market is 24 hours a day, and the returns from trading justify some juggling to find a routine that works for you. I would be profitable just from my end of day (EOD) trading, I would be profitable just from my intraday trading, there is a system out there that supports most approaches and lifestyles. Forex trading is appealing to many precisely because it works around other commitments.
Anyway, I hope that you find that helpful as an example of how one family marry up the needs of kids, washing, errands etc. with the needs of trading the currency markets.
ST
(One small PS, and apologies but I can’t resist this part as it is a pet peeve of mine having spent years taking kids to playgoups, toddler music classes, kids’ parties etc and having most of the paperwork, helpers and staff refer solely to ‘mums’ and do a double take when I walk in: I don’t know where you are from, but over here in the UK the word housewife is pretty much on the way out as so many of the ‘traditional’ family structures are broken down. My wife and I share out the childcare between us, but as I do most of the daytime stuff, including with the smaller kids, I guess I am as close to the general definition of ‘housewife’ as we get. Except that I’m a 6’1’’, 210lb man and spent a decade up to 2007 earning a living driving fast cars, chasing people, taking doors off hinges and arresting people at the more violent end of society… at ‘only’ 38 I’m not quite ready to be called a housewife just yet, so please move with the times and update your terminology! You’re asking a question about a lifestyle and set of demands that is not restricted to the narrow group understood under that term.)
And when ST has finished doing his trading for the day, he keeps his hands busy cooking some of those yummy bakewell tarts that hubby loves for his tea.
http://forums.babypips.com/asset.php?fid=31459&uid=84357&d=1348651473
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!
Hello SimonTemplar,
Thanks again for the follow-up post and your explanation about the mistakes of the “newbies” make from that article. It is very informative and I greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
I am also glad that everything is going well to you and to your family. There is nothing more important to be with your kids and taking care of them yourself everyday. I can relate to you in that respect.
I also agree that “housewives” terminology should be change because nowadays more and more Dads are staying home with their kids whenever they are able too and what fits for their family life style. I think we should change it from “housewives” to “Parenting” instead :).
Thanks again and Happy Trading
Opps… I meant the above Quote is for Clint… Thanks Clint.