I’m new here. For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a trader (not a gangster), but I never quite had the gumption to pursue my dream and instead ended up with a huge mortgage and being a slave to a tyrant paymaster. Now I’m hoping to keep the dream alive and find some light at the end of the tunnel by renewing my interest in financial markets.
My wife bought me a one day fx trading course which I attended last year and it got me hooked. Really it was a taster for the main trading seminar / course but as they wanted a few thousand pounds for that I’ve had to put that idea on hold. Instead I followed the course on babypips and ended up here. I’ve had a demo account since January this year which I’m using to try and convince my partner to relinquish some of out family savings and it’s going ok so far.
For anyone reading this that is trading full time I just have one question:-
If I can only expect returns of 15 to 20 percent per annum on a good year, does this mean I’d need at least an investment of £266,000 to make an annual salary of £40,000. If this is the case I can’t readily see me giving up my day job to trade full time, which upsets me greatly. Is there another way?
Greetings Border Patrol and welcome to the BabyPips.com community! Glad to hear you spent a part of your forex education journey here with us :).
I have a question to your question…what is your proof of concept that you can achieve 15% - 20% in the forex markets? If it’s through demo, then my suggestion is to take that system and apply it to a small account to see if it’s replicable over a good amount of time (depending on your trade frequency with the current system). Do you keep a journal we can check out?
Thank you for showing an interest Pipcrawler, the training course here on babypips is absolutely excellent; I’ve really enjoyed following it.
With regard to your question, I plucked the 15 to 20% figure from some figures I’d heard banded about in various places. I must admit to being a little confused though,as a lot of people suggest that many retail fx traders don’t make any money at all, some people say that 15 to 20% annual profit is excellent and yet there seem to be quite a few people trading full time for a living. So I guess I was just trying to ascertain what is fact and what is fiction. If I wanted an annual salary of 40 k then I’d need around 260 k to start with wouldn’t I? Assuming I could achieve 15%. Dies anyone trading full time start off with a big lump sum like this?
To confuse matters even further I’ve been trading a demo account since January this year with a starting sum of 10 k. I know that trading with a demo account is probably nothing like using your own real money but I’ve had a decent incentive as if I can prove to my wife that this is a worthwhile venture then at the end of the year I can secure some family savings for my trading pot. So the demo account has been traded cautiously and not too frequently but I have now grown my initial 10 k to 25k. Again I realise this is probably not realistic but it has just served to intensify my desire to be trading and also increased the confusion about how much I can expect to make.
I think I was hoping that some people on here might give me some thoughts and opinions and maybe tell me a little about their situations.
The rule that I am following is that maximum drawdown on an account should not be more than a month’s profit. Also, I think as long as you’re using a stop loss and not just using cost averaging, you will be successful. If you are trading more than a few lots at a time on $10,000 then you will lose money. I think that following longer term trends is easier than trading short term noise.
At the moment my strategy has been, looking for trends on the hourly time frame using moving averages at the point where different time delays cross, using a stochastic indication of under or over sold, checking for resistance levels on longer trends and time frames and then using the 15 minute time frame to decide when to trade. I really do feel like I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing though.