Hi guys, anyone here who has ever grew an impossible account. Like less than $3…?
Not sure if its even possible with most brokers. There is one way around it, you’d have to find a broker that offers fractional lots. I remember oanda used to offer like a 0.001 of a lot size. If you find a good point of entry, you could try your luck risking 5 cents and leaving it running. Look at a Monthly chart for the best entry.
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No, I have never been able to do so and I grew frustrated quickly after my equity decreases.
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You can but it has to be on an exponential curve, very slow profits at the start which compound, I turned an account by 500% the past weeks but it uses passive trading.
It was to recover an account from testing an algo for someone to see if they could succeed actively trading, keeping their training to 1yr instead of 2yrs, turns out it’s built in to the markets you can’t.
Can you take a small amount under $10 and grow it, sure over months, quarters, years, you have to project where you will be, not where you are, but you need to target 5%/10%/20% per trade.
Plus you can’t use active trading which is the only knowledge you will find in the internet, so in the end no, you can’t grow a small amount to anything meaningful.
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I’ve neither done it nor thinking about doing it because it will instill the wrong habit and mentality of trading if you ever did it and made it.
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this is very relevant and important, and is the main point to make 
it’s similar to the “trading competitions” of the kind you sometimes see advertised (often by unregulated brokers who want to identify and attract dangerous gamblers/traders!) - they are designed to reward and encourage wild gambling, and the people who win them are often by no means sensible or successful traders
it’s also more or less the same philosophy as offering very high leverage to inexperienced traders: the ones who will find it attractive are typically the wild gamblers, and those are exactly the ones those unregulated, offshore brokers have learned how to attract with excess leverage (big red flag), “bonuses” (also a big red flag), competitions and all the other ways they attract the exact customers they want, knowing from very long experience that they will almost never have to pay them out anything significant
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Hi, very valid points, but I’m curious.
I just signed up with IC Markets and many have said it is a reputable broker.
However, they allow 1:1000 leverage and also gives a bonus. If I’m not wrong, they also host competitions.
Is IC Markets a secure broker to trade on? Thank you.
this question was answered right here, earlier today 
(so if you’re using an IC Markets company that offers 1:1,000 leverage, then no: that’s clearly - by definition - not the one that’s properly regulated!)
and welcome to Babypips!
One part of it (regulated by ASIC) is.
But if you have 1,000/1 leverage, that isn’t the company where your account’s held, and that’s a problem and a worry. 
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I haven’t personally experienced growing an account from less than $3. While it’s theoretically possible to build up a small account, the practical challenges make it an improbable feat.
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Let me explain to you how this works coming from an institutional background, yes you can grow small accounts but there are a few problems.
- You will never be able to keep the returns stable
- The markets go in cycles which you do not control
- You will make losses in those cycles which you must eliminate
- You need to ‘pause’ during these cycles preserving capital
Identifying when the cycle changes is experience, but ‘pausing’ is very difficult for anyone as you have to watch the markets move while not trading or investing, all these factors mean you cannot grow a small nor a large account, the account size actually doesn’t matter.
The only difference is with a large account in $100,000s plus is you look for returns at 10%/20%/50% per year, not per day or per week, on top of that small accounts do not pay your living expenses so it’s only really valid for students or those building a nest egg, on the flip side people with masses of capital are equally prone to losing it in the markets for one simple reason.
Any money you make or inherit is not yours, it’s the next generations and you use it to cover your living expenses while preserving the base capital, wealth management 101, this is the entire foundation of how the financial markets work, if you attempt to ‘make money’ in the markets they will help you move the money from your weak hands to their strong hands.
If you look at the CEOs and fund managers, their $millions are just a fractional compensation on the $billions AUM which is why any course you find or any advice to trade the markets will be wrong, unfortunately people thrive on this mis-education simply because they are not taught one key aspect of life, the art of TIME - management of it, the correct moment to action, the correct moment to do nothing, when you mistime you lose, as an example.
In an 8hr trading day in the markets you have a 5minute window during that day to make the actionable trade entry (the ones that actually make profits), a few minutes either side and you will be breakeven, anything else and you will lose capital, if you take one week in Forex you have a 72minute window for that perfect trade entry for that week, although in reality it’s a 36minute window.
I grew a hedge fund at 50% per quarter, personal accounts at much more, but if you don’t ‘pause’ when the markets are in a negative cycle, you just start again from the beginning so I will leave you with a little trick, if your first trade for the day is a loss you wait until tomorrow, if your first trade on a weekly basis is a loss you wait until next week, this is how you grow an account regardless of capital size, using TIME, every other way will result in a loss.
Like Formula 1 the financial markets are a wealth game, and TIME is your asset - the one thing I try to teach and the one thing no other person including the education sector will touch - teaching time is a near impossible task, the poorer the background you come from the less you will value time and the more you will lose chasing the markets.
Learning to trade and invest is nothing more than spending years and decades re-educating yourself to value time.
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Can you explain this more - the negative cycle? How long does this last? Is this like specific to a pair, or the whole market, or what?
Do you mean volatility is down?
It means the majority of the market participants are holding in the wrong direction and an inversion or continuation occurs, this could be on any timeframe from seconds to daily and beyond.
A simple process of moving weak money to strong hands, you will feel a ‘pressure point’ as it happens but be incapable to doing anything about it while your profits and then capital evaporate.
I already know all the questions which will then be asked, how do you know when the cycle starts, institutions have that knowledge, then how do you get that same knowledge, you have the same fintech as them, can’t you just avoid it, sure if you’re in the top 1%, how do you get in the top 1%, you have more time than anyone else, how do you get more time, you do everything slower, but that means you make less profits, no it means you make more profits in short periods, but how do you time those short periods, you know when the cycle starts 