Hi everyone, I’m a hard working single mum of 3 beautiful daughters (10/7/6) I want to learn to trade because no matter how many hours I put in at work there isn’t enough money for everything they want and everywhere I want them to go/visit. So hoping learning the forex will give me the extra monthly money to tick lots of things off our bucket list. Before I’m old and too uncool for them to want to spend time with 
Welcome to the forum. Don’t worry you are going to be amazing traders if you learn to trade properly.
Ahh Thankyou! I’m trying to read as many discussions on here possible to understand the things
Practice on a demo account until you have developed a consistent successful strategy. I have found trendlines to be very helpful in determining the main trend and the stochastic indicator for catching trend reversals.
Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that it is very unlikely to happen. If you are not already aware, you will soon find out from the many threads here that something like 70-90% of all new retail traders actually lose their money. You need to work out how you are going to be different from the lemming crowd if you are going to succeed.
You will note that I didn’t say it is impossible, only statistically very unlikely to succeed. Another difficulty is that I assume from your reasons given for starting trading that you do not have a lot of capital to put into your trading. The fact is that you cannot make a good amount of profit from a small deposit without taking very big risks with highly leveraged position sizes. But the risk works in both directions and the potential for losses is as real as the potential for gains.
A small capital account usually means that the trader ends up trading very short-term, looking for quick profits from small moves. But the short-term charts are extremely erratic and demand a good strategy, strict discipline and a lot of patience. Entry timing needs to be accurate, and managing risk exposure and capital maintenance are crucial in order to achieve any kind of consistency - and without consistency you cannot build confidence…and without consistency and confidence you cannot build your position size to achieve what you are looking for!
But give it a try! If you start with a free demo account without using your own funds then you have nothing to lose! Experiment and practice what you learn as you go and hopefully you will actually end up in the upper 10-30% 
Some do, but not many…
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If there were 90% of losers I would find hundreds of profitable and long trackrecords.
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25k registered users, 10% would mean a huge army of profitable traders… 
The reality is that 99.9% are losers.
Stay on demo for one year, if you end the year in profit you can go live with 0.01.
If you profit another year you can start to think to be winner, one in a thousand makes it.
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I don’t think it is as generalised as that.
The ESMA regulated brokers all have to state on their websites the percentage of losing traders and most state a similar figure to this example:
“Risk Warning: CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 73% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with________ . You should consider whether you understand how CFDs or our other products work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.”
However, I am sure that a big proportion of retail traders use offshore brokers in order to get the leverage they need and there are no statistics for the level of losers in those accounts, but I agree with you that it is most likely in the upper 90’s percentage.
And I am pretty sure from the huge turnaround of newbies coming to BP and only posting a few times, or even only once, that most of them give up while on demo stage or after losing their capital. And therefore, as you say, I doubt anywhere near 10-20% of BP Newbies make it to consistency. But, of course, there is no evidence to show one way or the other- except maybe that I have only ever seen a few people returning to BP to say how they have succeeded in their trading ambitions. Just by following some of the journals here one can soon see the difficulties and errors that occur along the way.
But the retail trader clients with the highly regulated brokers, who have no problem with the limited leverage, are not all BP-type Newbies. Many are already trained and experienced in various ways and from various sources and have the psychological character and understanding of risk/money management.
Forex is rather unique in that there are absolutely no entry qualifications or selection processes. Any one can start and with minimal capital. And since there is no recognised schooling process, it is not surprising that the breed “retail traders” includes a whole bunch of people who shouldn’t be trading at all for a wide variety of reasons. But they are sucked in on the back of wild promises and a belief that you just buy and sell and make buckets of money. It is an insult to the professionalism of those that know what they are doing and inevitably leads to huge number of casualties, both financially and psychologically.
End of soapbox speech!
I am sure there are others that will argue differently, but that is fine, that is the world of forex!
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Exact but lookback is only one year.
You have to introduce survival in the equation.
If your definition of winner trader is someone with one year trackrecord… 
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I don’t really have a definition of a winner trader, there is no way of telling if they are all new “winners” or mainly the same old traders consistent year after year. I would expect mostly the latter because most consistent traders don’t seem to change their broker(s) without good reason. The other 70-80% being the revolving door crowd that never seems to exhaust itself.
Either way, whatever the actual figures are, they are way too high. And any Newbie should be totally aware of what their chances are (or rather are not) and what it is going to take to survive.
If 10% of those with a live account were winners it would be supereasy.
Just doing the school of pipsology and maybe reading a couple of books.
Generally in every field when you have a working formula or winning idea you are proud of it, you share it to raise capital and scale up the business.
That 10% includes those that make 3000 pips in a quarter, lose 2500 in the next one and give up despite the positive result, also the ones that go up to +2000 than down to -2000 and end the year at +50.
The hard reality is that being a profitable trader is as diffcult as being an astronaut.
I was monitoring also the world of professional hedge funds, the majority of trackrecords desappeared, and we know why.
(page 5 point 4)
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Hi and welcome