I�m just curious to see how long it took some of you traders to start experiencing success.
Thanks in advance.
10 years and i still havent made any money. this is because i, unfortunately, became part of the 90% that gets emotional and greedy. in a way i became a gambler in the market, and as always, the house wins.
i know alot about trading with different timeframes, indicators, and how get in and out of trades on my platform but one thing i never bothered to learn was the most basics. like, leverages, margins, money managment, calculating pip costs. so in a way i was making and loosing money that i didnt know where it was coming from or going. and i was also spending big money oj charts when i could easily get for free.also, i wasted money buying books and going to seminars which teaches you nothing you couldnt have learned for free but these books and seminars costs thousands that i could have saved if i only bothered to look on the net for all the info.
there was a time where i had a standard account (when i first started trading forex). the guys that were giving me my crash course opened it for me with 2000 bucks. i know now this was suicide but back then i trusted the people that were suppose to be the “experts”. lol. i was nieve to think that i would learn everything i needed to know about trading in a 2h course that costed me about 2000 dollars. but im not the only one that made this error in judgement. there is a big market out there for selling people the most basic lessons in stock trading, currency trading and investing in realistate. there are so many greedy people who think they are gonna get rich after making a $2000 investment in their education that only amounts to 2-4hours of lessons.it has taken me 10 years to figure out what i was doing wrong and start all over from the basics. now most people dont end up like me. i consider myself lucky. most unsuccessful traders just loose all their money and give up.
one of the best lessons i have learned over the years was that its better to learn from the mistakes of others and learn from those who know what they are doing. anyways, im still young. im only 21 years old and i already have 10 years of experience behind me and a life time to work out the kinks.
dont worry about how long it takes others to be successful ,cause the truth is ,you wont like the answer much. you can read everything in the babypip lessons in 1 sitting and still not have a clue as to what you are doing until you learn through your own experiences and the experiences of others. honestly, i could have learned everything that baby pip has tought me 10 years ago but i doubt i would have ended up any different today. this is because you have to learn through experience. most traders learn the same things but in the end we all make different trading decisions that fit out personalities. devising a customized trading plan is not easy. ive been tweakin mine for years. you really learn through experience. either you learn it the hard way (like me) or you learn it through the people who get it wrong and right.
no one here is getting rich over night. most of the people who do trading for a living can tell you that its taken them years and years to get where they are now. you probably wont be quiting your day job anytime soon. there is another thread where someone was talking about being happy with making only a 2% return every month. if you ever check out fxcm mini account contests you will see people making 200%+ and this kind of thing can really mess newbies up. they dont realize that this 200% is just lucky pickings or a good winning streak.
im trading a demo right now and ive been doing so for about 1 year. im doing pretty good with it . i would consider myself as being on the road to being a successful trader. im ready to place another 2000 dollars… in a MICRO account.
if you are seriouse about trading then you will be here a while. you dont start to becoming a successful trader when you start making money. you start to become successful when you know how to make money and keep it. that takes years of hard work to be able to determine weither you are successful or just been lucky.
sorry for the long post. and good luck to you.
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Honeb,
Thank you for sharing. You’re experience is something I’m sure alot of traders have experienced. What I’m most impressed about is the fact that you continue to educate yourself, even with all the hardships you’ve been through. That is something that is very difficult to do, and is the reason why most traders don’t make it. Your willingness to correct your mistakes is what will make you a winning trader. I sincerely wish you the best in your trading career!
-BP
Anyone can actually be successful very early on. The problem is staying successful. Often times, beginner traders have a hard time adjusting to the market environment because the FX can change so quickly. It�s learning how to adapt your techniques to what the market is doing that will help you become successful. Remember trading is an art, not a science
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Hi y’all, I am a paper-trading newbie and would just like to say what a great site this is. I have spent a lot of time learning about FX and have been in no rush because it looks all too easy on paper and I have been searching for the catch.
To offer my answer to the original question, I don’t think any answer would be of any real value to “sleepycat” because all traders are totally different to each other and sleepycat’s personality and approach will determine how successful he/she will be and how soon.
“Honebe”'s response is very interesting but dare I suggest that the start of the 10 years of experience quoted have to be taken in the context of the personality and psychological makeup of an 11 years old boy who is just entering adolescence and all that that does to us? Hardly the stuff that successful traders are made of. Nothing personal intended here, just being realistic.
I was also interested in his comments about the worth of the schooling offered on this site. I have spent months reading, learning and paper-trading and I will say without hesitation that this site offers the very best basic training that I have encountered so far.
The most important thing I have learned here is that leverage is a killer and although it is something I had to work to understand I am amazed that it is overlooked by most if not all the other training courses. This is very real overhead or charge and is never talked about by the brokers. I am so glad to have learned about it right here. This is the very catch that I have been searching for so my thanks go to BabyPips.
Going back to the original question: Sleepycat, I can only humbly suggest that to win at any game, we have to thoroughly know the rules of that game first. I have decided to take that route but am quietly confident that by the time I am ready to start, I will start making money straight away - because I will have prepared myself properly and taken as much time as it takes to do so.
Roll on! 
ummm im not a boy (hense the name HonEB (Honey bee)).lol. anyways, its always been said that girls mature faster.lol. you would be surprised what kids could do if you gave them a chance. my aunt was the one who got into the forex market so i rarely entered a trade without her say so but i had my own account. we were both trading and in a way (at ll years old) i did much better then she did. we both lost miserably but her account went empty in 1 year while i still have some money left today. lol. my aunt is very smart woman(doctor) but she is just too smart for the forex. at 11 i was the one devising systems for us both (my aunt couldnt come up with anything good) to trade by and they worked beautifully. even today, the trading systems i came up with (i thought i invented them at that time) are actually systems many professional investors used and still use today, and i came up with them on my own. i know i was on the right road but i just didnt get the right startout point cause i wasnt disciplined enough to follow money management statagies and i allowed my emotions to get me in and out of trades that i probably would not have messed with if i were demo trading. you where right that at 11 i was too young to truely get everything together so im not too hard on myself for failing but again, i had early and valuable experience at that time and most adult traders starting out dont get for another 10 years. some of the smartest innovators start out very young so it would have been interesting if, back then, i was able to some how get everything together and do it right the first time. i know that it was within my power and knowlege range to do so. you dont need to be ingeniouse to make it in the forex biz. there was research done showing that monkeys out did some of the major indicies(maybe the study behind this is a bit flawed but from the last time i heard they did the study twice). the problem with most unsuccessful traders is that they think they know it all when they dont.they dont like to be wrong(cause they are too smart to be wrong) so they leave loosing trades longer then they should and then when they get winning ones they get greedy and think they are so smart that they throw money management out the window to trade larger lots (to make more money). it sounds stupid when someone else talks about it but some of the smartest people fall for this. my aunt did very earily on in her trading career and i did later on when i was over confident that i could trade demo accounts. when i had my first demo account i didnt have a clue as to what i was doing. i was just fooling around and i made more money doing that then i did when i started using charts and indicators. lol. kids today have more knowlege of computers then their parents and most of them just learn by fooling around. so im sure if we did a study, kids would beat their parents in trading.
give your kid a real account. the worst that could happen they get a margin call. you probably wasted more money on cloths they never wear. but who knows. they just may be able to make enough money to pay for their own college tuition.
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All your stories are certainly inspiring and scary at the same time for someone like me! I am very new with this and still feel like I better keep reading and studying and finding out before I get myself into too much trouble! But Just wanted to thank you all for sharing your experiences. It is great to find this inspiration every once in a while!
OOps! No offence intended Honeb, it’s just that honey bees are of both gender. But now we’ve established that you are more honey than bee, right?
I take your point about 11 year olds not being dumb. I used to be one myself. I also know that females are smarter than males in many ways and not just as kids. But you seem to agree with my point that at that tender age, you were not emotionally ready for trading? However, you have made some interesting points and I am learning from you now.
In closing, don’t knock the monkeys and their stock-picking successes. I was one of them and I bet we could do it again!:rolleyes:
Good luck to you.
lol, no offense taken. yeah im bit more on the sweet size. i definately agree with you that i wa too young and undisiplined enough to exect to do as well as i probably could do now.
lol, monkeys picking stocks.who would have thought it was possible let alone out doing the big guys. he he he. if they can do it then anyone can. so dont worry so much berlinlife06. you are obviously on the right track, just by being here. give demo trading a fair bit of time and start with micro accounts then work your way up. if you really want to be a trader you will definately find a way. so go for it!!!
Every minute of every day I experience success with forex. I guess it really depends on your definition of success. I do not measure success in how many pips I make nor do I measure it on what my capital curve look likes. All those things are nice, but if you measure success that way I think you are not getting the big picture. So I measure my success by looking at how far I have progressed. I admit I have a lot to learn, but I know so much more now compared to what I knew a few months ago. As long as I keep moving forward, even with the occasionally step backwards, I consider myself to be successful. We all want to get places and achieve things, but what really matters is how we get there!
I have more than one year of experience trading live in forex and as most people, I have gain and lost money. I begin with a profitable strategy based on stochastic that turns my $ 1.000 account in $ 1.600 and then, market condition changed and I begin to loose. Then, I went to a chat with a “forex guru” that placed live trades and it was a real disaster coz I lost all my money trading based on his advice. Of course, its never his fault. Is allways your fault coz you dont use proper money management, coz this and that, bla,bla,bla. Lesson learned.
Then, I beguin to educate myself and learn in any possible way: forums, lessons, etc. (babypips is one of main contributions to my education: Tks. a lot !!!) until after a lot of efforts I was able to create my own profitable system, and I have recovered almost all my loosed money with it. The most difficult part is to follow my own rules, thats why I am paying a good programmer to develop an Ea to automate the trade.
You cant measure your success in therms of TIME to archive it, but in terms EFFORT to solve your trading problems, most of them created by yourself. There are a lot of good indicators/systems, but the main attention have to be focused always in the most important part of the trade: YOU.
I think it is very difficult, if not impossible, to pin an exact time on success. Everyone has different learning curves and experiences. Everyone will experience their “A-Ha” moment at different points. I have known and read of people who sometimes took 5 years to really get it.
At the very least you can assure yourself that you have not failed until you quit. So, don’t quit and you will eventually succeed
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My personal experience extends back to 2.5 years with FOREX and has still not led me to consistent profits yet. Right now, i am back to demo trading and testing.
I was essentially attracted to FOREX through a local seminar that made trading seem so easy. It was really pushing a certain methodology and nothing else. No money management, no psychology, nothing. After that seminar i was convinced i was going to get into this thing. They tried to push their course naturally for 3000.00, but some voice in my head told me to not do that and just start learning on my own.
I got lazy with the learning and figured there must be gurus out there who would sell signals or advice. I did some research on that and guess what?!?! I discovered signal providers. I thought i was set. I wouldn’t have to think, just follow the signals and i was set for success. Yeah right!
Besides a knowledge of how to execute orders on my trading platform, i knew nothing of what it took to succeed. So, i started with my first signal provider and was completely enthralled with all their backtesting results. Were they legitimate? I found every excuse in the book to convince myself theye were. Were their posted results simply fabricated? I refused to believe that.
So, i started to trade and hit a losing streak. I couldn’t beleive it. They posted 60% winners so how could i be experiencing 6 losses in a row? Not to mention that fact that i was risking almost 7% per trade, not realizing i was doing so. My risk was increasing on each successive trade because i was not modifying my position sizes. I really had no clue of money management. I went through this process for about 3 months jumping back and forth between 2 providers every time i hit a drawdown. I even began to cherry pick signals. Eventually i lost half my account before i realized I had to be doing something wrong.
So, the adventure started to really learn this on my own. I signed up for a 1-on-1 program that really did not end up being 1-on-1 at all. It still taught me alot of crucial information though, but it did not help me to become profitable really because i did not have the discipline to follow rules. The program didn’t teach that, LOL.
Then i moved on to mechanical systems. I was on the right track because i was trying to conciously control my emotions by using clear cut signals. I tested this system till i was blue in the face and after 100 back tested trades, i was pleased with the final result. Or was I? During my testing of this trend following method, the system experienced what i believed to be a tolerable max drawdown given the type of methodology. 25% max drawdown using 1% risk per trade. It also had 35% winners and avg win 3x higher than losers. Great! I decided to trade it. When trading live, the story changed. I experienced those several losses along with the drawdown but i suddenly discovered what true stress was. I could not stomach that many losses. I abandoned the system! I was so frustrated that i almost quit all together.
I took a short break to clear my mind and decided to start reading stuff on trading psychology. I learned about a proper mind-set and how the distribution wins to losses in completely random but over a proper sample size an edge can manifest itself. I also learned that your ability to follow a given system is highly dependent on your personality. It dawned on me that maybe long-term trend following was not for me. I was not THAT patient.
Maybe a system with 50-60% winners with slightly higher avg wins than loss values. So i tried day trading off of 15-minute charts. This, again, was a very specific methodology with set rules and money management. I tested it thouroughly for almost 200 trades and was pleased with the results. One problem though…i was working and could not really follow it. I loved the results so much though that i had to find a way. I could not automate it because there was a slight amount of discretion involved depending on the news out. So, i started to teach my wife how to trade it. She was home and willing and just as excited. So, we started.
I found that the stress of day trading was compleetly overwhelming for both me and my wife. Despite the rules, my wife would pull the trigger too quickly and then want to quickly re-enter after losing. She resisted because of my instruction, but it still created insane stress levels between us. Mistakes were made with timing and the market gapping through tight stops, etc etc…
The testing showed that statistically i should have never expected more than 6 or 7 losses in a row at worst. After experiencing 10 losses in a row, i started to question it. These 10 losses in a row were free of mistakes. Everything was executed perfectly accorindg to the rules, so what was up?!?!
I decided to go back and backtest another year’s worth of trades to try and prove to myself that it still worked (or didn;t). Well, that year proved dismal. It was profitable but only marginally and threw off all the statistics such that 10 losses in a row was to be expected from time to time. I abandoned it
This system could proabably be tweaked a little to make it better but the stress of day trading was just too much. I recall banging on the desk !
So what’s left? Sometime’s it’svery hard to figure out what method fits your personality until you trade it live. I’m at a point now where swing trading seems best for me. I plan trades in the evening and they are held for a few days to a week. I’ve since discovered babypips.com and they really drove home the point of not letting a winner turn into a loser with their scaling out methods and use of b/e stops, 2 things which i never considered.
I am demo trading again, despite all the discouragement i have experienced and i still do not consider myself as a failing trader. I have not quit yet!
My demo trading is going better than it ever has, and i think the money managament regime i follow now has a lot to do with it. My method is discretionary using support/resistance on longer time frames (i have found them to be more reliable), while looking for divergence and OB/OS conditions on lower time frames (4HR & 1HR) to time entries and exits. Nothing has ever treated me better thus far. It takes patience to wait for those set-ups, but when they come i am seeing that they are some of the most highly profitable set-ups. My avg win to loss has been about 1.3:1 (i find i can really do better on this when signals line up simultaneously across all time frames), but my accuracy has been great. I went as high as 73% in September. I trade only 5-8 times a month and i am fine with that. I’ve changed my expectations of trading. Before i was rushing it because i wanted to do it full-time. Now, i have stopped focusing on that and instead focus on the right process of waiting for the best set-ups on a time frame that does not stress me out.
I trade much less now, but i am also less stressed and i think i will have effectively filtered out many many losing trades by trading too much.
I am really sorry to have rambled but this whole thing has taken 2.5 years to discover. I’m sure it will happen to many more people much worse than i, but the point is not ot quit. I consider my persistence a success in its own right and i most definitely have not failed until i quit…which i will not do
Thanks for listening to my story
pipbull
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great stories Pipbull and piplover. they definately read very simular to mine. im glad both of you are still in the game and hopefully we all get it right this time around. good luck to you both.
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Hi @honeb,
It’s an interesting story about 11 years old kid started trading. I also have an ideal about teaching my kids to trade early. I learn a lot from your story. Thank you for sharing and good luck.
I’m not sure you are still in this forum or not but it’s happy to see your story around.