How many profitable months

Trading Discussion
1

Good day traders! I was wondering for those who are profitable, how many profitable months demo trading did you complete before going live with real money?

2

hi, you should check, how predictable is your strategy

3

I have a 40% win rate so far

4

did you compare back test with live results, which trade during the same time?

5

I do only forward testing for the past several months. My only month in loss was December. It was pointed out that December is a bad month because market is more unpredictable than others.

6

you can also compare demo trading to back test, if it matches, it is ok, if not, build new strategy

7

I didn’t try backtesting my current strategy as I wasn’t able to find historical prices for the instruments I wanted. So I just ended up doing forward tests which seem to be working ok.

8

ok, it is your decision

9

Thing is where do you draw the line for going live?

10

I drew the line when I compared the value of my time with the value of the potential losses by trading live instead of trying to be perfect on paper. I mostly won at Monopoly when I played with family, but we never put any money on that. As a student, I used to play contract bridge - in London sometimes at the Chelsea bridge club, famous in the 1970s because Omar Sharrif used to play there. When I first started out I didn’t do much paper trade - maybe 10 or 20 trades, shortly after which I started trading with risk at about £20 per trade, then £50 per trade. It took me nine months to positively identify that my success ratio was losing a similar amount of money for three x three month periods on a row. That was the first time I quit trading, only to come back 5 years later with a more complicated plan, lost not as much, then came back another 5 years later around 2019. I have been trading since. I do not track profitable months. They do not mean anything to me.

11

for new traders it is helpful to know when one is ‘ready’?

12

Yes, but to wait until you have spent $100 on coffees learning, and then wonder if you should open a portfolio with $10 on Oanda, it is a pretty pointless pursuit.

13

ah yes in this situation.