Forex is a ZERO-SUM game, mate. You won’t make any money in this game. There will be good days, weeks even months then there will be a couple of bad days when you will lose all the money you earned (plus some of your capital) during those good months. This is the right game for you if are have lots of luck and if you can control yourself. If you don’t have these two don’t even think about playing the game with real money.
I am a very experienced trader. I am a bit successful now because I have learned to be patient and to control myself (or the demons living in me. Green and fear). I lost about 25k over the last 4 years. Now I am making some money…
NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE OR WHAT YOU KNOW, UNTIL YOU LEARN TO CONTROL YOURSELF DON’T JUMP INTO THIS BOG. YOU WILL ONLY BE SUFFERING…
Totally agree with Mr Benjamin, Demo trading is like playing paintball, shoot as much as you want and have fun. Real trading is more akin to having a gunfight, all your shots have consequences…
PipHacker is absolutely RIGHT!! 2 months of practice and thinking about trading currency Full time to me is, to be honest a little ambitious… I have been trading in my practice Demo account for almost a year now and will continue to do so. I do however have a live account with a relatively smaller trading capital. Im trading mostly in mini lots( 10k) and a few trades in standard lots( 100k) when the market conditions are in favor of my system towards a particular trade set up! …")
Buster, congrats on finding the gnats to do something… I have mentored a few younger than myself and I find the overwhelming draw back to their succeeding is “impatience” Once I convince them that the market dosent know or care and it will still be there tomorrow and the day after ,only then do they see the importance of patience … Good Fortune and go for it …Qed
They say “Practice makes Perfect”, But you will never be perfect in forex. The point I am trying to make here is that 2 months on a demo practice is small and 2 years is a lot. Look all of us are coaches of some sort and we have got our fingers burnt here and there. Therefore, the best way is to add 3 more months and keep studying from the school of pipsology. Just like you are finishing varsity and will need experience to perfect what you have studied, so study about forex and practice until you find who you are. About the returns, I believe you can make it big even surpass the normal expectations. I know a guy who starts early, around 4 in the morning and makes at least $2 250.00 in two hours and stops for the day. He is able to make at least about $11 000.00 per week. So yes it is doable and you can live on forex trading it you put your head around it and never be too excited or panic easily.
Money can be made in FX but to become successful you have to master money management and expectation much more that of when to pull the trigger on a trade.
In the beginning, I didn’t really place much emphasis on the importance of money management as I thought mastering the prediction of price movement was the first challenge. I took it for granted that the application of money management would be a fore gone conclusion as I have a degree in maths.
My ‘light bulb’ moment came for me when I realised that you cannot predict price movement. All you can do is to have faith and believe that when your criteria has been met for entry into a trade. The chances are that if you where to make the same trade 100 times expect 50 of them will fail. But understand that with the correct money management you can make money from this scenario.
I also started making money when I stopped being influenced by the opinions of others of when and when not to trade along with what and what not to trade. As a famous trader once said “A man must believe in himself and his judgement if he expects to make a living at this game.”
It’s well documented that you shouldn’t trade news or trade on a Friday or a Monday or scaling in/scaling out. Why? Again, many will talk about closing positions because of whipsaws and lack of volatility but some of my most successful days in a week have been a Friday or a Monday and some of my bigger trade successes have been on a news event. To find your own edge you need to free your mind of others opinions.
There are so many threads on here on trading systems that chase pips. I NEVER chase pips. I couldn’t even tell you how many pips I make in a week because it is completely irrelevant. Why? you may ask.
It’s very, very simple. I chase a percentage of my main account. I enter a trade and whether the SL be 10 pips or 70 pips, it makes no difference because it will still be the same %age of my account. I never trade more that 1% and this leads onto the next important thing. R:R (Risk Reward) is more important to me than the success of a trade. I never take a trade less than 1:1.
The last and most important aspect to become successful is to manage expectation. I am happy if I hit 10% return on my account at the end of a month. Or lets break it down. 2.5% a week !!! Doing the maths on this means that I only need 3 good trades a week at 1% of your main account and at an R:R of 1:1 to be making a healthy profit.
I am a really really new Forex trader, well I am still studying about and haven’t even started playing demo yet. After having heard from lots of traders saying that it is almost possible to trade full time unless you trade for at least few years, I still go for it and my goal is I will be able to trade and earn more than 20 percent per month in few months after a month demo. I know this is laughable, I just need to set my goal and dream this way so I can push myself into it more and more every single day. Good luck guys.
If you can get a regular 10% per month on your account and let your monthly profits compound in your account, without withdrawing from the account. It will be worth $100,000 in 24 months. For 12%, $150,000, 15% $285,000. Trouble is you need to live on something so will need to draw against your profits.
Hello, by the average trader, do you mean one who is only ready to make profits without investing his time in knowledge building and critical researches? Of course, that guys makes almost 90% loss. Why? His broker (especially regulated ones) get tohack his trade section, triggering his stop hunt, and even making the platform unresponsive to manual closing. Of course, that trader would never suspect after all, there license makes them as honest as the Pope. But the dedicated one can make 90% profit- even offshore!
It’s worth pointing out that the figure of 34.2% relates to the percentage of profitable traders during a 3 month period. Those same traders may not have been profitable in previous 3 month periods, and may not remain profitable in future periods.
If you replaced those traders by monkeys throwing darts at a board to make their trade selections, then you’d expect to see very similar figures.
Once you start trying to compile figures for profitability over a 6 month period those percentages reduce drastically, and if you extend the time period to around the two year period, you’ll find that the percentage who remained profitable is exceedingly small. At a significant number of brokers that figure will be zero.
The quarterly figures published by brokers are totally misleading, but are quite illuminating in many cases as they show clients from certain brokerages are performing worse than would be expected by random chance. Of course the marketing departments spin these figures as x% of our clients ARE profitable.
okay euhm, i am very sure its very tempting after having two months of good results, but my good man (or woman), if i were you id go for at least a part-time job to fall back on if you’re fresh out of college. If you have one or two years of consistent non loss on forex and its enough to live by, maybe then it might be worth to take a chance. But still i dont know what systems you have there. Here its possible to take some kind of leave, like a sabatical or whats it called, allowing you to come back after a year or so to the place where you worked. Think very carefully before you set real money on it.
Forex is NOT an exact science, contrary to what chartists might have you believe. Not even the greatest financial minds in the world combined can predict the exact position of a pair down to the digits in the next seven days, let alone a quarter or a month. Its definitely possible to make a profit but it is NOT possible to have a set target because YOU are following the market and its not the market thats following you. You go by opportunity to enter and you go by opportunity to exit. There is no way anyone could claim they have a consistent percentage every month for years in a row, its all averages and approximations.
Your initial capital is not a ‘set number from which you make the best profit’. Your initial capital is what you can spare to lose without it making even the slightest dent on your life because you HAVE to face the fact that its possible that it ALL goes down to the last cent if youre not careful.
Me, myself and i, i have eight months of trading (this year) and the first two were also fabulous (i am NOT saying this to distract or divert you, this is what i experienced this year). I got overconfident and during summer the dollar took a dive and i lost everything i put up (it wasnt much but i dont have much either so to me it was actually half a months income then)
I did not give up and started over, more cautious this time and unless something really bad happens in the last few weeks i should have about 14% (that includes all that was lost regained so if that didnt happen id have more)
One month i have 25% on an account, the other 2.5%, because i have to wait for what happens and i can not change what happens no matter how many candles i burn or demons i summon the wave goes as it goes.
If i were you, in [B]your[/B] position, fresh starting at life as we know it, jim, id really keep looking for at least a part time even if its f-cking boring, its a certain income to fall back on, and start with no more than a few hundred if you can spare that. The numbers remain the same, all you do after all is shift the decimal point so once you feel REALLY confident you could add a little more. Its compound but you cant know how much you will have by the end of year.
My 2.4567 cents, you can take them or leave them. After all hitting your face against the wall running hard into it without looking gives a broken nose to be remembered as a permanent lesson and that always sticks around better
safe travels in the world of finance if you choose to do so
You also have to take into account which 6 months as well. This thread started at the beginning of 2008 and as the charts show, the first half of 2008 is very different to the second half and the answers to the initial question will have changed as each quarter has passed.
I wonder how many newbies started learning FX during this last half of 2008 and then decided to go full time at the beginning of 2009 as they thought trading very easy post crash. Then at the beginning of 2009 they realised that life was not just about shorting the AU into extinction as now they had to take longs as well but where not sure what to look for.
Anyone considering a career in FX trading has to bear in mind that market cycles are just as important if not more important on the higher TF’s as they are on the lower time frames.
Someone mentioned earlier that they where going to start babypips school and then go for trades. BP’s school to FX trading is like a first aid course for a want to be heart surgeon. It’s a shame really as being successful is not about understanding when a ‘Head and Shoulders’ pattern has appeared or that the 5th Elliot wave has happened, very much far from it. Particularly in this generations trading environment.
I have been trading for about 12 months and had some periods of success and other times when everything seemed to head in the opposite direction to my position. Key for me is controlling greed and not worrying about pips that I missed by getting out too early. November has been fantastic so far turning £210 into £2250 but this is certainly not a realistic long term return.
I am accustomed to gaining a high percentage pcm, but 1000%+ in 30 days, that’s pretty F-ing fantastic if I do say so myself.
What is your average risk per trade ?
I stick to no more than 4% of capital per trade with between 100 and 200 leverage taking profit at 20% - 50% per trade. I am sure I will get criticised for it but I do not set SL on trades but prefer to closely monitor price movements during the day and be prepared to cut my loses if things clearly have turned. I have been opening and closing a large number of trades each day which has allow the big gain (it is actually over 3 weeks). I’m not under any illusion that this level of return is sustainable over a longer period. I trade European indices, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, AUD/USD and gold mainly.
I’ve found that telling myself not to panic if a trade turns red has been valuable.
