Yeah I have to share the same story with different amounts. Hope this year will bring some luck
I donāt think thereās a magic number for starting out that works for everyone. You should start with enough that it is a little painful if you lose it, but not so much that you freak out. However, you should absolutely begin with a demo account that is the same size you plan to start trading live until you are consistently profitable and comfortable trading in that range.
My first account was $250 and I had been trading a $10,000 demo account. I blew out that account in a couple of weeks in 2004-2005 with 200/1 margin trading XAUUSD. My second account was $500 and I made a little ($75) in a couple of days before having to stop for a while. My situation has changed since then due to outside factors and a few months ago I began trading a demo account with $100 and funded my live account with $100 this past week after a couple of months of winning trades in the demo account.
Money management is always paramount, however, it is much more intense with a small account. You can generally only afford one trade at a time even with a single microlot and it is VERY tough to make up a 20-25% loss if you are not careful from the very beginning! However, it is a great way to start learning with real money. As a noob you should only be trading one currency anyway to start out and if youāre subject to FIFO rules then one trade is all you should be running in that currency anyway as a beginner.
GOOD LUCK and HAPPY TRADING!!!
Thanks, Zaghloul, I will have a look at that broker, but I am sure they are good otherwise you would not be with them 
tell, me, please, how much you spread widen during the news with that broker? thanks
P>S
I know it depends on the type of news, but aprox.
Congrats dude ! That is very impressive
The first broker i got onto i got to by clicking an ad, it all looked very nice and attractive but the minimum deposit was ā¬250 so that was my first deposit, swaps and rollovers every night, never had a rollover in my favour every open trade cost me about 8 pips worth per night ā¦ i burned that out and quit that broker.
Then i went looking myself and found one who had nano, micro, standard, lite, heavy, rollover and swapfree accounts you can deposit from $1 so that was my second depoā¦and the learning process was less stressy
I burned out one more account since (last year) but totally recovered that money, and i even sometimes feel as if i know what im doing, that broker got bought over by another one and they merged it but the policies remain the same, which is just fine by me since i like the way it works out for me
hi
i started w 150$ and rise it to 290$ then during the last NFP news my account is blown up so i decided to go back to demo for while
Oh sorry to hear that.How much time did you spent in a demo account before you had traded live?Maybe it is a good idea on your part to get back at demo before trying it again.
Donāt have open positions when there is such an important release.
ya i understand that very late
any way im going back to demo and will wait till next NFP if i survived then ill go live again
Trading before NFP and holding it during news time and trading within 15 minutes after news time is purely gambling in nature. It is sad to hear many times that my account is blown during NFP.
If you started with $150 then you donāt have enough drawdown. You need to have enough capital to handle at least 20 loosing trades as a benchmark. Example if I have $150 I can only trade $0.10 a pip this allows for 1500 pips to play with. The EUR/USD the most liquid pair moves an average 130-190 pips on busy days in one direction. Thatās your entire account right there. Secondly what happened to money management? You shouldnāt be risking more than 10% of your account on every trade and thats with 3 to 1 return ratio at the very least 2 to 1 on the trade.
I first started trading with credit I got from attending my preferred brokers seminar and which was Ā£100 after 5 trades it was Ā£120 on micro account $0.10 a pip and that was just down to money management. That was 2 years ago now I have finally upgraded to a mini account with over Ā£1000 to trade at $1 a pip I might open 2 lots on a trade if I was 90% sure on direction. I also never trade charts under the daily charts, in my opinion it is great for broker but nuts for your and your pocket.
I havenāt opened a live account yet because I realize that I donāt understand how to trade yet. I did the entire Pip School, but my head could not absorb it all the first time. Iāve dabbled a bit with demos, but only did so-so. I decided to take break for a few months, which was good.
I just began studying again and am concentrating on Price Action. I understand how to place support & resistance lines, but I need to go over reading candlesticks again.
For those of you who had learned to trade successfully, what type of trading style did you discover works for you?
Also, I fully appreciate the importance of āmoney managementā. So, that another chapter I need to rereadā¦
I plan to open an account with $1000-$2000, which seems like enough to have a comfortable cushion for drawdowns and a few bad trades. I wish the FXCM demo didnāt start with $50,000 because thatās not a realistic amount for most people to learn with. Even if I was rich I wouldnāt open my first account with $50,000 because beginners all make mistakes while learning. They (FXCM) should let us choose our starting amounts.
Iām planning to begin with $1000-$2000 which seems like a decent amount.
thanks for advice ameraldo
what happened the i was in loosing situation the day before NFP so i decided to continue i thought it could turn back (which was my biggest mistake ) so i had a open position during the NFp and also i saw some speculation about $ strength at that time so i was convinced that USD will be strong and report will come out better than forecast but unfortunately it was a shocking 74 k and buy that time it was too late to do anything
anyway it was a experience for me and hope to be lesson for all of us that before NFP we should close all the positions no matter its winning or losing
@GlennR
you can create new demo accounts within metatrader and choose the currency and amount you want to start with.
if fxcm doesnt support that then just load mt4 from another broker (no need for registration or even using your real name etc.)
Hi Glenn,
Youāre right to start with an amount youāre comfortable with. As Jonnycash mentioned, you can use the FXCM MT4 platform to register a demo with your preferred starting balance. Just go to File > Open an Account and then complete the demo registration form from within the platform. If you donāt have our MT4 platform downloaded on your computer yet, hereās a link.
Note that the MT4 login you receive will also work on our Trading Station platform, if thatās what you prefer.
Jason
Aye, i think fledglings (like me, barely) need to start out with nano or micro accounts and real money, if only $10, so its at least real money, not a demo account, on a nano $ 10 looks like $10.000 anyway, its a minor difference but you do not have the pressure of losing it all that forces you into hasty decisions on a demo since it doesnt matter at all, you make two lucky trades and you feel like the king however.
Demo accounts are evil, nano accounts are not
Even if it sounds like gutterspeak from the ghetto, which it is not since im more like a white icecube from the suburbs who never got into the rich and famous shyte cos this is not america :
You take the money you could just flush down the toilet without it making ANY difference to your life, that means like ANY, money you could just wipe your arse with and flush down the toilet without feeling sorry about , and not a cent more
and thats what you start with, compound interest can still be a beach however if you start with anything under three zeroes it might take you a while, im sure its all possible, but im also sure theres no 100% failsafe of not losing anything at all or burning out when careless, other than that, i try to find as much info as i can from people who work for hudge banks, global ****, yearly reports they post to their own employers, its available and the 1e100 knows a lot if you dig a little deeper you can come up with some pdf file, but they will only give you a pointer as to the trends the big guys predict for the year to come , and a pointer is all it is, the trend IS your friend im afraid thats the only thing i could make out as a constant so far
Some good points. Everyone should think risk reward ratio. I risk $10 to gain $30 if you loose 10 times and win 10 times you will be up. If you win only 5 times and loose 15 you will be even. Probability dictates in an efficient market (debatable) in the economics world you cannot loose that many times and not win at some point with the reverse. So you should really always be up despite even a majority loss hence institutional traders are always rich or else no one will want to be a trader. The last time I checked it is the most sort after profession. It is all to do with money management and system you stick to. Donāt buy in down trending market or donāt sell in an uptrending market. Donāt eat heads or tails confirm first a trend is underway before placing your trades and always have a stoploss in place and cover profits as you make them.
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Thatās good to know about that youāre able to begin with any amount that you choose with MT4.
Btw, after posting the complaint about only starting with $50k I remembered that I had opened 3 different FXCM demo accounts (for testing different things). One of the accounts opened with only $5,000 ,but I donāt know how or why. The login # begins with D166ā¦ and the other two begin with D171ā¦ if that means anything.
probability tells you only what happened in the past, lets keep a clear head and remember the broker is not there to help you, hes there to make money off of yours, which doesnt mean he can just take yours unless its some obscure system where they ābet the opposite tradeā against what you place, gods know whatever i have read here so far people do.
Your stop out loss level needs to be adaptive, more or less to the timeframe, but equally to the time zone you trade in depending on wether you do daytrades or week or months , or hourly its all different, if you were to trade the dollar versus the yen you would notice your stop levels can be smaller during tokyo/aussie only hours since volatility is a lot less and spikes rarely occur compared to trading during rush hour , which would be like london/new york and especially the crossover of those two. You get spikes that are a lot bigger during those hours than you do during tokyo-daytime (im speaking only for the pair i followed the most but im sure that somehow applies to all of them)
theres too many factors to take into account to be absolutely sure. I myself prefer to put in most during off-hours, while others like high volatility just because it gives high spikes. Who all has never had a trade on a major news event like a bernanke (or future yellen) speech to see your trade go right the way you would
AFTER
it spiked out your stop loss the other way for just a minute?
its very complex and it needs constant adaptation, i dont think the best of supercomputers programmed by googles best combined with the top black hats and the worlds financial geniuses could come up with an absolute system that works on any situation, theres just too much to compute.
I can see how all of it is possible but i think iron will is one of the most important things to have, chart-statistics tell you what happened in the past, but they means of calculation only take the data over time as a whole, they do NOT take into account the actual political/economic/social situation in the world, hence they lack variables (which cant be computed at the being anyway), theyre pointers, general pointers that might guide you but i feel you need to understand per pair and i strongly feel mathematical probability as such is not the way to go when used by itself on this. Im not too good with names, i read a few great posts i think by goldenmember ? or goldenbear ? and maybe a guy name master tang ? or was it another one sorry for the confusion on probability.
probability shows you what happened in the past. The accuracy depends on the number of variables taken into account. In this case you can not just take a chart from 1950 to 2014 and extrapolate data and take it as a prediction. For instance, on my favourite pair, data from 1950 shows a post war japan. data from 2014 does not . data from 1995 shows a first US government shutdown, data from 2013 does as well. Data from 2008 has the infamous crash-cause while data from 2005 has not. Meanwhile in the usd/jpy theres the rise of china that happened as well as āemerging marketsā which werent there before.
All of these things are [B]not[/B] included in pure chart statistics so maybe i am quite elaborate in saying you cant have one without the other, the euhm ā¦ fundamentals or whats it called? im not very good at dictionary
im probably blabbering too much again without sticking to the numbers but you can blame that on my lack of formal education or whatever. Its probably a bit of an extreme example and i know retail forex wasnt available to john average like me in 1950 but its still the point i want to make, the situation is never included in chart statistics. Chart statistics take [B]all[/B] numerical date (no 1950 might not be there for forex) and they devise chances on that. Purely mathematical but i dont think retail forex dictates currency levels its too small for that. Retail forex wins on what happens, it does not create price levels. Similar patterns should be linked to similar situations. E.G. the us gov shuts down -> the dollar dips, thats high probability, not just o, it went up 1500 points it will retrace back to the 61 fibo now, just because.
did this make any sense ā¦ i know i dont make a lot of sense a lot of the time for some reason
seriously, glenn, get registered with a broker that has nano-lots and depo like ten dollars or 50, it looks like the same but you get the feeling youre handling actual money, in forex, the trend is your best friend and it should be the premise for any āsystemā you try to devise, short term trades based on wave theory or even fibo (which sometimes seems like the numbers of divinity since theyre so much more than only this) going against the trend might still cut you down a lot more than you want to afford (im sorry for sounding like a pro since im not). If youāre gonna waste $1000 on your first live account, try $10 on your first nano, it will look like 10k, and scrap the demoās , demos are marketing by brokers, who also need to make money since if they didnt none of us could