I am on a kind of “coming clean” streak as of late, so I thought I would try and come clean here.
I just started trading live forex at the end of December 2015. I started my account with $100. I absolutely screwed up pretty big and while trying to manage a bad trade I shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place (or really I should have greatly lowered my expectations for a point of taking profit), **** went down, I don’t feel I really had much of an idea of how to manage the loss, I tried hedging, and made a lot of mistakes, anyhow, I lost like close to $70. I had a couple of wins before that, but my account dropped to $25.
Since that time, I realized I shouldn’t have been trading with as much volume as I was trading with. I was trading way too much volume and also I think my expectations for the profit targets I were going for (30 to 50+ pips) was a bit too high for me at least. I lowered my expectations and just tried to get around 10 pips at a time. I figured this is probably easier to get and I can slowly get profit like this and learn some self-discipline.
Anyhow to fast forward, it has been 1 week since the $70 loss. Today I brought my account up to around $38 and then I didn’t have the greatest read on the market, and I had already closed about 10 pips for the day, but I wanted more. I then got into a trade, it would have been decent if I had just taken 10 pips and left but I thought, you know, I got to make that money, lets make that money, so I set my target profit to around 15 pips, and the ****er went to like 14 pips and then left me for the day. Then, I had the audacity to say, you know what, I am so “confident” this **** is going through, lets double down lol.
Long story short, my second double down never went into profit, and I closed both positions for a total loss of a little bit more than $6. So, I am now around $32 in equity.
It would’ve been better if you had just traded on a demo account without using (and losing) real money. There’s no need to invest real money right away.
This is probably the biggest reason for people losing money… I’m only using the demo account but I set a limit of +5 pips per trade. I simply don’t care how much I think the price will rise or drop, but it will almost certainly rise or drop by 5 pips sooner or later.
So far I’m successful at obtaining 5 pips profit around 70% of the time. I actually use a crazy high stop loss as well because throughout the day the price can go up and down 10’s of pips but it will usually come back down at some point, either the next few hours or the next day
Yes… naturally you get sucked into the “oh but I can get more” way of thinking and sometimes that might be true and others it might not, so why risk it?
You have made a solid £50 in a few minutes, just take it and be happy. Wait an hour and make another trade.
That’s a dangerous mindset and only setting people up for further failure. Busting an account is not a rite of passage that leads to success. No. It’s an indication that someone hasn’t done their due diligence and unnecessarily threw money away.
Nothing about losing seed money is indicative of future success. It’s just another blown account in a vast sea of blown accounts.
Maybe let’s not rejoice, congratulate, and reward losing. Being positive doesn’t have to include pandering. Although losing an account is a type of “normal” we shouldn’t just accept it as such, and again it’s certainly not an indication of future success. Most who can’t trade will remain unable to trade - that’s just how it is. Success is tough.
You felt alive for $70, that is cheaper than jumping out of an airplane… 