Since I won’t give up my real name, we’ll just call me Mr. P which can stand for pips or my surname initial, you can decide it for yourself. I should argue at this time that I’m not a native English speaker so, for those of you hopped up on grammar or semantics please “bare with me”.
I started my forex adventure in 2008, 8th of August 2008 to be more specific, back then I was 22 years old soon to be 23 and, like any young adult I didn’t know what to do with my life. I lacked any job skills employers wanted out of me, any experience, I was gullible, naive, pretty much like 90 or so percent of the population of young adults (which does not imply I changed a lot :)) ).
Nevertheless, I wanted money, financial stability, to be independent. After countless job interviews and a few jobs that I held throughout college I was really, really disappointed. It all changed for me when my father took me as his “partner” to a business transaction (real estate) and, basically gave me 180k Euros to start my life with. This was, I guess, his way of giving me this money to start my own thing.
The first thought I had was to change my money to US dollars. Since at the bank the spread was huge, I thought to myself that there has to be a way of changing the money back and forth with lower costs, I mean, is 2008 already, right ?! It took only one search and that was it, forex, brokers, exchanges, pips, I was hooked !
After a week or so of reading and reading and searching (that was 24/7 with me ) about the forex industry, pips, spreads etc, I opened a demo account with a broker. My first transaction, I lost 5-7 % of the account (I started with 100k demo). After a week or so, I was down 35-40 % of my account and I kept getting all this phone calls from alleged managers of my account, insisting that I deposit real money and not miss out on the opportunities. All this made me feel real cautious and insecure about the business of forex and just, abandoned the whole thing. I thought it was filled with deceiving people and its just a big online scam to be honest.
Changed my money at the bank and, back to square one, just thinking about what to do next.
End of November I met a friend, which I haven’t seen for a while, he was 5 years older than me, and got to talking about what we do. He told me that he was in forex, trading with a broker and his making a decent amount every month. After arguing back and forth about this for a couple of hours (I was against, he was pro trading) he points out that I really didn’t had much knowledge about this business and that I should do more research and then make up my mind, point at which he introduces me to this website.
I’m not trying to advertise on this website or so but the content of it, the school of pipsology, forum and everything on it really changed the way I was thinking about trading forex. I started to read it every day and still doing that.
As you can gather from my story I’m not a risk-taker so, after going through the school of pipsology, a month or so later I opened a demo account, I traded on demo account until 2015 so, almost 7 years because I did not manage to make constant profits.
In mid 2009 I bought some property which I was unable to lease because the economy tanked, and had a big cash flow problem. I worked in various places, it was not a good, happy time for me but I was trading and learning every day and this was very rewarding.
In 2013 I thought that I was missing something in this business and decided to join the University of Economic Studies (my previous major was in marketing) to gain an academic perspective on trading. I studied for 2 years and by October 2015 I managed to lease my property, dropped out of University and decided to move to New York and just see where life takes me. March 2016, I moved back to my country and opened my first live account on which I am currently trading.
Also, in 2016, a broker offer me a position at their dealing desk which I am currently holding.
I wanted to put this out there because I’ve read a lot of stories on this forum and lots of times I empathize with them, I’ve shared the same downfalls of not making pips or of asking myself if this really worth all the trouble or if I’m ever going to sustain my profits in the long run.
After almost 10 years of doing this I have some of the answers, others I might still discover but I must say I’m really happy with the choices I made and I guess, if you really want to do this, you will discover what you need to know in time, you just have to be able to put in the work and that’s really all you have to do.
I also want to give a big thank you to this community and the work that they’ve been doing, and I honestly believe that a significant reason of my “return to forex” is owed to you.
Honestly,
Mr. P
