Hi there all, just thought I’d share with you the worst financial week I’ve ever had!
I’ve been demo-ing for about 4 months now, been pretty consistent and so I thought it was time to go live. I started with an account with £3000 with FXCM.
By the end of week 1, my account was now £4500! £1500 profit in 1 week! I was over the moon and all weekend I was planning what I would do with an extra £1500 per week!
Monday morning of week 2, I got spanked! I lost £1888! It’s now Friday of week 2 and my account of £4500 is now a paltry £700…I feel like topping myself! I did exactly what I did on week 1 though, really don’t know what happened.
Has anyone here been burnt worse than this? What do I do? My only thought is to re-do the babypips school and demo again for a few months…
This smells like a classic case of boosted ego, greed and poor or non existent money management. You should look to address all three before you go live again.
What risk are you using per trade? Even with 2% risk per trade, which is quite risky, that means you lost 120 trades that week. I suspect you were playing with no SL and huge leverage. Tell us how many trades you made on demo, and the win/loss ratio with that, and the leverage and money earnt over 4 months.
I think there is a name for it ‘King Kong Syndrome’ rings a bell! You start making large profits and “This Forex thing is easy”… You start to think no matter what you do, you will come up smelling of roses, then the complete opposite!
You start loosing money and with no money management, a bad trade gets worse!
You are lucky that it was only a demo account and it wasn’t your hard earned money! But nevertheless you should exercise your trading strategy regardless of who’s money you are trading!
Back to basics, work out a workable trading system. get your risk management in order. be content with smaller profits. the big money will come ones your balance grows.
If you have a week where you make 25% or more, then you know you are doing something wrong. Trading to make money takes patience and is actually pretty boring when done right. If you want excitement and/or significant gains in a short period of time, go to a casino. However, if you can accept that trading well is boring then you will dramatically increase your chances of success and may actually make it as the few who prosper.
yep money managment is key,
also, demo and live trading is compleatly different because there is no fear in loosing paper money,
my advise is start again with a micro acount and use money managment,
only risk maximum 2% of your acount at any one trade,
What killed you is not necessarily leverage. What killed you is Greed. Most traders don’t know how to use leverage properly, it’s a common problem to newbies.
This my first day back after an extremely long sabbatical (sabbatical from these forums anyway) and I almost fell into the trap of replying to this thread myself.
Sadly though: what’s posted here is every bit as relevant today as it was years ago!!! I’ve been at this off and on for at least the past ten years (probably a little more) and I can tell you that every now and then I manage to mess myself up for EXACTLY the same reason. It happened last year BIG TIME!!! AGAIN!!! Had MONTHS, if not over a year, of uninterrupted profitable trading. And simply because of that: got ahead of myself and got into a single trade that finished me off again effectively wiping out months and months of profits and hard work and late nights!!! Today is my first day back as noted!!! LOL!!!
It happens to the best and we end up fighting the market, trying to force our opinion on it for whatever reason, either to win back, or more often to reach b/e or even because we know we are right and add to the loser.
Sometimes too we miss the detail - UK BBC Business headline this morning: Shares hit by Trump tariff threat to China
Sure enough the S&P gapped down - but the detail - it was the Asian market reacting to Pres Trump tweet re China, truth was he was likely ratcheting the pressure as all good deal makers do.
Here was the detail: White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox News that the president’s tweet was a warning.
