Hello,
I would like to start out by saying hi again. I haven’t been on this site in quite a while.
I joined on December 1st, 2018. I started learning about forex maybe 3 months before that. Amazing place; has taught me so much.
Now, its a year and a half from then and I wanted to kind of share how things are going, so anyone who might be just starting gets a freshly detailed showcase of what to expect. (Not to say it will happen for everyone but you know, whatever).
- How Much Money Do You Make?
Let’s start with the big questions. How much cold hard cash do I pull-in??
haha, none. Zero. Zilch. To be honest? I haven’t traded a single penny that was real.
This whole time has been just demo-trading. well…for the most part…
See, early on (about February of 2019) I decided on an extremely silly endeavor.
’
’
I was going to trade $500 and make 30% every month all the way to $25,000
.
.
…okay okay, don’t laugh at me. I was new alright? haha, this for some reason sounded logical in my head. Obviously it was ridiculous. Albeit maybe even impossible for someone at my skill level.
So what happened? Well funny enough, my first month I did make thirty percent. 35% actually.
And then slowly lost every penny in 3 months. On top of this, I ended up risking way too much to earn this 35%. Maybe not trade by trade but, day by day. Way too much risk.
Okay So Back To The Drawing Board Then…
.
…I had said. This clearly didn’t work. So, I decided to just keep studying. At this point I was only doing technicals because, well, fundamentals kinda scared me. But I decided to start to learn fundamentals seeing as they seemed to be quite important. 5 months later and boom. Fundamentals were under my belt. I had even created my own strategy for technical trades. And wow! The strategy actually worked!
…well, kinda. It averaged a whopping 1.3% each month over a backtested amount of 12 months.
Not amazing but hey, positive. I kept just trading. Practicing. Trying again and again with strategies and backtests. I used a free online backtester at first but then went over to forextester3 and 4. Along with tradingview.com
Awesome site.
Skip a another 8 or so months. I’m trading one day at 8 AM. (demo account). I see on forexlive.com (amazing fundamental news site to watch) something about a virus outbreak in China. I think…
Man, that’s definitely gonna cause a risk-off mood for the week.
.
It proceeded to cause a risk-off mood for 4 months.
So here I am. coming up to 2 years in the future and not a dollar profited to my name. And honestly? I feel good. I learned so much and feel much more skillful. For you all to know, I average a consistent 4.5% a month on my current accounts. That really started the beginning of 2020.
I can’t say for sure of course, but, I think I will be fully ready to start putting money on the line by the end of the summer.
- Do you use a lot of Indicators?
Ah the indicator question. Every aspiring trader has it. Even I went through the phase of having 1 million and one indicators plastered on my screen like a pasta. You remember when your tv would get messed up and it would turn into a black and white pixel mess? It basically looked like that.
I use some indicators of course. But not many, and not often. I use Fibonacci retracements and extension tools. I use moving averages: 200, 100, 50 usually. I use pivot points, and every now and then I use stochastic. These indicators are never on my screen for long. I usually toggle them on, look and see what I need to see and then toggle them off. They never stay on my screen for long at all.
- How many pips/dollars do you average a day?
A fair question. As we know (or should eventually), pips are relative. So that question is a bit irrelevant but to answer it; I average 15-20 pips a day. Again, kinda worthless of a metric but there you go.
Dollars? Well, I demo trade on a $50,000 account. I risk 1-2% and make $200-500 a day.
- What is your strategy
Although I recommend not using someone elses strategies full on, knowing them and seeing how they run isn’t bad IMO.
I trade risk currencies. I define these as the current pairs:
-
AUD/USD
-
USD/CAD
-
USD/JPY
-
NZD/USD
-
USD/CHF
These markets up? Generally risk on day. Down? Risk-off.
My bread and butter is a hedge strategy between AUD/USD and USD/CAD. I find a good trade opportunity and entry point via price action and enter in two trades in the same direction for both pairs.
USD/CAD is there to hedge the other, just in case im wrong with my expectations. Profit for AUD/USD is $1500. Loss is $1000. Profit for USD/CAD is $1200. Loss is $1000. And hence, I make $200-500 a day on average. Hell, sometimes I make $2700. Sometimes I lose $2000.
There you go. Check out hedge strategies online and get a feel for em. They can be nice.
- Did you ever blow an account?
HA! Oh did I? Constantly. I saw a general rule of thumb early on is a loss of 10% counts as a blown account. Since my demo was at $50K, there wasnt really any way to lose every penny unless I tried acting like this was all some casino game. And I fell under this threshold many times. Why you ask? Well none of it was because of bad trades or bad ideas. It wasnt because of a fault strategy or bad luck.
Every time it was caused by me getting either greedy or fearful. I either lost way to much trying to win back a small loss and lost a lot. Or tried getting a huge win and ended up on the wrong side. Sometimes it was revenge trading. Journalling (something I HEAVILY recommend you do) helped show me the negative repercussions of such action as my account took an obvious hit in a big way.
Dipping under even 5% is unheard of for me as I havent made those mistakes in a long time now.
Last but not least…Do you consider yourself a trader?
N…O.
Nope. I made a post a while ago on here giving my opinion on the whole “90% of traders fail” statistic. And my opinion hasnt changed. 90% of traders dont fail. Because a random stranger on the side of the road isnt a trader. Someone who opened a brokerage account once isnt a trader. A trader is a professional. Someone who is profitable already and is using real live money accounts. A trader is an individual that is consistent with their trades, day to day, month to month, year to year.
So no. Even after all this time, I still dont see myself as a trader. But one day, maybe even soon. I can finally reach the goal of becoming one.
Good luck to all you guys and I hope you all stay safe in there crappy times.
Happy Trading.
-Zhadow
P.S: Would love to answer any more questions if you have any 
