Is it still worth trading if you'll only ever have $200 to trade with?

What was the time frame for this, what pairs were you trading and do you have a general overview of what the strategy was that you employed? :slight_smile:

This was around 20 years ago. I didn’t have a job but I had my computer and a friend asked me to follow him to a meeting where we could learn and practice on their test equipment.
I did very well so I started with a demo account which raised very good.
I received a small amount of money on my birthday and started cach trading with the live account. First I used very small inserts at currency pairs. It went up and down and I got no real profit out of that. Then I started with gold and only gold. I had the opportunity to see the graf at a very low position and it started to raise. I won more and more and when I reached $400 I cached the initial $200 and continued (now I had money to be able to start over again if I failed).
I then got a new job which took all of my time so I had to quit the moneymaking. I tried a couple of times when I didn’t have so much to do but found out that if you can’t follow the graph all day it is hard to know when it is time to buy and sell.
I first used the demo account for 1 year and then It took me a little more than 6 month until I could cache in the $1.150 …

I have some accounts relative new, open ones so there is no past record, atxthe beggining i wasctasting quite a lot brokers, and when i make some money i retired and opened to get a reliable one so there is no track record. I sent before a reply on this question but baby pips rwmoved my answer. Because i put my telegram adress… So i dont know to contact outside here

Oh okay! Thanks for answering! Do you still trade today?

Why talk outside of the forum though? :thinking: Questions can be answered here! :slight_smile:

I am not active today.
I am repairing my house and restoring my summerhouse, which takes all my time and it will take approx 2 years. When I finish and sell the summerhouse I will start over again. That is why I joined this site to have information on practical issues before start. I need a halfyear for the startup again. I have had 2 strokes which reduced my brain capacity, so I am not sure I can make a good restart again :frowning:

Just for fun on a quiet day let’s go a bit further with the strategy statistics I gave a few days ago.

So, you can only run one trade per day, your win rate is only 55%, you risk only 1% per trade and your r:r realised is only 1:1.5. Any strategy worth its name ought to be able to at least meet these criteria.

This strategy will produce a profit of 7.6% per month.

Let’s now suppose you have scraped together £1,000 as your trading account capital. After 12 months, you will have more than doubled your account, you will have about £2,400. Your income from trading for Year 1 will have been £1,400. This is not big money. But it is a huge annual profit rate - 140%.

If you just keep running the strategy, in your fifth year you will be earning well over the average UK salary in profits, easily enough to live on.

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I thoroughly agree! I am a day-trader and my monthly win rate is consistently between 70-80%. It is not so very difficult to do except that I would say that the most important key to any day-trading success is discipline - and that, I suspect, is quite difficult to apply constantly!

But herein lies the biggest mystery in forex trading! If it really is easy enough to find such a strategy that will achieve such parameters, why, why, why, do over 75% of traders constantly fail to find it and apply it??? These failure rates have been consistent for as long as I can remember, and that is quite many years back!

And, again, that leads us to the likelihood that the seeds of failure are indeed in the trader and not in the strategy.

In past years I have played with these compounding systems that start with, say, a $1000 and then systematically build the position size in line with the capital growth and achieve a certain target and it does work - but the discipline and patience required are quite extraordinary. And as the position size grows it becomes more and more scary for anyone not used to such trades, and that creates even more uncertainty and reluctance to take big positions even though they are within the system criteria. It becomes a bit like taking the next question in the TV “Do you want to be a millionaire” programme when you already have a good sum waiting to be taken… :smiley:

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This is the key riddle to trading. It isn’t hard, so why is it so difficult?

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Apart from all the standard reasons, I suspect that it only starts to be “easy” once it has become “boring”. Boring in the sense that one is content to wait and trade only when there is something sensible to trade.

I.e. when one is veteran enough to just trade the set ups and not set up the trades… :rofl:

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Yes, its got to be hard to do something boring, when your success depends on doing everything exactly the same way again and again and again and…

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The question is simple and the answer is as well. Do not gamble with your last $200. Except for experienced talented traders it’s a losing proposition. The transaction fees alone will degrade your profit somewhat. But the elephant in the room is Time. This is limited. IF you only have $200 THEN Earnings(Time@work) - Expenses(Time paying bills, DIY around the house rather than hiring contractors, laundry rather than a dry cleaner, and so on) = 0 +/- a small delta. Steady State = +$200

Let’s say you are very talented with a strong math brain. It will take ~500 hours of training on Demo (because you cannot afford to hire top tier talent to train you) to become proficient enough to risk your last $200 rather than buy a ring for your wife.

Your Opportunity Cost would be:
~ $15/h (assuming min wage) x 500 hours = $7500
If you work overtime then it’s = $11,250
So in less than 1 year you could save at least $7500 with 0 Risk with 2hrs or less work time/day.
Invest the $ in a tax deferred IRA AND be as aggressive as you would like to be within the constraints of a balanced portfolio.

Do this every year. Yes it sounds boring but you will get the benefit of genius professional traders working in the financial industry to build your savings. :slight_smile:

You won’t retire at age 30 but you will be able to retire with a hefty nest egg. Take 10% of those savings, pay off the taxes and have fun trading in retirement!

Or try your luck.

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Why would a new trader select a strategy which require a top tier talent trainer or 500 hours of demo time? This is a false premise from the very start.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. You are correct that he wouldn’t. My point was that investing in one of the major funds automatically hires top tier talent to do the investing for him. Less the administrative fees of course. This analysis starts with the premise of a talented individual without formal training in financial markets who can only ever afford to play with a seed fund of $200.

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I hope I don’t sound confrontational but wouldn’t there be a default opportunity cost if learning a skilled trade (not just confined to trading)?

What’s the best way for a new entrant into retail trading in your opinion?

Yes there would be an opportunity cost for any form of new venture. It’s always a question about whether the road not traveled will yield more or less than the one selected for the one asset more valuable than anything else in trading — your TIME.

BUT, the response was based on “only ever having $200”. Perhaps I misunderstood the issues.

Nah, that is indeed the topic as I understood it initially too. I lost track of it in the course of the responses over time. Thanks for the clarification.

Good point

Perhaps. But there are factors that govern that. The biggest of all is how good your trading strategy is and how good your psychology is. For new traders, it is very unrealistic to go by this rule. That is why newbies should have a consistent source of income. If you are not new and have been trading, however, then backtesting your strategies will give you some idea if going with $200 will work.

Leverage here in Australia is maxed at 30:1