It took me two full years before I was able to trade profitably. I went through periods of feeling despair too, but each time I picked myself up, dusted myself down and got back to it. You need to be tenacious, robust and determined. You need to learn quickly from your mistakes and never repeat them. You need to learn from what you did well and consistently repeat those things every single day without deviation.
Develop a system of trading that stacks the odds in your favour. For an example, here is how I put a EURUSD trade together last week which stacked the probabilities of success in unison across several timeframes. It’s the way I like to trade and when I get so many concurrent signals, it doesn’t matter if I win or lose because I know the trade signals were bang on and I’ll win three out of four trades that set up like this.
Develop clarity and certainty, trade demo until clarity comes, and then start live trading again with minimum stakes until you develop certainty too. Lose the “get rich quick” mentality and you’ll be a lot less likely to join the 85% (or whatever it is) of retail traders who fail.
95% of the systems I’ve designed and backtested either fail or only generate small marginal returns. But 5% of those systems I design ARE successful and are what I consider “tradable” (backtested 10+ years over the major pairs and Yen crosses).
Here’s the catch. Designing, backtesting and improving a single system can take many weeks, if not months. Many people don’t seem willing to sink the time to do their homework, especially when there’s a very high probability that their work will lead to nothing.
Many times I felt despair when I design a system, sink a month in backtesting and optimisation, only to find that it’s a loser. But with each iteration, my design/backtesting process becomes more methodical and efficient.
If anyone is losing money consistently, my opinion is to sit out for 6+ months and simply devote your time to system testing and design. ONLY go live once you are thoroughly happy with a system YOU designed and fits YOUR psychological profile. And avoid discretionary systems like price action. I know many people recommend price action, but I find many aspects of price action too subjective for newbies. If you do want to trade price action, try to create a mechanical set of rules and backtest it thoroughly first.
As for myself, I wiped out 25% of my account at the start of this year. Took time off, only went back to live trading last month after scraping together a rudimentary trading system, and generated a 3% return for the month. The biggest lesson I also learnt was position sizing. Smaller position size allows you to recover quicker from your losses, although it also gimps your equity growth. I believe a position size of 1% or less of your account is ideal for newbies.
In some ways i’d agree with what MoneyNVRsleeps said, but obviously that can be a hard pill to swallow and a lot of people don’t want to just give up. Just understand that it’ll all take time, and patience and practice. Don’t look for quick fixes or easy wins or ways out, because chances are you’ll cut so many corners you’ll end up going around in circles
KingKaivar Would you recomment any one of your 5% system for us? I know, I asked too much but this is what the community for. Plus, It might help to improve your system.
Its actually simple. The algorithm is designed to trade based off price action, volume and time. It has nothing to do with indicators as we believe they are lagging. We also try to avoid economic news events as they can be very violent and if you’re wrong you can get hammered.
There are plenty of people that trade for a living and make a healthy return from it.
The problem with most people is they over inflate their expectations. You can’t make money week in and week out. Even every month can be tough occasionally.
I have a team of professional traders that I work with and I can tell you only 1 out of 10 made money in October for example.
That depends on how often you trade, if you only place 1 trade per week, then yeah sure it can be tough to make money week after week. Context is important.
but im pretty sure if u study it and take in the info and utilise what youve learned properly, you’ll succeed!
