Let me just go ahead and thank everyone ahead of time for any support or contributions to this thread, I really appreciate it.
I have never been one to gamble, and I stay away from risky investments (always have) and so Forex has always scared me insofar as making money is concerned. Then a funny thing happened and I began to correlate what was happening in the world politics-wise with the ups and downs of currencies and became fascinated…so I opened a demo account.
I must say that I found trading very intuitive, my own personal style (at this point anyway) is scalping. Even with the spread I have been able to clear enough profit to where my trading has safely brought me in about $30.00 an hour (1:100 leverage @ $100.00 investment) . It’s not AMAZING money but for someone who just graduated from college I have to say I think it’s awesome.
Now I want to be clear, my thought is to drop about $100.00 into a real account and see what happens (my risk appetite has only grown slightly ).
So now my questions…
1.) I’ve been trading on eToro and have noticed that the platform will sometimes be completely unavailable (either with regard to charting or even altogether), who is the MOST TRUSTWORTHY and STABLE platform?
2.) Emotional and psychological stress aside, is trading on an actual account any different than a demo account? My fear here is that I may be being offered a great platform for practice only to be shortchanged when it comes to the real deal…what are your experiences?
3.) I have about 2 weeks of profitability going for me where scalping is concerned (on the demo account) and have made $30.00 an hour (overall, including losses), am I jumping in too soon? I know $100.00 isn’t a lot of money but for me it’s also about being ready and not being discouraged, for the first time in my life I feel like I have found something I can do well and want to succeed.
I look forward to the advice you all have to provide, shower me with knowledge!
Once you have covered all (all, all) of your bases and are ready to open a live account (all, all, all of you bases), then you should do deep research on the brokers that people recommend. Most brokers with MT4 platform are very stable. Etoro is very simple and great for noobs, but you will not want to use this platform once you are trying to do more complicated things. I use FXsolutions and I’ve had no issues, but I can’t do most complicated (or simple) things that I want to do.
Whatever people recommend, be sure to google it and do plenty of research because there are plenty of scam brokers out there.
I tend to keep my Stop Loss fairly high and take profit right around 10-12 pips. This has kept me out of trouble because I have found that if I pull out of a trade every time it goes south then my losses are far greater than they would have been if I had just rode the trade out.
Here’s a general tip on life that I’ve learned: before taking advice from someone, check to see if their destination is where you want to go. Is the grass really greener in the valley they are standing?
Sounds like you are on the right track. I’d take that $100 and open a live account ASAP and move forward. Don’t put much more than that, until you have proven to yourself several weeks of consistency. I recommend you focus on percentages more than pips – both in terms of account growth and risk. That way, it will be easier for you to scale your account when the time is right.
If you have $100 to risk then I would say go with a broker that allows you to trade very small lot size such as Oanda. The negative with Oanda is the Java platform, may not be good for scalping small time frames. Persoanally I scalp the daily time frame and it works ok for that.
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