You flatter me, @Heteroskedasticity 
I’m just another anonymous internet tard that IRL survived the trial by fire we call trading / investing and learned few tricks after coming out the other side. You’re welcome, it’s been my pleasure 
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What is being said here makes a lot of sense. Thanks for pointing out as it is. I must confess I was one of the guys that got in the game with huge hopes and targets. Am sure, that on its own contributes to unprofitability as it clouds judgement.
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This thread is literally the perfect list of what’s wrong with most beginner traders.
High expectations:
I think ALL beginners start with the wrong expectations.
Everyone here knows that.
I did too.
Then…
Not giving it enough time:
Come on!
Seriously, it’s not about just learning a strategy, it’s not about just learning some rules and apply those.
It’s about experience.
That subconscious knowledge that you build over years of watching the charts, seeing patterns in motion, seeing price action develop, seeing things happen in real time on the chart!
Also…
Couldn’t agree more!
Every trader starts thinking with a fixed daily profit target in mind.
And that’s the quickest way to get disappointed.
After that…
Thinking there’s a special secret knowledge that’s exactly what will make you profitable:
Wait, actually there is!
The knowledge missing is called…
Experience
Literally…
The title of this trade is actually the answer to your question.
Knowing how to trade isn’t enough.
The truth is that a lot of “simple” strategies work well.
I mean very basic price action like engulfing candles or simple support and resistance can work extremely well.
But knowing how to trade those isn’t enough!
You then need the discipline, experience, and consistency to trade well.
In other words…
Give it time.
Don’t look for shortcuts.
It’s NOT about the strategy, it’s about experience.
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Have you considered Propfirm trading? Apparently, you can get instant funding and play around with huge margin and leverage it.
hi , i want to start out trading forex xauusd firstly is that a good or bad idea ? secondly i have a million and one questions to ask and where do i get the answers ? any advice would be be gratefully appreciated
many thanks
steve williams
thank you. i really appreciate your comment
I find the volatility in the commodity market like gold too slow for me as a day trader. The same as forex. I’m now focused on indices. Dow jones, Nasdaq and SPY.
yes. I know about them. My 6k account was from a prop firm trading challenge (which I failed miserably on August 30th).
I’ll be going back to demo for sometime (maybe 1 or 2 months) before taking another challenge.
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Do you realise that a prop-firm “funded” account that’s called a “$6k account” isn’t really anything like a $6k account?
The real account-size you’d be trading after passing the challenge is the maximum permitted loss-limit, so if that’s (for example) $600, you’re actually trading a $600 account even though prop firms misleadingly call it “$6k”, and you need to use position-sizing, risk-management and trade-management accordingly. And not trade the Dow or Nasdaq!
Sorry if I sound disparaging (not my intention!) but honestly you’re still rather a long way from being ready to take a prop firm challenge, and you need to understand that when you eventually get there, you’re going to need a far bigger “funded” account than you expect to have any realistic prospect of averaging $100 per day income from it.
Mate, love the energy and enthusiasm but you’re running 1000 mph in the wrong direction.
Most inexperienced traders (the 95% who lose) don’t understand that their instincts and mentality developed over their lifetime is their biggest obstacle to becoming profitable. Nearly every losing trader thinks the path to profitable trading is “being right” more often, more wins, quicker wins, bigger wins etc because this is what life has taught them. Unfortunately this understanding is dead wrong when it comes to profitable trading.
Remember this phrase:
Profitable trading is about letting the market manage the wins while the trader manages the losses.
Losing traders love to do the market’s job (the fun, i.e. emotional job of winning) while no one does the trader’s job (the boring, uncomfortable, painful side of minimizing losses).
The quicker a trader understands that profitable trading is counterintuitive, the quicker they become profitable (with virtually any trading style and system).
In any case, wish you good luck with your trading.
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It’s really good that your focus is narrow, and related. I think that is smart.
If you are not yet profitable, it’s really important to find out why? Most times, getting into a trade is straight forward, but getting out is where the problem exits.
Do you move your stop loss if a trade goes against you? Do you exit a trade at the first sign of trouble, only to see the trend continue well after you got out? Does it sometimes seem like whenever you place a buy order, prices fall, or rise, whenever you sell? Do you sometimes chase a rally and end up overtrading out of greed? Have you ever broken your trading rules?
Consistent profit is the product of a strategy that you know and understand inside and out. Something you have lived with for quite some time and trust, and so you come to know its reliabilities and occasional failings…a bit like a card player. No guarantees, but suddenly, the odds seem stacked in your favour more often then not. It’s that comfort feeling that comes from using the same tools and indicators over and over again, with 80% plus certainty things will go your way. Actually, quite a difficult thing to describe, but you’ll definitely know when you arrive.
What’s your win-lose ratio? Risk-reward? Longest Losing Streak? Largest losing trade? Get to know your strategy inside out, and tweak as necessary, and put the odds in your favour!
Good luck.
checkout fundednext stellar challenge. I enrolled for their 6k challenge.
I thought if I were to pass the challenge, I’d be given a 6k account size?
I have gone through their website and they never mentioned this information you are sharing.
what do you mean by this? i don’t get it.
I thought probably you were referring to FundedNext (just because not so many companies actually offer a “$6 one” - it’s a slightly unusual amount.)
Yes - that’s exactly what they want you to think.
No, they almost never do.
That’s one of the (many) reasons why the whole industry desperately needs some proper regulation. It’s all terribly misleading.
How much are you allowed to lose from the nominal $6k starting figure? Whatever the answer to that question, that’s the true account size. If you lose that, the account’s gone! (It’s as simple as that.)
yea. i have broken most of my rules in this prop firm challenge I took. I remember my last trade on Friday, Aug 30th, when i entered the trade, the price reversed against me and started heading towards my stop loss. when it got close to it, my heart started beating fast. I moved my stop loss not to get stoped out quickly (i knew i shouldn’t do this but i did it anyway).
It eventually hit my stop loss and I lost the trade and the challenge.
My risk to reward ratio is 1:3 to 1:4 and i use the divergence trading strategy taught here in babypips
Don’t beat yourself up about that (almost everyone has done it!); just learn from it. 
You may want to re-think that (completely!): I’m not saying it’s impossible, but all the people I know who have ever passed funding-firm challenges have been using an R of around 1.0. You’re making it really hard for yourself, in so many ways, IMO.
I’ll contact them to know if what you’re saying is true.
you mean i should be targeting a 1:1 risk to reward?
Exactly this from your post 
I remember my last trade on Friday, Aug 30th, when i entered the trade, the price reversed against me and started heading towards my stop loss. when it got close to it, my heart started beating fast. I moved my stop loss not to get stoped out quickly (i knew i shouldn’t do this but i did it anyway).
Your intuition and mentality throughout your life has convinced you that you need to be “right” in order to win. So you placed this trade expecting to be right because of your trading system, intuition, technical analysis, fundamental analysis or whatever. The reason doesn’t matter, but you were expecting to be right when you put the trade on.
Your heart started racing when it got close to your stop loss, the thought of being wrong is painful because growing up, we get punished for being wrong. So your subconscious convinced you to move your stop loss to avoid the pain of being “wrong” in order to give yourself a chance at being “right”.
You were trying to force a win (as I wrote, this is the market’s job not yours) by moving the stop loss instead of doing your job, which was to minimize the loss. Even worse, you were so consumed with winning that you didn’t even realize that your trade was proven wrong when it approached your original SL.
As I wrote in my previous reply, a trader that wants to become profitable needs to rewire their brain and ASSUME that whatever trade they put on will be a loss (wrong) and be on the constant look out for ways to minimize that loss. They need to do this until the market proves them right and moves their position well into profit. Most traders are never able to do this and that’s why they continue to lose.
Managing losing positions is an artform (that the losing 95% avoid) and is the very first skill needed for profitable trading. The better and more creative you get at managing losing positions the more profitable you will be. The best traders are quick, aggressive and creative at getting out of losing positions. Losing traders go all “deer in the headlights”, become indecisive and often become virtually paralyzed from taking action (doing their job). More often than not, good traders have gotten out way before price even gets to their original SL, because they recognized quickly that the trade won’t work out, minimizing their loss. This is the very opposite of losing traders who hope and pray that the loss will turn into a win.
As I wrote, counterintuitive.
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We break our rules because we don’t trust our strategy. We can’t trust our strategy because we never really give it a chance to operate without our personal interference. It’s a little cycle that plays out until, hopefully, we realise WE are the problem.
Your stop loss is absolutely meaningless if you move it whenever you panic. If you move your stop loss, you also move your risk-reward ratio, so end up taking far greater risk than intended. But you already know this!
Cheers!