Very simply… you’re not ready to trade live yet! Its not a bad thing, I know right now your excited about the prospect of trading and making money, but are you making money or losing money?
You’ve made the most common trader mistake. Going live way too soon! But don’t feel bad, many of us have been right where you are now!!! I only offer my personal insight on what can be done from this point forward to push you in what I believe to be the right direction.
Two weeks demo is no where near enough time to get things straight in terms of emotions. I would recommend a bare minimum of two months of solid, consistent success in demo before even considering going live. It also sounds like you were either too highly leveraged, trading too many lots, or were just plain underfunded. The good news is you learned your lesson for cheap.
The bad news is you need to add a lot of patience to this if you intend to do this successfully. I quit my job and started doing nothing but trading full time for an entire year before I really got the hang of the analysis, the trade management, and MOST IMPORTANTLY TRADING EMOTIONS!
Step 1. Go to amazon.com and order Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas.
Step 2. Read it twice. It will save you thousands if you comprehend the issues he describes before you have to pay with your hard earned cash out of pocket. I must’ve paid well in excess of 5 grand learning the hard way. Reading the book would’ve been MUCH CHEAPER!
Step 3. DEMO DEMO DEMO. Don’t cheat yourself on this. Keep your entries consistent, don’t mess around with your strategy. Manage your trades just as you would if you had real money on the line. If you change any aspect of this and get positive results, but then alter them as soon as you go live you’ve just wasted all that time for nothing, and have set yourself up to give away more of your money.
Step 4. Go Live, but do so with a small amount of initial account balance (<400.00) and trade REAL SMALL (like maybe 1000’s with Oanda) and systematically work your size up every week. If you start faltering do to the $ amount risk increasing you’ve got more work to do and decrease the size back down.
As far as management goes…
Think of EVERY trade setup in terms of Risk:Reward. If you enter at point X, where can you safely set your stop loss, and then at what price must price action move to to equal 2x’s your initial stop loss. You should be able to answer these questions before you risk the trade. If you can’t reasonably foresee a 2:1 ratio playing out successfully its time to wait for a better price, or a better setup all together.
If your “losing big… …when the market just went crazy on me” you aren’t using stops effectively in your strategy and you most certainly aren’t employing any kind of risk:reward logic in your trade setups. I cannot stress the importance of thinking about every trade in these terms. Solid money management can turn systems with 33% success rates into profitable system. Poor management can turn 75% win rates into losing systems.
If you can provide us with some kind of time frame, normal profit pips you take, etc. maybe we can provide some more in depth analysis on what can benefit you for money management.
Hope this helps!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Cheers! (White Russian in Hand!!! 
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