as long as you’re risking the same on each trade, no matter what strategy you’ll find, you’ll have bad results. Stop dreaming of 100%+ / month and focus on reasonable targets, risk 1 to 2% per trade and you’ll have enough time, even if “dying slowly”, to adjust things up and learn from your own mistakes.
What will you do if your next demo strategy will work for a month? You’ll just jump into live trading again and lose another 100 bucks in a few days(10% of your account if I am correct)? then search/develop another strategy and repeat the whole cycle?
Trading is a tough challenge and you’re your own enemy. Instead of starting the week/day by calculating your target profit - why don’t you start the week/day by calculating THE MAX. you will afford to lose? focus on what you don’t want to happen rather than dreaming of a million dollars, “easy money”, by trading a mini account @1:100 leverage.
I, for one, am up 1.05% for the last week - could have been a bit better (around 3% if not rushing to exit too early on 2 good trades), but would laugh in the face of anyone telling me he’s doing 30% / week or month.
Own common sense rule says: to become rich soon - you either steal or are a genius (i.e.: invent something such as twitter, alternative energy etc).
Just be realist, it’s for your own good. Good luck.
but would laugh in the face of anyone telling me he’s doing 30% / week or month.
Go to currensee, myfxbook, meet4pips, or one of the many sites and services that show real verifiable account histories look at the top performers. Many show real accounts that have been active for well over a year and are making returns like that. It is possible people can trade like that. Just because you can’t do it for lack of skill or more likely a lack of time to devote to full time trading does not mean it cant be done.
Now to tell a new trader not to expect returns like that is good advise. I agree with every thing else you said and I want to reinforce what you said about focusing on how much you are willing to lose rather than how much you think you can make. The amount you lose is completely under your control, one of the few things that is when you trade. Learn how to control it.
Check the largest drawdowns of those highly profitable accounts on the tracking sites. Also check their open positions. Many of them are holding positions open at -500 or more pips until the market goes back to close that for +10 so they will show a highly profitable statement. Not all but most of them.
Very few are highly profitable, but those top performers are only a few out of thousands traders and the odds that a new guy will do so well from the beginning or even after a few years are zero.
Go to myfxbook and search using the following criteria “at least 100% gain; drawdown at most 100%; system age at least 1year; acct. real” - 22 systems found. Out of that, I’d say 2 to max. 5 are actually ok (no large drawdowns, not hiding anything such as large negative trades running until becoming positive etc). Q.E.D.
I’ve seen tons of account statements, audited results, hypotetical results, excel spreadsheets and heard of many ‘trading gurus’ etc. I’m already immune to all that. I am also immune to “it can be done” or “doesn’t mean it can’t be done”.
Are you doing it? Or you’re just saying there are a few highly profitable guys out there? I knew that already. But how many out of total traders? You know, those are not profitable from day one. We speak about masses here. Don’t use an argument like “one in a million”.
As I said in the previous post:
huge profit in short time comes to those who either steal (now think about all those posting fake results trying to sell you a book, signals, a course, a robot etc) or those who are real genius (perhaps 1 out of 10.000 who developed a really good strategy that works excellent in current market conditions and the 9.999 are expecting the guy to share it. hah!) or damn lucky (such as winning the lottery).
I don’t tell a newbie: hey you can’t succeed. I tell him: hey man, stop dreaming, don’t be greedy - you won’t be the next Warren Buffet. You want to make some nice profits? that’s fine, you can do that but don’t put all your money on the same bet, don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose, don’t expect to outperform the large funds and banks on the long run, cut your losses and accept the fact you will be wrong many times, stick to the winning trade because you won’t be right more often than you’ll be wrong etc
start reading some books about trading btw