A year or so back I tried forex trading not knowing much about any of it. Made a little bit of money, lost about half, and left the game. Now I’m back more mature, focused, and determined!
The plan -
Start with a practice trading account while saving money for a good deposit. This will take 6 months to a year. The idea is to learn to make 10 pips a day successfully over and over during Asian session. From now till I’ve saved up enough money to comfortably leverage to $10 per pip. Why a specific amount? Well that’s how much I want to earn simple as that. No greediness here.
A while back there was a thread about trading with bollinger bands, vary detailed info on finding and trading “the perfect bubble”. This style of trading is what I want to learn with Oanda trading software. Unfortunately no metatrader available or at least there wasn’t last year.
The good news is that Oanda now support metatrader
I’d probably argue that targets such as X pips per day are unrealistic, you get what you get, some days you make +200, some days +2, and other days, you lose 150.
I’m sure 10 pips a day won’t be impossible if you are reasonably confident about your entries. But maybe it’s better to try average 10 pips a day. Same thing really, it just makes provision for potential bad days where you make a few losses.
In my experience, its just completely unrealistic. Others may disagree. This year (which isnt going particularly well) I’m [I]averaging[/I] around 7 pips a day, but the range is typically anywhere from around -90 to +160
The other major problem is that if you are only aiming for 10 pip targets, you are pretty much guarenteed to fail, as your transaction costs are going to be way to high a barrier to overcome. The spread is just too high a percentage of the target.
It can be done, but it takes a great deal of experience.
Pointless to set a target for the day. Its only going to handicap you. Either you get a trade and you cut it short to get 10 pips. Or you have a day of good trades and just take one. Or have a bad day and keep on taking trades to try and get 10 when your system isn’t working. Or you get 8 pips and are tempted to trade to get the last 2 pips, when its not worth taking a trade for 2 pips.
You guys are taking my statement a little to seriously. 10 pips a day is a [B][U]general goal[/U][/B]. Nothing more nothing less. Gee this forum is a lot more negative then it was last year.
They arent being negative, they are giving you feedback on your IDEA. Pips should never be a goal. Percentages are how R:R should be managed. If you leverage to survive off of 10 pips, your losses are going to be really brutal. I would work more on establishing low risk entries so that you could even lose more than win but you would still come out on top. My 2 cents.
Its good to have a goal to work towards, whether its 10 pips a day a week or whatever. You just have to be careful that your goal doesn’t make you chase trades and judging from your response I don’t think you will suffer from that. While personaly I have a monthly target of x% as opposed to x# of pips per day, but why I say good to have a goal is because if you have a fixed goal, then more than likey you have thought out your trading plan.
In your original post you identify that greed will not be a factor and if you can stick to that, you ought to do very well.
your welcome, alot of people post their ideas based on their experiences not that they are right or wrong just how they in particular trade.
Remember most people posting on this forum and well just about every FX forum consistently [B]lose money[/B] and as such have ideas that include “never do this…”, “don’t do that…” The truth of the matter is that your trading style will evolve as you gain experience and your rules will change.
If you develop a good trading plan and then put it into practice you are well on your way. It won’t be easy and you will lose money along the way, but with diligence and patience you can succeed.
I agree with you, its impossible to set a fixed target daily to earn … sometimes you loose 10x your profit … so its impossible to to make a constant pips rate daily
After heavily studying the previously mentioned thread I’ve decided to take heed to your cautions. 10 pips is quite a low target exactly as everyone has stated. There would be no reason to exit a trade just because 10 pips were achieved. Instead a goal of 10 pips or more average over months of trading is a minimum goal. It really isn’t even a goal more of something to look back on after 6 months or a year of trading. Something to be happy about after much hard work.
Now I apologize for being the negative one calling everyone else negative. All you were trying to do was help.
Say you have a 1k account. You risk something and would get 10 pips per day on average, which is 1% a day. A month has on average 20 trading days. That’s 20% per month. Or 250 days per year, which is 250% roi per year.
Sounds realistic? I don’t think so. Maybe you can do it in one year or two or even 5 with a lot of luck. But not consistently, year after year for 10 years and more. The problem is that intraday prices have a high part of random moves included. As some stated already, you may get in 10 days 10 pips a day, but on the eleventh day you may lose 90 pips. Or you may lose on 10 days 5 pips a day which is 50 pips loss together.
I think that is a great starting plan! There is a guy in the book “Millionaire Traders” that targeted 10 pips a day and became successful, so I think that it can work.
Don’t listen to all the negative replies on this thread…others have done it, you can too!
I would also recommend getting a backtesting software program so you can practice every day (including weekends). Trading in a demo account is great, but there are only a few opportunities every night. With backtesting software, you can look at as many opportunities as you want over the past 10+ years of data.
Of course, this will not guarantee your success, but it can speed up your learning. Search for “forex backtesting software” and check out the options.
I think that 10 pips a day is definately achievable with the right strategy. Until recently I was targeting exactly the same with great success on the euro/usd but I stopped using the system I was using when the recent volatility made me more losses than wins, that aside my risk to reward ratio was 3/1 & above & I was showing over 500 pips up overall, why stop? That was less than half of what I was previously up using the same system! I now tend to move my stops up as soon as the price has mooved clear, not as much profit but nowhere near as much loss.