When you feel confident and ready to move on to real money, I’d suggest you try one of the brokers that allow you to trade small positions, as little as 1,000 units, and open accounts with only a few hundred bucks.
For example, Oanda, Interbank FX, FXCM and others have low minimum amounts for starting accounts and allow trades as small as 1,000 units.
Start off trading with small positions, 1,000 units = 10 cents per pip or 2,500 units = 25 cents per pip. As your confidence and W/L ratio improves you can slowly increase the size of your trades.
IMO trading with real money is so much better than demo trading. Even if you’re trading for just pennies, you’re still emotionally involved, learning about and controlling emotions is a very important part of trading.
I would put " Half of my 1 month salary " [ depends on how much you make ] .That’s how i look at it …and i would do that only after i feel confident trading …
This is a personal question (not in terms of being intrusive, but rather in terms of the answer being very different for each of us!).
Personally, I started with £2000, and quickly raised it to £5000 as my initial deposit was not enough for my purposes.
My reasons for this were as follows: I trade a number of different Pairs, including some moderately exotic ones, and I sometimes target pretty big moves on the higher timeframes. I religiously risk only 1% per trade, so my initial deposit only gave me £20 per trade to risk. I found that I could not cover some of the Stops needed for some of the setups I wanted to take. This would have thrown out my figures, as my results would not include some of the trades that I would otherwise have taken.
I felt that my trading was going well, so I increased my account to £5000 pretty quickly after starting out, for those reasons.
My point is that the amount of initial deposit has to be considered in context: what constitutes ‘a lot’ of money to lose? What is the intended risk per trade? How many open trades does one intend to have at one moment? There are a number of factors, so I would suggest that you need to have a moderately complete understanding of how you intend to trade and where you are with your overall, non-trading finances before you can arrive at ‘your’ figure. So specific figures quoted by the rest of us don’t really take you forwards, it is more the route by which we arrived at those figures that might be of interest.
I would, however, concur with the poster who suggested that $100 is not enough. To my mind, you might as well trade demo rather than live if you are at that level, as a loss won’t give you any sting. When 5% of your account won’t buy a pint in your local pub you might be inclined to be more cavalier with your trading, and will certainly be more resilient to losses, so you might as well be in demo and save the few extra dollars.
