I’ve been trading a dummy account for 5 weeks now and am enjoying so far as my trades have been mostly successful. I am aware, however, that I could be doing even better if I could stay at home all day and watch the charts instead of having to go and do my 9-5 job! What I would like to ask you all is…is there anyone here who was in a similar position to myself and took the jump to quit their day job to concentrate on forex trading full time and if so, has it been as fruitful as you had hoped?
Please reply with your experiences as although it’s early days yet, I am hoping that this may be my ticket out of the 9-5 rat race that I am growing so tired of. Cheers!
I haven’t quite a full-time job to be a full-time trader, so I’ll leave it to someone else to comment on that. Personally, I have no desire to turn trading in to a job and put myself in to a situation where I have to trade for a living. Spending hour-upon-hour in front of the screen is not what I consider good for my health and well-being.
Before you ever even start thinking about trading full-time you need to start trading with real money. Demo trading is good for two things:
- Learning the market
- Testing new strategies
That’s it.
Until you actually have real money at risk - even a tiny amount - you have no real understanding of what trading is. Make the jump from demo to actual trading, then figure out if its something you can seriously do full-time.
Thanks for your comments Rhodytrader. I’ll start trading live in a couple more months so I’ll see how I get on after that. I’ve no intention of jumping in the deep end so soon. My question was just to test the water and to find out what other Babypips members are doing. Cheers
I can tell you what professional Traders have told me and from personal experience, I tend to agree with their rules of thumb in this regard:
Inexperienced Traders will blow through at least one account and probably two or three. This is caused by over-trading, over-positioning, and over-confidence (usually after trading a demo account). The “natural Traders” are those that can consistenty turn a profit after 6 months of trading - they are few and far between. Even then, they usually suffer greatly sometime down the road. 2-5 years seems to be the magic number which helps explain why the failure rate is so high.
The downside to simulators is that they can’t make a chart go from looking bullish to bearish the instant you go long. You think I’m kidding…I’m not.
Open your first account with money that can be considered “tuition!”
I do not trade full time but I can’t think of a better way to make a living (given my golf game stinks…). Have fun in the journey. There’s a book called “Master the Trade” which I highly recommend. The author breaks down the life-cycle of a Trader/Trading-Wanna-bee. I laughed out loud…painful stuff but ohhhh sooo true!