By the way, I DID start answering your question last night or the night before:
Which reminds me of a question I asked earlier (that no one answered). When do you know you can “make it” as a trader and focus all your energies there?
but I was not happy with the things that I was saying (or at least how I was wording them but it went something like this:
I think you’re ready to start doing this as a full time career when you’ve ‘lost touch with reality’!!!
Only kidding.
I could only offer you this:
You have to be able to live with the uncertainty (I had my own business for years so I’m pretty used to it).
I would suggest that you have ‘backup money’ in the bank JUST in case you don’t ‘make it’ (at worst case) OR you have a ‘bad month’ or two.
Don’t start off small i.e. my HUGE losses were in ‘increments’ and most of them came from margin call after margin call. I really do believe that had I ‘ploughed’ the whole lot in at once I would have done better. I’m a firm believer (nowadays) that it’s easier to open a HUGE position and ‘shoot’ for a lower numbers of pips than it is to open a small position and ‘hope’ that the instrument ‘trends’ for a couple of months.
Spend money learning (by buying books). It’s amazed how many people come onto this (and other threads) who just want a ‘quick’ solution. How do these people (and I include myself here ‘ala last year’) even HOPE to make a living out of this without doing the background work??? I’ll guarantee that there are traders out there who have being doing this their entire lives and have not yet ‘made it’ and they have experience!!! I really believe that this is a business that you have to ‘study’ and ‘learn’ and get experience LIKE ANY OTHER JOB. Don’t think this is different from being a lawyer, doctor, dentist, or anything else. As a matter of fact the aforementioned professions are an easier way to make a living belive it or not i.e. they are dealing with ‘the known’ not the ‘unknown’ (with or without my beloved ‘Delta Phenomenon’)!!!
Remember that you have monthly bills to pay and the ‘trick’ is to ensure that you’re making enough profit WITHOUT having to touch your capital. That’s what happened to me i.e. needed to pay bills, not making enough profit, draw on capital to pay bills, increased lot sizes to make up for the capital that I did not have, ended up owing ‘the world’ around $360 000 USD, not to mention what it does to you as a human being i.e. ‘living like a king’ for a good few years and now having trouble paying for broadband and your family thinks you’re nothing better than a ‘compulsive gambler’ and an ‘ars*hole’!!!
You wanted to know!!!
That’s as close to ‘telling it like it really is’ as you’re going to get!!!
In short: if you can ‘handle’ the above then you’re ‘ready’!!!
But hey: all of this is ‘just me’!!! I WILL ‘master the trade’ if it’s that last thing I do in this world OR until I have no resources left to pursue it (and even then I’ll probably be able to ‘make a plan’). (Did I mention that you need ‘dedication’ and a sheer ‘love of this business’ and you have to be able to accept the ridicule if you lose and be prepared to do it on your own because if you lose you are not going to get encouragement from anywhere i.e. trading is YOUR ‘baby’ not anybody elses and you are solely responsible for your profits and losses)!!! What was that about reality???
