Hi. I apologize in advance if this question has been asked before. I’ve been thinking about starting to trade forex for the past few months, and been researching about it for a while. There are a lot or contradictory answers on different websites.
Certain websites (including investopeida) claim that trading is not profitable in the long term, and most people will eventually lose money in the long run, and there is no real edge in trading strategies, while on other websites (mainly ones that are focused on trading, like this one) claim it is really difficult to stay profitable in the long run, but it can be done. Considering it is gonna be a long and time consuming road, and I really don’t have that much free time, is the end result worth it? Does it justify spending time and mastering this skill?
And if it actually is possible to make money from forex, how profitable will it be for someone trading as a side hustle and not dedicating most of his life to trading? According to many websites (including this one), a very skilled and profitable trader can expect something around a consistent 5% a month. For someone like me, who can maybe put in 5 to 6 hours a week on this, considering I learn and practice this skill properly, can I expect to make any money at all from this? I know it highly depends on the capital I put in, I’m just asking about percentages.
The majority of new traders lose all or most of their account capital within their first year of trading and leave trading. Some re-finance their account and start again, sometimes many times.
That does not prove it is impossible to be profitable trading, it just proves that there are no barriers to entry into training without knowledge or skills. If a new driver could take to the roads without any lessons, research or a test, the crash rate would be equally high but that wouldn’t prove that safe driving was impossible.
Find a simple and objective strategy which you can run in demo until it is consistently profitable for you. No real money trading until you are winning on demo.
Let’s suppose you only deposit £1000 and only make 5% a month. That’s a 79% profit in a year. After only 8 years you would be earning more than the average salary in the UK, with no extra work involved. Compared to progression in an employed professional position, this is life-changing.
to start forex trading is not a tough game, the main challenge is to keep survive with successfully, because almost 90% traders become losers from this trading place.
Your question already been answered but I must say one of the best posts I read on here from a complete newbie ,you not just shown common sense, by doing bits of research from different sources, but also your honesty too
Thanks for the help, this does seem worthwhile whem you put it that way. Just one question though, how long will it take me to get to a consistent 5% if I put enough time into it?
The power of compounding is massive. Unfortunately in this instrant gratification world we live in, most won’t wait a few years.
Treat it as a business side hustle and as such don’t expect to make any money for a few years. But once you learn to remember that it is scalable.
How long a piece of string . you probably have to spend 6-12 months on a Demo account practicing to find a consistently profitable strategy ,whilst reading and watching examples ,that itself is another challenge finding material which is good .After that, there is no guarantee you be profitable using the live account.The first challenge when opening an account is not to "blow"it .Sorry I could not be a bit more romantic
Start with a very simple strategy, the simplest but importantly the most objective you can find. This will allow you to quantify what you’re supposed to be doing and the results in a demo account before you even put real money in.
In the first instance, allow 2 days to find a strategy, 2 days to get used to its rules and the mechanics of your demo account platform, then start running it in demo. I don’t know, maybe 100 trades?
So this was one of my main questions when I was first starting and honestly, thanks to learning how to trade forex, I’ve been more involved in trading both stock and crypto markets. And while I didn’t make a significant amount of money from forex trading, I’ve been able to understand charts a little better and it’s allowed me to make SOME money from both equities and crypto.
It’s a great skill to have and one that will just apply to one market so while you may not earn much right away, the education you get out of it is def worth it.
My advice to you would be, you either go all in and prepare yourself because it’s going to be hard, or you walk away and don’t waste your time.
You might not value your time now, but if you go all in with this you will definitely value it at some point, imagine in two years, thousands of hours spent studying and still losing money, you lost money and your time. Doesn’t feel good, but if you want to get there you have to pay the price.
This is not a area that if you study a little you make a little money, and if you study a lot you make a lot of money. You study a lot to make a little money and then you need to get a lot of money to make a lot of money.
It’s about consistency. 5-6 hours per week is a lot of time in my opinion. See how long you can keep that going, and then at 3 months/6 months/12 months, re-evaluate. I do think there is overlap in what you learn here that you can take to stock trading and crypto trading. So think of it not just in terms of FX. I would give it a go!
What’s the alternative to learning how to trade forex for you?
I have also started with forex learning recently and I spare 3-4 hours per day for learning and practicing.