Hi everybody, I’m Rudy, I’m 35 and I’m new here and to the trading community. This is hopefully a slightly provocative thread whose intent is to probe the naive terrain of my ideas and leave something interesting for all to read.
BACKGROUND, WHO AM I
I work as a senior 3d artist in the film/videogames industry. It took me about 5 years of serious self directed training (probably a lifetime of artistic training) to become commercially “viable” for the market and being hired. It’s a really tough career to break into, you need to be always on top of your tech/art skills while having a good amount of predisposition. But I love it, so I’ve been able to push through countless nights of study while doing dozens of odd jobs during the day. I’m no stranger to effort and discipline.
On top of that I’m also an “artrepreneur”: I have a quite successful youtube channel and personal project which brings me a lot of joy and it’s starting to create revenue.
HOW MUCH DO I MAKE
I have no issues in talking numbers: I live in Europe, work from a beautiful island (my wife and I can work from anywhere) and make about 5k euros each month from my salary and project. It’s not much for many of you but I’m aware it’s on the upper side of an average income here. Combined with my wife salary it certainly allows us to live well.
WHAT I DON’T LOVE ANYMORE AND WHY TRADING
This is the bottom line: I started my day job as it was directly connected with my interests and passion - but I recently became aware that the industry is changed and now I simply work for the salary. Nothing more, nothing less. My art and passion is in my Youtube project.
I always had a curiosity for trading, I’m not very good at math but I’m pattern oriented, tech savvy and quite intuitive. Maybe this spells out disaster but maybe it can help in trading
WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR
A solid profession which can slowly replace my day job to get rid of “a boss”, “a few studios to depend on for work” and “being fired”.
A profession which allows me to gain a certain degree of financial freedom (eg.: buy a 300-400k euro house in cash after 3-5 years of trading) while working a reduced number of hours per day (certainly not 14 hours a day of my present career).
A profession which is designed purely to generate wealth so I’m aware I’m in it simply for the money. As beautifully neutral as it sounds.
The starting investment I would dedicate to forex trading would be 1000euros each month.
If you made this far I’d love to hear your opinions and experience!
All my best
There is nothing personally rewarding about trading in the way that conventional employment can be. Its more like being a machine operator on a production line - you turn up at the same time every day, you feed the material in, you pull the levers in a certain order and widgets pop out the other end.
Not only that but I’d be surprised if trading ever made you the sort of money your own work has done. Sure, you’re now only working for salary, but that’s literally what trading is too.
That said, I still say, yes, get into trading. BUT - don’t carry forward the belief that longer hours and deeper knowledge will bring you more money, that’s not the way it works.
It may help to clarify I’m absolutely not looking for any emotional satisfaction or realization WITHIN the profession of trading. It would be absurd to me. I already have that thanks to my projects.
I’m already a “robot” in a very segmented production line (as for the day job).
So I wonder in a very cold and logical way: could trading, after long and strenuous study and application, allow me to work shorter hours, without a boss and giving me more flexibility? Certainty is now more absent than ever in every industry so it may as well be time to explore? It’s a peer to peer meditation if you will
Agree with Tommor. Invest your monthly money into an index linked fund - you’ll get a safe 12% APR. Unless you treat forex trading as a new business, it won’t work for you in the long term - or even the short term, because it’s difficult to become and stay profitable.
Just make sure that this would suit your lifestyle which seems pretty cool to me.
Best of luck.
Invest your monthly money into an index linked fund - you’ll get a safe 12% APR. Unless you treat forex trading as a new business
Hi Steve, thanks for your suggestions! We invest steadily in ETF through Nutmeg every month. So far we’re up 16% which is crazy good.
What do you mean “treating forex as a new business?”.
Are you referring to starting with a bigger capital than 1k per month?
I’m still a noob and just started few days ago to learn. What I’m actually trying to do is exploring forex trading as a side business until I’m able to eventually, make the jump and replace my day job.
You see yes the lifestyle is pretty good and eventually my art business will, hopefully, take over but until that happens my employer can call in and say “you’re fired” and then we would need to relocate to the big cities to get a new gig. So it looks good and stable but… it’s just a mirage like everything.
Yes, trading can mean shorter hours, less stress, your own choice of daily routine, with just possibly the right amount of unexpected occurrences and intellectual challenge to keep it stimulating.
One of the best things about trading is that you can get a demo account from a broker and trade it in precisely the way you would trade with real money but without any cost or risk of financial loss. Its hard to think of another self-employment opportunity in which you can do this. Demo-trade until you are running a consistently profitable strategy: until then, don’t put actual money in, real money won’t change the outcome.
The demo thing is really cool. At the moment I plan to first finish the babypips training while I’m also watching a few videocourses to get initial awareness of all this.
Then I will throw myself in the simulator!
Nailed it, the less time you spend “trading” you will actually perform better. Setting alerts, trading higher timeframes etc will help. Spend most your time educating yourself not trading.
I’ve been trading 8 years, professionally for 3 years. I lost money or broke even for 5 years, make sure you get the correct education and knowledge and you hopefully will achieve it faster than me, but I am stubborn
Wow that’s quite a trial by fire.
I would probably give myself a very harsh deadline of learning to be profitable in one year and then re-evaluate what went wrong-right and decide if I’m in for the long run.
My mentality is such; I ask myself IS THIS WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO? and DO I BELIEVE I CAN ACHIEVE IT? If the answer is yes, then I keep going until I achieve it. I would rather die attempting than live quitting. Yes I am extreme hahaha
Another question I would have is: how compatible forex trading would be with a full time job? Since I work from home I COULD not afford to loose too much focus from my 10 to 6 job. I would be able to trade mainly after 6pm GMT.
Its perfectly possible to simply trade off the daily time-frame using entry orders which you set as from the market close. There is no need to day-trade to make a profit, in fact most traders will advise against starting as a new trader on intra-day time-frames and to always keep away from anything less than 15-minute charts. Again, its often said the most profitable form of trading is from the daily charts.
Let’s imagine for a minute that we’re flipping the script here, and I’m a guy working in some random but semi-stable profession and coming to you for advice on whether or not I should bother with becoming an “artrepreneur”. I have no background in artistic training (neither do you in trading) and knowledge of the tools I would need to do it like Photoshop/Maya/Unity/etc (neither do you in trading patterns/market structure/trading psychology). My goal is to create a successful youtube channel that will reduce the hours I work in my current day job and buy a 300-400k house in 3-5 years, and I have about 1k to invest in my tools. I would give myself about a year to start making some money on the youtube channel, otherwise, I’d have to re-evaluate. I don’t love spending hours drawing and rendering per se, but the extra income is nice to have. Should I go for it?
Personally, I really don’t think trading is something you can brute force and grind out an income in. In art, you need a flair, a unique perspective, something that makes you stand out. In trading you need an edge. If you don’t love trading, I think technicals are boringgg. Hours and hours of pouring over charts, analyzing defunct patterns. Any technical indicator you can find is garbage on its own and you won’t make money trading someone else’s system. The reason for this is less conspiracy theory and more practical - No business book gives you an untapped business idea that would work. If it were that simple, the business would already exist. Sure you can learn about how they work or what elements made them successful, but to create your own, you need your own idea.
For this reason, if you do decide to pick up trading, I would strongly advise against fx as it can incredibly range bound and the moves are sharp (often during working/sleeping hours depending on where you live) and would recommend equities instead. Even then, you need an edge.
Hey Phaz3d that’s an interestic perspective but there’s a main issue with the analogy as my idea is “trading” () one profession (3d modeler) for another (trader). Not trading an artistic project for a profession. It wouldn’t make much sense. Unless you consider trading as an artistic project or enterprise which would be really interesting and respected nonetheless!
So in case you’d ask me the same question I consider myself a very pragmatic and encouraging person. I would literally lay out a possible, safe strategy for you to attempt:
Start to learn 3d modelling in every possible way (how you do it, up to you)
Start practicing asap and create something which interests or matters to you.
Use that 1k to invest in a decent workstation
I would tell you a year to evaluate your 3d skills is very early but may be useful to stay ahead of the competition.
You shouldn’t absolutely leave your day job but start selling your models on Cgtraders or TurboSquid. This would allow you to make a little income along the way while building experience and portfolio.
After one year start approaching recruiters and look for a studio who’s willing to hire and train you as a junior.
The bottom line in your response makes me understand that trading is something to be undertaken, only, exclusively for the love of trading in itself?
So you’d be happy to undertake trading even if money would not be a on object?
Hi Rudyoriginal,
I found your post refreshing, and indicative of the thoughts that go through thousands of minds who realise that trading may be an opportunity with life changing potential. I like to strip things back to basics in the hope that it will genuinely add value to your thought process. For my sins, I am a management consultant, and I thoroughly enjoy what I get paid to do. That may seem perverse because most of my colleagues do that they do to earn a wage. I have tried to change what I do but I get fidgety and bored, so come back to the same old same old.
In management speak, what you are contemplating is a transformation of the way you run your current life, and in order to be successful in creating a transformation you need to understand what the end game objectives need to be, and then to set about a “transition plan” to achieve your life transformation. What you actually decide to do on the journey from now to your perfect future is probably less important than understanding and deciding what that transformation looks like in your perfect world. Since you are the author of your own destiny, do not compromise. Be selfish and be single minded about the timeframe and the interim steps you need to take to complete the transformation. I could write a book on this matter. Whether you dive in and make trading that object of your transition in your life, or whether you choose another vehicle via which to realise that dream, it may not matter. Best of luck with your life transformation
If you’re simply working for the salary, why would trading be more fulfilling than a different career change? If you became a successful trader, wouldn’t you still be earning money by putting in hours sitting at a computer? There are a LOT of prototypes of what a successful trader looks like (full day scalping, leveraged swing trading, automated trading, long term fundamental trading, etc) with various amounts of the presumed workload so I won’t try to box you into a particular answer since you haven’t even started your journey yet. My main point is to think ‘of all the other things you could spend a year learning about, why trading?’
Personally, if I won the lotto tomorrow and never needed income again, I would probably still be trading. I wouldn’t trade if there was no money to be made, but hopefully, that answers the question.
However, there’s nothing wrong with peeking into the rabbit hole to see how far it goes. There’s plenty of accessible and reasonable info to get you started. If I were to give you some things to keep in mind, it would be:
Don’t trade without an edge
Don’t confuse lack of an edge with a need to have “better trading psychology”
As mentioned earlier, there are many ways to trade and I don’t like to advocate something just because it works/doesn’t work for me, but I believe these rules always hold.
Many people just go for the fun of it, a gamble, or a hobby, but serious work is required to become consistently profitable over a long time period. The ‘business’ traders are focused on treating forex ‘seriously’, dedicate themselves full time in making it work, and that could mean a change in lifestyle.
A side business falls outside this scenario, until you become proficient in making your strategies profitable year in and year out. First of all, though, experiment with a demo account and find out what suits you style best and focus on that.
I really would advise you to refrain from putting money into a live account until you’ve learnt how to trade properly. Give it six months, which should be enough time for you to see if forex is for you or not.
I wrote some code a little while ago which takes the past years worth of Forex data and crunches it. What I found is that the average percentage move every week for a Forex pair is around 2%. I stress the word “average” in that statement. Here is what it told me…
If you pick the correct direction for a pair every week you can make an average of 2% on whatever you risk every week. This should give you an idea of the income you could make from Forex trading. If you have $1000 and you bet it all and you are right every time then you will make approximately $20 per week on average. Using leverage will help you make more than that.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, all events portrayed…
