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Well, that’s a matter of opinion.
Plenty of “successful” traders aim at capital preservation. That’s their No.1 priority.
But then…who knows…they might do it all wrong and still trading “successful” nevertheless…
Gee…that’s a difficult question to answer.
To be honest I don’t know how to answer that question because I don’t know and I have no control over where price will go in the instruments I’m trading.
Crude Oil might rock back to 140 and I’ll make a fortune. It may sit on 60 for the next twelve month and I’ll be making 2% if I’m lucky.
So why worry about things I’ve no control over…?
I have two monthly goals. The first one is to not lose money, the second is to achieve an average of 5% per month, which then adds up to about 80% per year with compounding.
NO!!
I recommend that people do not post their live profits on this open website.
There are all sorts of undesirables watching here, such as identity theives, hackers, full on career criminals etc.
Please use wisdom.
You real profits are private and not for everyones eyes.
That’s probably true yes, but just stating your percentage goals can’t really hurt huh?
No problem with that!! 
Your math is just fine. You’ve just illustrated how little we can/should believe what other people claim to do/know/etc.
There are a lot of big mouths with big words out there, but only a few can actually trade with consistent profitability. And the funny part is that those who can seldom brag about it…
Remember that 90-95% of people don’t make it in trading. Perhaps they’re too busy telling other people how good they are
10 - 20% a month is totally doable and not that hard once you get some expertise with your method and have good knowledge of the market behavior.
Let’s assume you have it all covered (money management, great skills, etc).
What I think that happens with most traders is that once they start getting amazing numbers they get dazzled by greed and start to fail, making mistake over mistake over mistake until they lose their account or smartly stop trading to reconsider what they’re doing.
The key here is discipline and self control, and no, it’s not magic. It happens and it’s all up to you.
What happens to your psyche if you don’t archieve those goals you set…? It sure has an impact on your psyche no matter what people say.
I rather protect my capital and the rest will take care of itself. I aim for good trade set-ups and more often than not my capital increases. Sometimes more and sometimes less but it does overall.
I am shaking my head in disbelieve when people talking about risking 5% of their capital per trade. That’s 20 losing trades and their capital has gone up in smoke.
That happens more often than you think because people don’t like to talk about it. People love to tell you about their winners but they hate to tell you about their losers.
The best traders I’ve ever come in contact with were the ones who talked about their losses and stupid trades instead of bragging and what the could do blahblah.
Those traders were honest. Especially to themselves.
Completely off topic.
Cas, whatever happened to your wonderful avatar?
Yeah… I take your point…
I got carried away there.
It needed a rest.
No no, I meant that my question was off topic!
It’s obvious from your posts that you know a thing or two and I read them with pleasure.
O.K.
The lady is back…must have been on a trip to get some cigarettes LOL.
Thank you for your kind words.
Afternoon everyone… I trade with a group that targets a min of 20% a week as a reasonable goal. That being said out of 40 people in the room less than 15 do it. Then you have the exceptions to the rule one trader made 6000 pips last week if look at the USD/SEK he made 2500 of it alone. Most wouldn’t even consider that to trade, Spread is like 50… But as he stated it once it starts trending it is a money machine.
The majority of the successfull traders risk less than 1 % of their accounts . But this helps in the very agressive trading that takes place. On a personal note I am not one of the 15 but hope to be soon… I have all the tools but have not developd the right mental edge.
I know o990l6mh is studying Jame16 ideas. That is where a lot of these traders migrated from. They were all profitavle when there also. It is a very good starting point. But they saw the amount of pips they were misisng in ranging markets and over 7 years trading developed means to extract those pips.
Sorry for so long I just feel we should give new people some hope and dreams everyone is always going on about small gains and how risky it is . That they will find out if they don’t work at this like anything else in their lives it wont come.
Trade Well and always grasp for the stars… Ken
Exactly! Good to read your post. I know you know what you-re talking about. Just because not everyone gets those results doesn’t mean they’re not achieveable. Not encouraging everyone to want to get rich overnight, but as you said, it’s just to give a little bit of shining light to newbies.
Surely a dose of reality won’t hurt. In fact it might save a lot of newbies a lot of their hard earned cash.
I aim for 25% per month , offcourse it does not happen all the time but this is my goal
I aim for 10% per week…
FYI - 5% risk per trade, you would have to lose ~135 trades in a row to totally blow your account. Though only 15 trades to blow half your account…
Risk vs reward…
Personally I believe that anything over 3% per trade is to risky in the long run.
To some extent it probably has to do with the account size. It’s difficult to just risk 3% of a small, say 1000$ account since it’s gonna feel like forever to get it anywhere. But that’s just impatience talking.
We should try to do everything right from the start so I personally don’t believe much in the: I’ll risk 10% until I get my balance to X$, then I’ll only risk 2%. First, they likely never get to X$ to start with, and if they do, they’ll probably find it hard to cut down the risk, resulting in a losing streak wiping the gains out.
But hey, different strokes for different folks!
By the same token, it would take ~35 trades @ 2% to blow half your account, and 335ish to entirely blow it…
The trouble with small accounts is it is very very easy to risk to much, unless you are very disiplined.
On a large account balance it is easy to trade 1-2% risk, because that equates to a substantal payout.
2% of $50k = $1000.00
2% of $500 = $10.00
The principle is the same, just greed takes over and that 10 bucks is not enough…