I come from the technical side of life. My initial trade was fitting and turning, then I moved on to tool & die making, and after that I went into machinery manufacturing and design.

Eventually I decided that I enjoyed Forex more than the hassle and grime of my original field.

So I began with trading on demo (like I think most do these days) and I traded successfully on demo for 3 years before opening a live account and trading with my own money.

What a HUGE difference!

The demo and the live account are exactly the same, in fact no, the live account is more stable.

But the difference lies in the 2 lurking monsters of life. Greed and fear. It soon becomes aparent how very much there and real those monsters are when the money is real. In demo form they didn't exist at all.
m finally getting better at actually PUTTING in a feasable stop loss in more or less the right place and actually leaving the trade to go as was planned.

It makes all the difference in the world, and I only figured out (after much burning of fingers) that the profit is totally unrelated to how big your gains are. It is actually only related to how well you limit and master the loss.

One thing that always used to mess up my trades was the frequent 'minor' news that I did not know about. I only knew about the 'big' news events. Yet quite often (since I found Forex Factory, or was it For