The cost of trading

I'm sure this will be obvious to a lot of more experienced traders but I recently calculated how much the spreads are costing me.

I lost my first account, which was AUD 4,000. While preparing my statements for tax I totalled how many transactions I did, which was just over 400 (I mostly traded 5 minute charts). With my previous broker, most of the spreads were three or four pips, which when you times by 400 is some thing in the order of 1,500 dollars. I'm glad I shopped around and found a broker with much tighter spreads.

You live and learn, hopefully.

Hi there, consider that $4,000 AUD a cost of education. I know, ive been there!

Hopefully that you can learn where you went wrong and become profitable. Give trading a demo account a go. Also remember to look over your failed trades to figure out where you went wrong.

Good luck.

The other thing I would give some SERIOUS thought to is the time frame you are trading.....way over trading and way too short a TF.......jmho

I trade a lot less now, one of the problems I had (as I mentioned in another thread) was that I always wanted to be in the market and tried to force it to give me money when it wasn't there.

I trade with daily charts and five minute charts. Now that I'm a little more sober in my expectations I'm finding things a lot easier. My five minute charts made good money last month (8%) and are generally earning more than the longer time frame.
The negative of the shorter time frames is that you have to watch the charts for long periods. Once I have enough capital I think I'll drop them.