Profitable Traders, how well are you doing?

Hi Guys,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this.

I just wanted to ask everyone on here,

How long have you been trading for?

How long have you been profitable?

What is your monthly avg% or yearly%?

Do you use prop firms or trade with your own money?

Not sure these results are good or not i am beginner and just created a new system which i will be using in my journey of trading although the first trades were gamble but yeah fixed those issues later on

Nice

Which model have you used that we see in the picture?

Nice, Good luck on your journey and I hope it keeps going well for you

Its my own stuff basically just support resistance refined it to my needs and timings for better results soo far going solid i have done backtest for like 1k trades and my expectancy was positive soo

which app is this

MYfxbook

I just made my trading account with Trado I am trying to learn on my own. Very confusing to do. Anybody willing to teach me? I am going off youtubes and TT vids ..Really want to learn this

At the moment, by far the single most important thing for you to understand really, really clearly is that people with the education, skill-set and experience enabling them to trade successfully for a living are NOT spending hundreds of hours making videos to put on Youtube and TikTok.

Those are people with marketing skills, not people with trading skills.

Their YT/TT channels are directly/indirectly their income-source.

It’s overwhelmingly easier for plausible-sounding people to make a living by selling or promoting stuff to aspiring traders than it is by trading. Most people don’t really understand this, and they struggle on for years hoping that it isn’t true, because that seems like such an easy way to learn.

And it is an easy way to learn. The problem is that what you learn, that way, is how to struggle and join the great majority who never make a living from their trading at all.

That is true, and anyone selling courses as well in any field, they are good with marketing skills and try to make money of newbies.

Every one trades differently, finding something profitable it will require trying out different things and a lot of backtesting. Don't trade with real money until you have done this and found something that works, back tested and forward tested.

Do everything yourself i would suggest why beacuse no one can help you in trading in anyway ( for me how i have learned so far ( in start i would just open charts and just trade 24hrs a day ofc on demo ( rember i was monitoring my trades (recording yhen ) after that i would be looking at some pattrens in my trading where i will get most of the earnings ( like 6:40 to 7:20 PKT ) after that i got focous on my trading style ( where i have seen in my trading if the trade which i taken cross more then 3 to 7 mins i get really anxious so i switched to scalping) after that was looking at my risk parameters how much i can tolerate to lose bla bla many more its like that for me in the end i have created rules on these and yeah collected data over 1k trades where my rules got statistically profitable thats it i just excute same stuff day and day thats how trading was for me and yeah i am been trading for like 2 years now

Trading for a few years now. Became profitable after gaining consistency and controlling risk.
I focus on steady returns instead of fixed monthly % targets.
I use both prop firms and a small personal account.

Very encouraging to see a lot of experienced traders providing valid and nuanced opinions. I've been on the trading journey for over 6 years now, but the first four years were on and off. I'd try trading for 1 to 2 months, lose money, and leave the industry for 6 to 8 months. I've bought courses, indicators, bots, signals, mentorship, and even had someone else trade for me. I got serious about trading in 2024 and have been breaking-even so far, which is a good sign for me. All I can say is this: Do not give up that easily, backtest and live test your strategy thoroughly, and keep it very simple. Don't create a system with too many conditions. A simple rule-based strategy that works for one to three pairs is sufficient in this line of work. This is how I've been positive this year even through the Middle East crisis

I started forex trading around 2002. For the first few years I tried manual discretionary trading, but I was not profitable and blew 2 $1000 accounts rather quickly. I also bumbled around trying numerous indicators or other peoples trade signals, but nothing really worked for me.

In the end, I was sick of it, and fully prepared to quit trying to find a profitable system.

In 2005 I began looking into mechanical (non-discretionary) trading systems. This is the time I started to become profitable. I have a programming background, so I wrote an expert advisor framework where I could easily plug in and backtest various mechanical strategies. After finding the one that I considered to perform best regarding risk/reward ratio, I programmed a dedicated expert advisor for that strategy. I then enhanced it with various tweaks to mitigate losses due to spread, slippage, and swap. These are my results from 2010 on by using this strategy:

2010 : 36.55%
2011 : -7.67%
2012 : -5.42%
2013 : 15.70%
2014 : 48.39%
2015 : 49.35%
2016 : 21.96%
2017 : 15.66%
2018 : 0.66%
2019 : -29.92%
2020 : 50.07%
2021 : -4.74%
2022 : 18.03%
2023 : 8.00%
2024 : 24.13%
2025 : 17.31%
2026 : 19.57%

I don't think it's too bad, even though COVID did set me back a bit. I run my expert advisor on a VPS with relatively large live accounts spread over different brokers.

Looking at my programming history, the last time I updated the expert advisor was in 2019. Most updates to the expert advisor were to add more functionality, and maintain compatibility as Metatrader was updated. My expert advisor has some variables that I will occasionally modify to suit new backtest data as it becomes available, although this is just me being pedantic. I do still try to find better systems that suit my risk/reward appetite, but most of the time I just log in to the VPS at least once a week to make sure everything is going okay.

This is not to say that you cannot be profitable long term with discretionary trading, just that I could not be. Plus I rather spend time with my family, and not be burning my eyeballs out staring at screens any more. Also, there are no doubt more profitable expert advisor or manual systems around. This is just my result with my expert advisor at my risk/reward preference.

VPS restart unexpectedly. how do you deal with that ? I much prefer having a laptop in my appartment

VPS restart is very rare in my experience, and normally forewarned via email by VPS provider. I cannot remember any time my VPS restarted and I did not get an email about it. Most times email notification was given about a planned restart a week beforehand, or really rare would be an email immediately after an unexpected restart.

Even then, my expert advisor is designed to resume trading existing positions after restart. I did consider setting up auto-launching MT4 platforms after VPS restart, but it's not important for the way I trade.

My first year live trading after studying this game for 2 years. Made about 70% so far. Mostly on that nice oil run. I dedicate most of my profitability to the confidence of my trading strategy not just being based upon backtests but on how it forms from macroeconomic regimes unfolding in classic ways. My strategy is starting to really blossom which i guess isnt important. I think if you have ideas you should trust in yourself and those ideas enough to at least warrant studying and interrogating them because sometimes, even as a newbie you can have some pretty original ideas. Everyone lives a unique life in unique times, to think that your ideas arent worth can do more harm then good. Stay demo until it starts making money and then go live when you have a real undestanding of the trades and edge youre actually executing on.

For those of you who have shared your multi-year track records here, what was the biggest psychological shift you had to make during that specific transition period from being a struggling/break-even trader to a consistently profitable one?