The future of trading is worrying me

I have been studying forex for a couple of months now, and I have realised that becoming profitable takes long time hard work. I'm ready to work hard to get there, but I'm worried if trading still offers the same possibilities to traders say after 5-10 years.

What I'm worried is that trading seems to be quite regulated business, where politicians and regulators can throw in any rules they want, and potentially make profitable trading harder or even impossible. It would be a nightmare to learn finally to trade profitably after thousends of hours of work and then trading would be turned impossible for individuals for example.

How do you more experienced people see the future of trading? Will there always be money to be made for talented traders?

I am guessing the push for more regulation recently in the markets in the US has you thinking this way. While some opportunities may be eliminated by the new regulation, others will arise, and just because one country pushes for more regulation, doesn't mean this will carry out across all markets, everywhere.

In other words, it's nearly impossible that trading will be unprofitable for many various reasons. One of the most fundamental ones is that corporations, governments need to raise capital for various reasons. As long as they do this, trading is profitable because in essence trading is nothing more than providing capital and getting a return for it. I feel like many people over look this fact far too often, especially when trading ultra short-term or short-term. Now beyond this, there are many theories regarding the markets, whether the markets are efficient or not may lead you to different conclusions with increased regulation in the picture, but trading opportunities will always exist as long as someone, somewhere needs money.

If you learn how to do it well, you will be able to make money. And even if the markets do change drastically, you will be able to adapt if you are a decent trader and find those profitable opportunities. This isn't going away anytime soon.

Just my 2 cents.

I feel traders don't make money, not because of the system, but because of their attitude to focus only on system and not pay attention to trade management principles...

Also, people are just crazy for robots and we know significant number of forex robots don't work!

trading has existed so long its not funny.. as long as something has a value that is against something else... there will be trading even without markets.. if i walk to america from brazil and i bought a bunch of birds for nothing cause there is alot in brazil and i sold them in america for alot because supply is low... with or without a market I traded and I made money. they have tried to regulate trading and speculators more times then worth mentioning and all that happened was market trauma lol... just ask vlocker .. hell tell ya

look in the news obama say limit bank trading and market FREAKS out.

Pip-Shark. as long as there are people making products to sell, there will be markets to trade them and the money to buy them, and the equities in the companies themselves. The markets may change, but if you master the skills of being able to trade consistently, one market is not much different from another one.

If the "interbank spot" FX market died, there would be futures, indexes, stocks, bonds, foreign stocks, bonds and futures. The banks and "market makers" in the "traditional" markets will always be looking for a way to try to screw the "average joe" out of his hard earned cash. As a consequence there will always be some new "derivative" of one market or another to trade.

Look at Binary Futures and Binary Forex, both relatively new areas of trading. Both provide huge upsides as well as potentially huge downsides (does that sound familiar?).

Learn the skills, master your new trade, rest assured that human nature will conspire to create some new trading scenario with a derivative nature even if Spot FX gets regulated extremely heavily.

yeah...i am now serious in finishing my studies and try to find a full time internal audit job.

In the meantime, trading forex will continue..i am not making enough at the moment from forex trading which pays my bills.

Thanks for the replies! It seems I can now fully concentrate on learning how to trade without fears it might be useless.

Brilliant answer, mate - ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON. Worthy of a full "quote", but I don't know how to make my post *not* limit the character length of your "quoted" post. Hope you know what I mean...

Anyway, what you wrote is exactly the answer I would have given to the original question (were I capable of writing as well as you!... <smile>)