5% per day is achievable

Yo witsnpips,
Reasonably good MM. I am achieving these results with 65% winning ratio.

5% per day is possible but not everyday you will earn 5%. Sometimes there is profit and sometimes there is loss. This is true forex trading.

Your statement makes no sense.

He means that is possible to achieve an average of 5% daily.

How do you know what he means? You either make 5% per day or you dont. And do you even know what that equates to in terms of yearly gains? The whole notion is simply ridiculous. The is no way to consistently do this and it has been proven many times over on this forum.

First of all I have to say that this conversation is a waste of time.

How do you know what he means? Because there's no other possibility.

And do you even know what that equates to in terms of yearly gains? I haven't made the calculations.

The whole notion is simply ridiculous. I agree, and I haven't said it's possible

5% consistently seems unattainable to me with my current experience and knowledge of trading. Say you follow the rule of never risking more than 1% on any one trade, you'd have to make 5 winning trades with a 1R expectancy or 2 winning trades with a 2-3R expectance or 1 winning trade with a 5R expectancy and hmmm...no losing trades.

That seems like a lot of trading in one day.

The most I have been able to get is a 3R expectancy trade in the course of one day....but then again, I'm a newbie.

Sorry if this sounds conceited, but I can't resist saying that these kinds of threads make me chuckle, for a number of reasons:

1. The thread is over 5 years old, but people are still replying to the OP.

2. The OP said that it's possible to average 5% daily in a sustainable fashion, but then asked if people agree with him. So I assume that he hadn't proved whether his claim is possible or not. Sure, if one could find a market that was 90% predictable, then almost any return would be possible (so why only 5%?). But markets don't work that way; for every person who sees the market as being bullish, ultimately there has to be a person who's equally bearish, to be willing to take the opposite position.

3. There's the inevitable on-going debate as to whether a 5% daily average is possible, even though that equates to several hundred times greater annual ROI than the world's top traders (the forex billionaires) are making.

4. People are always happy to discuss what returns are theoretically possible, but never the risk that they're willing to take in order to make them. Everything else being equal, higher return necessitates higher risk. I can tell you an absolutely guaranteed way of turning 10% p.a. ROI into more than 100%: trade ten times your current position sizes. Or, in other words, ROI in itself is a very indeterminate measure of trading proficiency. You can ramp up the scale to support whatever ROI you want to believe is possible.

5. Given that trade frequency also has a huge bearing on ROI, then once again, anything is theoretically possible. If you can make 5% per month risking 1% per trade, then you can make 5% per day risking 1% per trade, providing that you can find the same consistency of price behavior on a timeframe that's 30x smaller.

6. What might be possible for one person has absolutely no bearing on what's possible for another. If people want to know what's possible, you can become a billionaire. If they want to know what's a realistic outcome, it's that the vast majority never make it, hence by far the most likely outcome for a randomly selected individual is a negative one. The 'average' trader (if we may call him a trader, that is) loses his shirt.

7. Anybody can choose to debate from the side of any one of the points I've made, and although (IMO) there's some truth in all of them, nothing is ultimately provable.

Return on investment should be counted in year, NOT months, and NOT especially days. This is just a marketing scheme to get more people to start trading and this is why most traders failed.

5% seems unattainable. Trading doesn't work that way. The 5% assumes you know, every probability the market will throw at you ... and thats not possible. Evey trading day will be different. Theres the possibility to experience 5% or 50% in a single day. Theres also the possibility to experience -5% or -50% in a day. Negative days will decrease your average hugely, assuming you win some and lose some. Theres even the possibility of complete negative average.

Making any short term target like this is foolish.

Do not try and make money, in any amount. Instead try and make correct decisions. I know that sounds strange but I believe that it's true.

Make correct decisions and you will make money. But if you focus on making money, (especially with such arbitrary targets), then you will make the wrong decisions.

You cannot control results, only your own decisions. So that is what you need to focus on. Result orientated thinking will not work. You can only ever take what the market is willing to give you.

Agreed on the last few posts.
The thread's idea generates more, to me.

It's interesting what people tell themselves about money to earn it. A consideration of varying the number of trades counted through time reveals this.

One-time trades would be the rarest:
A job's stock options or a clever insight through easily-obtained information, perhaps. Skill or money interest, inconsequential.
By definition, no traders do this. Lots of others do.

Cycles work for a very few.
In this context, a cycle is a period of trading with defined objectives and then a period of nontrading. It's these people who appear to support speaking of earnings alongside skill/decisionmaking.
ff has had a few people with threads that said they made real money in cycles -- one established a '100 to 1000 in a day' thread, going thru half a dozen or so cycles of making it and then withdrawing the money; another, more experienced ff member went for broke and made ten times that over a few weeks, waiting a good while before starting another such cycle. A third treats opening and then, once the idea is proven, closing different methods' threads as a way, perhaps, to refresh and challenge ones trading. A fourth may simply switch methods (range, trend, etc.) for a new market cycle. Exhaustion and diversion would create micro-cycles in each period of trading.

Streaks happen more often.
Someone's younger relative, who is just beginning, does really well over a short period. Profitable traders involved in trend trading hit it big when the overall market goes one way for a period. Unprofitable traders may reverse and lose all made in such a market just as fast. Theoretically, a person could invest in one symbol once, and do well; only, most streaks
Thus, merely accepting the money without noting it or the skill appears the most likely.

Averages over lots of trades are the most common measure.
This thread suggests one can label one's daily earnings: Versus this, a chart's technicals change in major ways at least once a day (for daytraders) and discretion invites emotional trading. Most of the profitable traders who answered in this thread likely do well averaging.
Talk of skill over money here addresses how damaging over the longterm a little inconsistency of one's skill can be to an account.

5% per day for how long ? 10 trading days, 100 ? 1000 ?
10 yes, 100 and more, no way. not possible. You will have losing days, or days when you break even