Reasonable Monthly Earnings Expectation

Published stats on US based forex brokers show that only about 30% of accounts are profitable in a quarter. Doubtless the number of total profitable accounts over a longer period is much lower as losers run out of money and get churned, and some of the profitable accounts are only temporarily on the positive side of cash flow.

I've been fortunate enough to stay profitable for almost two years now, so I get a POTB. However, I can't get most of my friends excited over my profits even though I'm fairly consistent.

With that introduction, I'd like to know what you all think is a good monthly return for a forex trader to get, assuming the account is profitable. I've include some poll options to make it easy, but please add comments if my options don't fit or you want to explain your thoughts further.

PS. I know this is an amateurish question, but I've been at this for five years including paper trading and learning time and want to know if my results fit the pattern for more experienced traders.

What's consistantly? 3 months, 3 years? I've been profitable, 30% for a couple of months, mostly because of steve hopwoods excellent coding work

Curious to the results of this poll!

I'd say about a year is a good time period to judge success. I've had lucky streaks of 2-3 months when testing new ideas before they collapse.

It's reasonable to expect that you'll never make a living trading.

Oh dear, missing poll option. I've assumed away the 90% of traders who never succeed, but the question is that for those who do, what's reasonable? Another way of approaching the question is what's outlandish or what's too little to bother with.

Exponential growth will fill any petri dish, so let's further assume a modest account size that could sustain growth for a few years before becoming "too big to fail."

Not consistent yet .

But do make enough returns to make a living of it .

Takes hell lot of time to reach the stage .

Money management matters .

Thanks for everyone who has participate and/or commented. Self-styled consistently profitable traders seem fairly split between less than 10% and greater than 30% returns in a month.

I made two significant trading errors in the past year and took a sabbatical from trading, so my monthly average is around 8%. Discounting those three events, it's about 13%. My non-trading friends don't believe I'm doing that well, and most of my trading friends/acquaintances seem to be unimpressed.

Considering that the forex traders I've been in touch with are either a) unprofitable and looking for big money or b) hunting for an ea and not interested in a manual system, my poll of friends wasn't hitting my target audience of profitable self traders.

Thanks again.