I trade my own account for a living. Tell your story

It's only impossible because you think it is

Seriously. That's the only reason.

http://www.forexfactory.com/forexsaint/23

What's the point of trading then?

to get rich and then live off interest. Trading income ?! For brokers only.

2 traps.

Shortterm. One cannot increase size and is stuck at one size until edge gone. Cant trade 100+ contracts with 20 pips stop.

Pschological: If you do have edge with 70% chance of win and is not liquidity sensitive then you do not need more than 200 trades to get rich. Not increasing size is great mistake and again once edge is gone you on the streets.

Yes you can even trade 500 lots (or more) with a 20 pip stop.

500 lots with a 3 pip stop? Doesn't work as well but still doable. If the rest of the world just bought 50,000 lots, they aren't going to take out your 3 pip stop just because its so easy to take out. If the market is taking off, it's taking off, and no one is going to reverse it just to stop out your 500 lot 3 pip stop loss. But 500 lots with 20 pip stop loss? That's all day long. Don't say you can't do something when you don't know what you are talking about.... (no offense or anything). To say its not feasible to trade even 100 lots with a 20 pip stop is just completely inaccurate.

I don't think you realize how LITTLE 500 lots moves the EURUSD. Not even close to a full pip. You can certainly scalp intraday doing so. Those who trade even larger sizes (more than 500 lots) on the intraday swings know where the bounces are going to be, so they just do it with limit orders.

EURUSD averages like 2000 lots PER SECOND during London session.


No I don't know from experience, but I'm close with my broker (best EURUSD spreads in the world for the low income trader, 0.7 to 0.9 pips total fee. If you are trading like 10,000 lots a month you can get 0.2-0.5 pip spreads) and they give me some good info on the matter of huge sized market orders and slippage.

Basically my point is, you aren't going to have liquidity issues in EURUSD unless you are trading yards.... (10,000+ lot)

Stop hunting is a complete and utter myth. They don't need to stop out 500 lot orders just to get enough liquidity to enter their 10,000 lots...


10,000 lot order with 20 pip stop = $2 mil loss. That is absolutely NOTHING to the criminal mega banks.... most of whom have over $1trillion in net assets.

I mean hell you hear about interbank traders losing billions all the time...

Anyway, I just hear this liquidity nonsense on FF all the time, and always feel the need to correct it.

which broker u use bro?

95% individual people can't trade for a living, this is excluding financial institution, insurance companies, hedge fund, etc.
why? because such an institution has its own system (either fundamental or technical) and professional traders/analysts who work within those companies/institution has a responsibility to stick with the system when they execute any position in the market.

If you can create such a complete systems to trade which is combination of both technical and fundamental in a great timing, and u can stick with your own system. I think you can trade for a living. But it is difficult to create such a system since i think most individual traders only stick with technical and ignore most of fundamentals since they don't have access or very little knowledge to any crucial information before the news release.

I still believed there is no such technical system that works in all the market condition. if so, Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and many2 more financial institution doesn't need to hire high paid professional traders/analysts to keep their money works all the time.

how long have you been trading ? and do you trade for a living ?

i trade since 2004, and i don't trade for living. Forex is just one of my investment portfolio. its only 10% on my investment portfolio.

I crashed my account during 2008 when GBP free fall from 2.1000 to 1.3000 eventhough i have money management but i bought Pound so many times and hit the SL so many times. However, since i think forex its not a good investment during that time, i put my money on equities and make a good fortune during 2009 so i recovered my losses in forex.

Since that, I learned a lot. One thing is you have to have a big picture of investment vehicles not only Foreign exchange there are many investment vehicles around you. market changed everytime for example there are many individual trader at this time which create more volumes than 3-4 years a go, furthermore EUR/USD has more movement than GBP/USD at the moment compared with 3-4 years ago.

For each currency you have to have a reasonable stop losses depend on your strategy.
For example GBPUSD has average 120 pips movement in a day with max price range (60days) 258 pips. and EURUSD has average 106 pips a day in this month and max price range around 240 pips. Do you only put 5 pips as a stop loss??? i think a reasonable SL would be 30-40 pips and 80-100 for TP. But if you're a scalper perhaps you would have another strategy, but be carefull. since most of the technical indicator work best @ H4, D1, W timeline (you can google for this information).

I don't see any reason to be a scalper since i think they will put into a position without any good reason so only their greed, frustatation, and feeling which control them into a position

You must be broker shill. Here little chapter from my manual thks to CQG futures :

Are Your Stops Being Hit Too Often?

If your stop loss orders are being hit too frequently, here are some possible causes:

• Bucking the market trend.

• Through impatience, you anticipated a market change and entered a market before it gave a clear signal.

• Failing to decide in advance where the right points of support and resistance are located.

• Improperly placing your stops, moving a stop too soon, or moving it too close to the market price — Fear.

• Incorrectly judging the potential of a trade — Greed.

• Failing to weigh the risk / reward ratio properly.

If this is happening to you, you should review your judgments about potential market movements, and/or about where you have chosen to place your stop. DO NOT, under any circumstances, abandon the use of Stop Loss orders. If your stops continue to be hit too frequently, get out of the market and stay out until you have located the source of your difficulty.

Rather than becoming irritated at such a situation, be thankful. The stops are sending you a clear message that something in your technique is out of kilter. Persisting to defy the market will only damage your bank account, your confidence, and your ultimate goal of success.

I'll put an end to this discussion:

I have met 2 fulltime traders here on FF, seen their accounts and even traded with them. The one worked in Banking before moving to forex and brought some of what he learnt over to Forex and he is REALLY good trading off m15 for his entries calculated off H1 and H4 and sometimes even Daily and weekly targets. He has a very big account now but obviously diversifies his money into stocks and properties so that his trading isn't his only income. He has very high profitability and one morning he made £20 000 just from London Open on Cable and Fibre...

The other guy started out with 30 000 Dollars and has worked it up to over 600k in 18 months. He had blown a small account before that but then was told to double 3 demo accounts before going live again and soo he did. He said the change from demo to real was very easy for him after that as he saw trades in terms of pips and percentages instead of Dollars. He recently relocated to an island and is living the dream trading still. He had his own business in before moving over to Forex, nothing in the financial Industry.

Stop listening to the losers on here who say it can't be done, IT CAN! 10% a month is nothing compared to what some traders can make, but it does get more difficult psychologically later with larger amounts. You don't need a large account but 5k should be seen as a minimum even though my friend has told me stories of his trader buddies which I won't repeat here because no one will believe it anyways.

Keep working and keep searching! The verse from the bible which says search and you will find, knock and the door shall be opened can be applied here, REALLY!

I have been searching and knocking and am finally getting there. Up 83% on my demo account in just over 6 months, once that is done I'll do it two more times ironing out my errors and finding which trades I'm not good enough to trade and which trades I do really well in and then focus on them. I have no doubt that I will be a trader one day and that I will make a living from it.

Here's a quote from my friend:

"It does take some time to study it and get used to it. I feel that your biggest problem is that you want success now, you can't have it. The market requires you to put in some serious brain time before it will reward you, you did not become a professional rugby player the first time you picked up the ball, you had to work at it and still do every day. Trading is just like that it takes time and devotion, there are no shortcuts. Nobody ever became a millionaire by borrowing a system or attending some class. Becoming a millionaire in trading takes time, devotion, dilligence and patience. You will get knocked down a few times and will need to dust yourself off. At the end trading will reward those that appreciate it and have learned its nuances. Pick a strategy and practise, practise, practise. An old hand I know told me it would take 10,000 hours of practise to know a strategy, he was not wrong.

Stick to a strategy and start learning, every strategy can be made profitable as long as it works for you, not anyone else, just you. Start reading some books too about technical analysis, there are lots of them written about equities and they work just as well."

Stop making excuses and work you lazy bastards :-)

The best way to trade for a living is to friend a bank trader and figure out his favorite single malt.
Hopefully he will give you some big orders to front run.

yep.....bank traders actually don't trade per se......they front run. The moment they go out on their own they discover they don't know $hit

I'd like to share my story with you people.

Atm I'm not in a position to say that I make my living off trading but I'm working on it because the market has been my dream since my childhood. When I first read the 'Financier' by Theo Dreiser I knew exactly what I wanted to be in life. So as I've previously mentioned I'm not yet trading for a living but I'm working on it and I'm sure I'll be there because I will not quit till I make it. It's really that simple for me, because as the saying goes winners never quit and quitters never win.

I have learned about FX in 2006 or 2007 I guess. Back then I had a day job in a whole different field and I was sceptical about foreign exchange market. Then I thought to myself that I would've had to become extremely profitable in trading just in order to make the same money I was making at my day job and the opportunity wasn't worth it because. At time that was like gambling, switching from guaranteed risk-free income to a completely new and at time unknown field. Furthermore I thought to myself, what in the world could've possibly happened that could've changed my attitude? Gold was up, the market was bullish since the dotcom bubble, everything was fine and dandy. Then 2008 came, then 2009. I had to change jobs and being affected with the global financial crisis I saw the decline in my salary. That was the time when I had a second thought on taking it to the market where I could've been in more control. I'm sure most of you guys know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, that was 2010 when I started seriously learning currency market. I always thought that it was never late to learn, so the transition process went easy. I read, learned from others and practiced on demo accounts. In 2011 I took a break. I needed some time to sum it all up and to take a better look at what I've accomplished down the road from say the 'outside'. In 2011-12 I made considerable money off of business ventures, mainly start-ups, and in 2013 I shifted back to FX. I never had any problem with that gap since I have followed the markets and the financial world since my university days and I wasn't new to business or economy, but by that time I just had a better picture and I liked what I saw. I felt very confident about what I was about to do and to me that was the key component.

Since then my routine is my Bible that I live by. I wake up at 5-5.30 am, I take a cold shower, grab a cup of coffee and do the news. In my opinion mainstream media was made for peasants so I don't focus on it that much, while what I do focus on is getting information from different sources and performing my own analysis. I simply don't trust those so-called 'experts' and their biased opinions and to top that I'm very well capable of making conclusions on my own. I'm also a member of couple of FX-related boards like FF (obviously), so I browse the forums as well. It takes me couple or three hours to get my info and pre-trading analysis ready. I don't place any trades before it's finished, that's the rule. When I'm done with my pre-trading info ritual, I print it out and if the weather is fine I take the paper with me to a nearby park. One hour later I'm back and ready. Usually I'd still have an hour or two before London opens and I place my first trade or two. Mainly it's greenback, euro or cable-related. I don't like exotics at all.

My day ends 3-4 hours before NY closes. I close my opened trades (there're some exceptions to that rule though), quickly browse the news and have my life back for 3 or 4 hours before I go to bed. I know 3-4 hours don't sound that much and some may call me a market junkie (which I am), but that's the way it is for me. I don't have kids, I'm not married, my gf totally understands me, so I can say that I live in peace with myself. That's the only thing that matters.

I study on weekends. Financial literature, books, articles, news, forums, feedbacks from couple of my school friends that work in investment banks, you name it. 'The most valuable commodity in the world is information', I live by that quote.

I don't drink, I don't hang out late, I don't like the night clubs (maybe it's because I'm not 20 anymore), I don't have a single social media account and I don't have that many friends to spend time with, so my social life doesn't waste too much of my time. And when I say 'friends' I mean the real friends, those buddy-buddies that you've known for a long-long years and not those hundreds and thousands of 'friends' that people have on their social media profile pages whom they've never met, whom they know nothing about, and most likely will never meet in person.

But I'm still on my way. Not there yet.
That's my story. Hopefully some of you might get something useful out of it.

PS: As I was typing this post, I've got a little bit carried along with so that I've almost missed the EURUSD reverse. Closing that trade now, have been shorting for 2-something hours. Move on to the next one.

You can say it a type of living which I am etting from forex. I am nt having any job till now forex is my main business . I had a low investment in my trading account . It is giving me 10% t0 20% profit on my amount . It is a good return . I can use for my personal needs.

I promise everybody reading this thread that you don't have to go through all of this to make good money from the markets. I don't make a ton of money right now due to the size of my account, but I have several close friends now who have been at this a while and do and we all make great returns percent wise with low risk. We talk about this stuff at our leisure and spend very little actual time "working"...one of the best benefits of trading is the free time you get from it, so if you find yourself overwhelmed and on a strict schedule to trade you're probably putting in a lot more effort than needed. Once you know the game it really becomes a matter of simply putting in the orders and going to do something else while you wait.

I have a small problem. Maybe a problem of many traders.

I know how to make money in the markets!
The small problem: I do not have it´s the capital to invest!

What can you advise me to find a way to get such investment.
$ 3,000 it´s the capital that I need for the investment ... well, the more the better, but it´s enough.

Find a real job... you wont make it asking questions like that.

That´s another problem (and big) because it is very difficult in some countries find a job these days; but you are wrong, I have a job, what I dont have is enough capital to invest in trading.

And I hope you have a job (it´s like gold these days).

If you are good enough trading your own account at a retail level with any amount of money you will be head hunted almost immediately by boutique prop firms associated with your broker.
Keep trading well and everything else will fall into place. Just don't give up!

Hello Sonofsin5, thank you for your helpful advice, I had never thought of it that way.

"... Keep trading well and everything else will fall into place."
And thank you for the motivation.


"... Just don't give up!"
That´s not my type (give up).

All the best for you.