Can I make it as a trader?

belize

belize

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Hi all,

I am writting this journal for one main reason, I want to be a full time trader. I have a scientific background, a family and recently tried to train for a career as a secondary school teacher. I discovered that I am not cut out to be a teacher within the current system. I have been interested in economics for as long as I can remember and have been part time trading demo accounts etc. on and off for about 5 years. Many of these accounts blew up, and I have backtested hundreds of trading systems only to find they don't pay off. Recently my trading has to evolved and my confidence has risen my last demo account I traded for 6 months and was 151.2% up. Although I use some technical analysis, I have been trusting my intution more and it appears to be profitable.

My next step is to trade with some real money and I am hoping you guys will give me some feedback, in return I will explain my methodology and if it carries on being profitable feel free to use it. I am going to record every trade here as openly as I can.

I am using a spread betting account
I have scrapped together all the money that I can (afford to lose right now) £605.
I am going to trade 10% of this account for each trade. High for some I know but its win it or bin it attitude for me. I don't have the time to take the long slow but safe process of trading 1-2%.
I will be trading EUR/USD. It has the lowest spread cost to daily volatility with my broker.
Average daily range for the last four weeks of 211 pips and average spread of 2. I treat this a like the house edge in a casino and always look for the lowest possible.
For the same reason I will looking for 100 pip plus trades to keep my trading costs to a minium. In the past I have found this makes a huge difference to the chance of success of any trading statergy. ie if you go for 20pips profit but have to pay 2pips spread its like the house edge being 10% where as if you target 100 pips with 2pips spread its 2%.
With these sort of pip targets I will be primarily a swing trader trades lasting 1 to 5 days. My broker does charge for the daily rollover usally about 1pip and there are payments calaculated on the underlying interest. Therefore I will keep most of my trades to less than 24h unless there is a good reason for letting it roll over.

I will try and workout how to take screen shots form my chart program to illustrate the trades.

bye for now
 
Ok, here's my first trade. See chart it took me a while to work out how to take the screen shot. I opened the trade at about 14.00 so the top of the last candle you can see. As you can see it has already gone almost 20pips against me, sod's law is going to apply for my first trade. The trade has a 100pip stoploss and is risking 10% of my account. The euro had been dropping all morning but stalled at the 38% retracement at about 12.00. The overnight news had been bad with negative news coming out of Spain however most of this is already known/ expected. At the start of the American market I detected a change in the news and sentiment to more positive. Being a natural contrarian I took the oportunity to buy, I think virtually everyone is short at the moment and we may get some more of Friday's action for a while. If it does turn around and go my way I will be looking to take profits in the 12580's .
 

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In response to your original thread title I'd have to say you probably wont, firstly because you are hoping to make it from a starting capital of £600 and risking 10% per trade and secondly because you are spreadbetting.
 
belize said:
I have scrapped together all the money that I can (afford to lose right now) £605.
I am going to trade 10% of this account for each trade. High for some I know but its win it or bin it attitude for me. I don't have the time to take the long slow but safe process of trading 1-2%.
Click to expand...


I think you are doomed to failure with an attitude like this. Trading is a game of patience and 10% per trade is far too much risk to take.

You won't be able to make a living off £605. Many have tried, and we've watched them all fail.
 
belize said:
Hi all,



I am using a spread betting account
I have scrapped together all the money that I can (afford to lose right now) £605.
I am going to trade 10% of this account for each trade. High for some I know but its win it or bin it attitude for me. I don't have the time to take the long slow but safe process of trading 1-2%.
Click to expand...

In all fairness you shouldn't risk more than 1% per trade (with 10% risk it's a bit difficult unless you have some extraordinary predictive powers).

Without that sort of powers there is a possibility to quickly blow the account away (irrelevant of the account size)
 
arabianights said:
Why are you not suited to be a teacher? Not lazy enough?
Click to expand...

he doesn't have leather elbow patches on his corduroy jacket. nor does he have a ginger beard and smoke a pipe.

but most damning of all, unlike 99% of teachers, he isn't a raving Commie, out to subvert our Youth on a diet of politically correct indoctrination bullshyt

my 2 bahts ..... :smart:
 
belize said:
Hi all,

I am writting this journal for one main reason, I want to be a full time trader. I have a scientific background, a family and recently tried to train for a career as a secondary school teacher. I discovered that I am not cut out to be a teacher within the current system. I have been interested in economics for as long as I can remember and have been part time trading demo accounts etc. on and off for about 5 years. Many of these accounts blew up, and I have backtested hundreds of trading systems only to find they don't pay off. Recently my trading has to evolved and my confidence has risen my last demo account I traded for 6 months and was 151.2% up. Although I use some technical analysis, I have been trusting my intution more and it appears to be profitable.

My next step is to trade with some real money and I am hoping you guys will give me some feedback, in return I will explain my methodology and if it carries on being profitable feel free to use it. I am going to record every trade here as openly as I can.

I am using a spread betting account
I have scrapped together all the money that I can (afford to lose right now) £605.
I am going to trade 10% of this account for each trade. High for some I know but its win it or bin it attitude for me. I don't have the time to take the long slow but safe process of trading 1-2%.
I will be trading EUR/USD. It has the lowest spread cost to daily volatility with my broker.
Average daily range for the last four weeks of 211 pips and average spread of 2. I treat this a like the house edge in a casino and always look for the lowest possible.
For the same reason I will looking for 100 pip plus trades to keep my trading costs to a minium. In the past I have found this makes a huge difference to the chance of success of any trading statergy. ie if you go for 20pips profit but have to pay 2pips spread its like the house edge being 10% where as if you target 100 pips with 2pips spread its 2%.
With these sort of pip targets I will be primarily a swing trader trades lasting 1 to 5 days. My broker does charge for the daily rollover usally about 1pip and there are payments calaculated on the underlying interest. Therefore I will keep most of my trades to less than 24h unless there is a good reason for letting it roll over.

I will try and workout how to take screen shots form my chart program to illustrate the trades.

bye for now
Click to expand...


"Doomed Captain Mainwaring, he's doomed, aye"
 
Thanks for all your replies. The teacher comments made me laugh, there are plenty of teachers like that. After working in the state school system, I really need to learn how to trade so that I can send my kids to a private school!

Well my first trade was a loser, it only ever went about 20pips into profit before crashing down overnight in Asia. Woke up this morning to find the price stuck right on my stop level. It took a bit of will power to not just buy back in again to prove I was right, but of course the market is always right and after a brief pause it has carried on down. Going to just watch for now as it is near the euro's previous bottom.
 
I strongly suggest reading some trading books before putting any money on the line. The one I've recommended a hundred times already on this site is "Trade your way to financial freedom" by Van Tharp, it's a must-read.

Having said that, you are going to need a lot more than £600 to have any chance of turning this into a career. I'd suggest a minimum of £10k, if not more. (buying the book will cost you over 5 pct of your account!!)
 
Ok time for a second go at my trade on the euro going back up. (Are their any sellers left?)

Account bal. £545 (-10%)
Trade buy at 12225.9 with a 100pip stoploss that puts my stop below the recent bottom in case of another go at it. 0.5p per pip so trading 10% of account again.

Will start thinking about taking profits up in the 580's (if it gets that far!)

Bye for now
 

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Thanks for the book recomendation, I guess I better try and find it second hand or floating round on the web as a pdf, thats one expensive book. I assume it maintains its price because it's worth it.
 
Can I ask why you entered that trade? The only thing I see on your charts is the PIN bar but that was 3 hours ago, had you entered on that you would be up 20 or 30 pips. I'm not saying thats what you should do, I'm just asking you how you read the chart and came to your decision.

If the current level holds for a while we would have a 4 hour PIN bar so you may still do OK with this one.
 
pboyles said:
...but I should add that you are fighting the trend on EURUSD.
Click to expand...

hmmm....on a half hr TF he may be OK, way too early for me to swing..but..

OK, a few points, IMO you can start with in the region of a grand and make SB work for you and build up a decent cash balance, odd thing is you're being v.careful with your selection of pairs to trade, just the one, but kinda going all in on that one pair...Why not try to make 'the probs.' work in your favour by taking 5 pairs (based on your strat.) and using 5% of your margin for those 5 trades? This whole game centres around money management or as Van Tharp would call it position sizing. 10% per trade is just plain stoopid and suggests impatience. If you feel impatient and need to feel as though you're involved/doing a job/earning your crust why not drop down to 30min TFs', use 40-50 pip s.loss?

Lose as litle as possible, stay in the game whilst knowledge hits you from all sides...a success could be considered making that 600 quid last 4 months and at the end you've honed your edge, you know your platform and are ready to re-cash your account..To finish IMHO it takes 12 months of trading to simply become proficient, and I dont mean profitable...anyhow enough...I'm sure others can add their 2 cents..
 
Can I make a suggestion.

Instead of using a spread betting account, use a CFD account for forex because you can trade for 0.25 per point, that will give you a bit more cash to lean on and more chance of staying in the game.
 
Moneymakingmachine said:
Can I make a suggestion.

Instead of using a spread betting account, use a CFD account for forex because you can trade for 0.25 per point, that will give you a bit more cash to lean on and more chance of staying in the game.
Click to expand...

Thats interesting i was not aware you could do that would be kind enough to elaborate a bit more on this subject like which SP companies you can do it wth etc
cheers
 
pboyles said:
...and a news release in 10 minutes
Click to expand...

Yes it was the pin bar and then the price went above the range on the 19th that resulted in lots of buying on that day. As for fighting the trend, I agree that I should'nt be doing that especially after being stopped out yesterday. But I was intrigued at how the price came crashing down but stopped short of the previous low on the 19th, even though the news was still very negative. I thought it would easily get down to that price and maybe have a false breakout or two, there must be some orders at that 12144 level. So my reasoning was that their were some buyers out there keen enough not to wait for 12144. Of course I suspect that in a few moments time the market will go crashing down to 12144 taking out all the optimists like me.

Talking of being an optimist thank you money making machine for suggesting the CFD's I will look into it to see if I can trade a lower percentage of my account.

Black Swan, thanks for your advice. Which pairs do you suggest ? all the main pairs with low spreads seem to be very correlated at the moment. When you say take 5 pairs and use 5% for those do you mean 5 X 1% or 5 X 5%. I assume you mean 5 X 1 so I don't end up with 25% of my account in the market.

cheers
 
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