How much an amateur trader burn before attaining profitability? - page 2
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I don't think there is any "norm"! Each situation is different!
If you think that $50K is normal for you, then it seems that you have quite an amount of cash to "burn" - Lucky you!
I lost 54K in 2 years before attaining profitability. May be I traded wrong markets with wrong setup.
If you are already profitable, then why are you asking what is the norm? It no longer matters! You are now profitable (and hopefully recovered the loss)!
Personally, I would have never risked so much during the learning phase, but to each his own! I say this for Forex, as Stocks is another matter!
I will use my experience as an example. I started off right from the beginning with a standard live account and never actually followed the DEMO route because I was impatient about making money and lacked the discipline (which I only acquired afterwards with the experience).
It took me two to three years to become proficient and recover my loses. During those first two years I lost close to €1500, with two blown accounts and a third account that had a huge draw-down before I started to recover. The first two accounts started off with €500 and the third with €1000. My first account was only for manual trading while the second for a mix of manual trading and EA's written by others. The third account which finally began to pay off, was exclusively for EAs of my own creation.
I don't really know if I would have done better with DEMO Account or even a Cent account - maybe yes, maybe no! I guess it depends on each person's state of mind and perspective.
Now I am profitable and it offers me a good income, although I still have a "day job" as IT Consultant and Software Developer, because I enjoy it. Trading by EA can become rather boring and one needs another activity to keep us active and sane!
It is not a single EA but a portfolio of 20+ which I enable or disable depending on market conditions and various other factors.
Even if I did share, you would not know how to apply them or make them profitable for you, because you would still need the knowledge and the experience that went into their research and development.
Hi Fernando, nice success story, anyway mind to share ur EA for us.. :)
I don't think there is any "norm"! Each situation is different!
If you think that $50K is normal for you, then it seems that you have quite an amount of cash to "burn" - Lucky you!
$50k is staggering.... you'd have to be stupid or stupidly loaded.. I'm fairly new to this; I've been thinking about trading for a bit, but only really properly engaged in it recently.
I've manually traded demos until I started to profit, then I wasted money on rubbish EA's but have settled on a couple of decent ones, spent money on TDS for quality backtesting, then spent money on VPS and ran my better EA's on demo's for a couple of months until I was happy with my setup. Now I'm trading with real money and making money from the start. Just $500 deposit initially, so all in my current profits are still very outweighed by my "development" costs (if you can call them that), but its heading in the right direction and if my performance is stable in a month or two I'll add a couple of $k to the balance, then wait another month of so and add some more. All the while looking for and testing new strategies, and hopefully learning to code my own.
So I think if you're relatively clever, read everything you can lay you hands on, then make careful purchases and be objectively experimental about how you approach this, then you can shorten the time to profit and reduce the losses... I think you have to be honest with yourself about how your setup is performing, look at the numbers and facts and be objective about it, if it's not working and its going beyond an acceptable DD then stop it, think about it and change it. It seems like lots of people trading are basing too much on hope and emotional investment in systems that I wouldn't trust... It's hard to win back the $500 you might have blown on a crap EA if you're not starting with a large balance, I think its better to hold back, research, read reviews and contact people, then making careful decisions... Invest in your R&D!
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$50k is staggering.... you'd have to be stupid or stupidly loaded.. I'm fairly new to this; I've been thinking about trading for a bit, but only really properly engaged in it recently.
I've manually traded demos until I started to profit, then I wasted money on rubbish EA's but have settled on a couple of decent ones, spent money on TDS for quality backtesting, then spent money on VPS and ran my better EA's on demo's for a couple of months until I was happy with my setup. Now I'm trading with real money and making money from the start. Just $500 deposit initially, so all in my current profits are still very outweighed by my "development" costs (if you can call them that), but its heading in the right direction and if my performance is stable in a month or two I'll add a couple of $k to the balance, then wait another month of so and add some more. All the while looking for and testing new strategies, and hopefully learning to code my own.
So I think if you're relatively clever, read everything you can lay you hands on, then make careful purchases and be objectively experimental about how you approach this, then you can shorten the time to profit and reduce the losses... I think you have to be honest with yourself about how your setup is performing, look at the numbers and facts and be objective about it, if it's not working and its going beyond an acceptable DD then stop it, think about it and change it. It seems like lots of people trading are basing too much on hope and emotional investment in systems that I wouldn't trust... It's hard to win back the $500 you might have blown on a crap EA if you're not starting with a large balance, I think its better to hold back, research, read reviews and contact people, then making careful decisions... Invest in your R&D!
Why are you replying to my post? I am certainly not the one who put up 50K nor do I consider it normal!
However, in the OP's defense, he did state that he started with Futures (which does require a larger initial capital). But even for Futures, I too, consider 50K a bit much.
Why are you replying to my post? I am certainly not the one who put up 50K nor do I consider it normal!
However, in the OP's defense, he did state that he started with Futures (which does require a larger initial capital). But even for Futures, I too, consider 50K a bit much.
hi Fernando,
I'm sorry, I was just typing in general suprise and didn't mean to associate specifically you with my ramblings... poor forum etiquette.. sorry..
I am suppirised though, but didn't mean to come across as rude. I'm very much a newbie at this and have private messaged many people already. It seems that most people I've communicated with are in a similar position to me; small capital hoping to find a way of making somthing of it. I would have thought the majority of retail traders would at least start in a simillar position??
regards, Owain