Quote from intradaybill:
Not academic at all and not impressive. The basic error you committed, which is a practical empirical truth you denied, is that for trader A to open a long position in forex, someone has to take the opposite side. Forex involves transactions between counterparties, just like in futures.
When A sells to B, A writes a gain or a loss., depending on whether his counteparty, A0, wrote a loss or a gain, respectively.
This is basic. Suppose a new forex game starts Monday morning for currency pair ABCXYZ. At the start of the day, A0 sells to A, thus A0 goes short and A1 goes long. Then, A sells to B, B sells to C, etc. If at the end of the day, A ,B, and C all made money, A0 loses the same amount of money unless A0 bought from another trader B0 to close his position in the meantime, but B0 is now short and as a result, the gain of A, B, C equals the loss of A0 and B0, etc. ad (countable) infinitum.
This is true. So a fair conclusion would be that there isn't one losing trader for every winning trader but there is one losing dollar for every winning dollar. One large trader could potentially win money from several smaller traders or from just one other large trader.
As for the original question everyone else has it right, you will lose quite a bit before you win, so be financially prepared for that. You won't hit the emotional part of trading until you lose a bit, then your journey really starts. Remember, you are trading against the best traders in the world who have more experience, better technology, better transaction costs, and probably even better information flow. It is their sole job everyday to siphon money from people like you (nothing personal) everyday. Good Luck though, just be ready.
