Are there any retail traders making a living from it?
I'm sure there are, but probably can't prove it ... I did, myself, for over 3 years (with hindsight, I should have switched to futures much earlier than I did), and I don't for a moment imagine that I'm the only one!
Can you point to any? This is an honest question.
Not in public, anyway ... here's the thing: nobody (or at the very least, surely "almost nobody") with enough capital to trade forex futures on CME is going to
prefer to trade spot forex? And you don't need
all that much capital to trade futures. When I say "all that much" I mean only that anyone "making a living" from trading is clearly going to have enough. (Maybe that's location dependent, actually, and I shouldn't state it as a "fact"?).
I think there are (or were) up to a couple of people (I mean literally, probably, one or maybe two) members of Babypips who are making their livings ... I don't know to what they extent they trade/spot and they're not "people I can point to" anyway - they're just "anonymous forum members".
There are, of course, some spot currency pairs that don't
have equivalent futures to trade, and specialists in those (whom I imagine to have "specialist local economic/fundamental knowledge" or something similar) may be trading spot, rather than futures?
It's perhaps not helpful at all, and I certainly don't want it to sound like a "criticism" of the question at all, but my overall feeling about this question is something like "Well, there won't be many, will there? But that doesn't mean you can't".
It reminds me (slightly!) of people here in discussions about TopStepTrader who want to belittle TST and ask for evidence that anyone has retained a funded account for as long as a year, and the answer is "Well, they wouldn't, would they?" because once you're fully up and running as a trader, you wouldn't need to continue to pay TST their 20% for ever ... similarly (maybe!) with spot forex, once you're fully up and running as a forex trader, you're going to switch to futures, aren't you, if you can?
It took me far longer to switch than it should have done, but then again,
nobody else is as stubborn and obstinate as me.
(I started off, when I was really young, on spot forex for the same reasons as most people, by the way: I had very little money and wanted to learn and practice on demo, and I found leverage attractive and appealing, and I used to use leverage as high as 1:100.)
I've rambled and probably not really answered you at all, really, ES - apologies!!
