How much did you spend before you became a consistently successful trader?

Quote from optionpro007:

Spike:

What about the profits ? %yr

and thanks for sharing this info.
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:D :D :D

Very satisfying, beyond what i ever dreamed of, and useless to be posted. I have already got too many negative or sarcastic reactions.
But it was worth the investment i did in time and money.
although the first five years i regretted to had ever started doing this. At that point i looked up at a loss of 250 000 $ of which i was sure that i would never recover it. So i was forced to continue to make up for the loss ( wife's orders .:mad: )
 
Quote from InTheZone:

How much did you spend in terms of:

A. Time - How long did it take before you became consistently profitable?

B. Lost capital - How much capital did you lose before you figured it out?

C. Educational materials - How much money did you spend on books, courses, seminars, etc.?

... before you became a consistently successful trader?

I thought the results might be interesting.

-- ITZ
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My initial currency training was a living nightmare for me.

My learning curve was gruesomely painful.

Either I was the dumbest mother****er on the planet or currency trading is really complex.

I lost 100s of my first trades (all on demos).

Then, one day I sort of... broke thru....

I started making profitable trades.

After months of going thru the ringer mentally, emotionally and financially (demos) I woke up one morning and realized I broke thru into being profitable, and that morning was different than all others before it.

I had a big grin and jumped out of bed HAPPY for the first time in months, and could not wait for the market to open again so I could make more profitable trades.

A month or two later I opened my live forex account and have been making good money ever since.

But since I started with a micro-cap account the earnings have not really been that "big" but I have made a lot of pips.

Also, after going live, having the market eat one system after another, and having to re-wire, modify and adapt time after time, while I did earn LOTS of money (in ratio to my account size), a matter of blood from tangling with the market has kept my retained net equity curve to a minimum.

A big EUR/USD short trade I entered Sept last year was the worst forex trade I ever made. I fed the beast for 8 months. The bitch took a 50% bite out of my ass, but losses were recouped ongoing by winnings.

Walking out break even when the trade was closed.

Now I believe I have a much better grip on market/trading fundamentals than I had, even a few months ago, therefore my bloodshed has been impacted for the better.

Example: When GBP/USD took a blistering 1000-point nosedive in a week, lately, my account sustained a mere .04% hit.

Before, on something like that, I would have had maybe 1% to 5% smoked.

I attribute the progress to my shiny new Controlled Descent Into Hell trading system. :D

I hope to soon begin realizing raw net earnings retained to be above 25%.

That is my goal, anyway, for the next 12-months.

In addition, I took my system that was forged in the fire of the forex furnace for two-years, to the stock market a week ago (demo), trading 15 stocks both short and long and am so far destroying the market on cornering tests.

That may be a good sign. :D

theskalper
 
Quote from darkhorse:

i had the good fortune of starting out in commodities (no stocks), and i had to deal with the worst markets for commodities in the past thirty years. i got beat to a pulp and slammed to the mat more times than i could count.

in the long run i think this will be an edge for me as i earned my stripes in the most difficult market conditions possible, everything after feels like a cake walk in comparison, and the stocks i am trading now feel like child's play.
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great post!
 
Might as well mention my very first foray into "trading" (if you can call what I did, that).

The stock market winter 1999.

Making my first big mistake by opening up a DATEK account, only comparable to my next mistake of having no idea whatsoever about trading.

My entire idea of trading consisted of watching the top-ten NASDAQ movers, seeing a stock coming up fast then rapidly calcing out HOW MANY shares I could POSSIBLY trade then hitting Enter.

3 mos.

Over 80% of a mini-account dumped to the market makers who took me out professionally as soon as I had made roughly 40% increase.

I had made around 300 trades but it only took (the last) 3 to clean my clock.

The combo of pump and dumps that I either couldn't get into or out of, along with the DATEK platform freezing every few trades for 30 minutes wiped me out.

Though, even through that I was holding my own and giving the old line MMs a run for their money.

That the MMs got the news 30-minutes to an hour before me (retail level) didn't help either.
 
a. made 18K in the 1st year (2000), BUT learned how to NOT lose money namely because of Mark Douglas books, by the 3rd year profits were respectable. i missed out on the entire bubble! a belief i have is that newbies focus on just staying alive (breakeven), and in time your opportunities will come, as will your profits.

b. i was very fortunate ... if you can believe it i only started with 10k (yet i was trading with ECHO so I had as much buying power as i needed), and lived on a credit card my 1st year of trading. i never lost a dime, and was able to hang out, and develop a couple trading strategies that have been incredibly consistent and profitable.

c. probably spent $500 bucks so far over time on various books.

i agree w/ pitufo as I sure wish i had a mentor to sit next to and learn.
 
Quote from PatrickQ:

a. made 18K in the 1st year (2000), BUT learned how to NOT lose money namely because of Mark Douglas books,

That alone would be of interest to me an others - if it is not too much asked.

Charly
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1- 2 years of active trading. Before that, I would have said that I was consistent but i didn't know what it really meant.Now , I begin to see what it is.

2- 500 $ or whatever really low. I was uncredibly lucky in my first year although my techniques were total garbage. Since that, I think I had a 30 % drawdown once.

3- 400$ only books
 
a) i am 2 years and a month into my full-time trading career. before that i did some part-time swing trading for about a year and a half. i feel i am trading my best right now, focusing on consistency over everything else. have backed off my size lately and plan to very slowly build that up over the next few years.

b) my biggest drawdown from my initial capital of 30k was about 5k, but i was able to get that back pretty fast. i've been lucky in the fact that it has never been hard for me to just breakeven... getting rid of the boom and bust cycle is what i'm working out now. (making a nice run for a few weeks, only to give too much back on 1 or 2 trades where i violated one of my rules)

c) i read a lot of books before i started trading even part-time, and i think that helped me avoid a lot of pitfalls right off the bat. only website i was a member of was dan zanger's for about the first year. i met a few traders in there that were very helpful. if you can manage your money i think you have a good shot at lasting in the game. then it is just a matter of getting a system and the psychological part down. psychological part is definitely the hardest, and the system part i believe is the easiest.
 
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