Quote from pipsaholic:
do you belive its possible for a new trader less than 1 year experience to become profitable in the 15-1 hour charts?
You've got to be kidding. I was full of myself once too, when I started, you know, the usual, I found a holy grail, traded with profit, thought I had it made, bla bla bla. Went live, blew 1.5k in a month. Heeell yeah. Unless you trade other financial instruments and want to try spot fx as well, I don't see how on earth is it possible for someone to trade successfully with less than a year of experience on a small time frame, even a bigger one for that matter. Trading is more about psychology than about anything else. You need to understand why things work they way they do and why people respond the way they do and once you learn the
WHYs and not so much HOWs or WHENs, you'll be profitable.
Second, it's all about money management, not about pips (or other units). I can be filthy rich with 100pips/month and someone else can't pay their water bill with 2k pips/month. It's all about money management. Trading for a living is for big boys only, if you don't have at least 100k forget about it. That's trading for comfort. If you want to pretend you're a big boy, a minimum would be 10k. That's what I think, but I'm by no means an expert.
Explaining the trading to someone who is quite new is like explaining the world to kids. You can talk and talk and they just won't get it until they grow up and learn for themselves. Only then will they be able to understand what you had tried to tell them 20 years ago. It's just a learning process, you can't fight that. There are no shortcuts and if you think they are, you'll be sorry when you blog your account.
I think it was bismarck who said, "a fool learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others". Read, read, read. Practice, practice, practice. Don't complicate and don't listen to others.