Make a living trading FOREX?
- Thread starter mjl
- Start date
I'm not looking for love. Apparantly, I challanged some kind of "Trading Orthodoxy" by questioning the belief/theory that 90 percent of traders fail, and yet no one has decided to drop some knowledge on the village idiot and elucidate me on how that statistic is true.
However, I'm beggining to think it is true becasue there are a lot of mean spirited, angry people here, and those are certainly qualities of a failure. I doubt a profitable, happy, trader would attack the new kid on the block whose trying to learn something.
However, I'm beggining to think it is true becasue there are a lot of mean spirited, angry people here, and those are certainly qualities of a failure. I doubt a profitable, happy, trader would attack the new kid on the block whose trying to learn something.
No-one knows whether it's true or not, it's a guestimate as far as I can make out. No broker is likely to willingly publish how many of their clients lose money and they'd be the only reliable source.
Maybe you could poll ET members, 90% are probably winners
Quote from cabletrader:
In theory but not necessarily in practice.
What does the average profitable forex trader make per month, around 4 or 5% on average at this level? Let's be conservative and say 3%. Compounded that's around 42% per year so he would need closer to 170k capital, if he compounds for a year before he draws out any of his profits. Then there's inflation to take into account.
But....if he's making those kinds of returns consistently then it's quite likely he will be trading money for other people as well, it wouldn't be unrealistic to say he's built up a small fund of a couple of million without too much effort but being conservative let's say 1 million (peanuts in the scheme of things). To be competitive let's say he's charging clients 1% management fee pa (10,000) plus 15% of high water mark gains (63,000), that's fairly cheap by industry standards. Bottom line, he doesn't actually need any capital of his own at all!
So now it's looking a bit more realistic and achievable. A small fund of 1 million, returning less than .15% per day on average....73k, job done, it's a walk in the park
And all those figures can be improved on significantly, especially if he adjusts compounding over and above the 'norm' and/or takes on a partner trader and more clients.
It's money for old rope!
Well, the OP didn't mention being a hedge fund manager. All he asked was if a trader can make a living trading the forex.
Obviously, if you become a hedge fund manager, you can make a ton of money. Hell, why don't we just say a $20 million dollar fund, and that'll be like 1.5 million dollar salary. LOL.
The truth is to become a hedge fund manager, you will probably need several years of audited results that is profitable. And as we all know, most traders won't even be in the game after 2 years with a small stake trading.
I think you are missing one important fact here. There ISN'T an equal amount of buyers and sellers, however, there IS an equal amount of buying and selling volume. That is the difference. There may be one big institution buying or selling to 1000's of smaller traders. That is how there can be 90% losers. Over time the 10% simply have and continue to get all the money from the 90%. I would also bet that over time the 10% winners get even smaller as a group. Over the course of 10...20...30 years I would guess it is more like 97% losers and 3% winners (Just guesstimates of course). Many winners go bust after a few profitable years, shifting them back into the 90%. Some of these winners turned losers have been quite large also, read LEH, LTCM, etc.
Yeah I was meaning you don't need a lot of money of your own to make a living, there's plenty of money in the world looking for places to invest.
There's no point in waiting x years and having past performance results audited, markets change as do strategies and traders.
Invite potential clients to initially invest a very small amount in order to allow them to evaluate live performance. If they like what they see then they can always increase their investment, or if the trader is garbage then the most they stand to lose is a few hundred dollars. Investors tend to believe what they see not what they're told, especially after all the high risk scams and ponzi schemes we've seen lately!
A friend of mine in the US did exactly that. He started out with next to nothing, took a night-shift job at as gas station working 6pm to 2am, went home and traded the European session for a few hours. He went on to raise some quite significant capital by word of mouth and now trades full time.
If someone really wants it, it's there. Most people don't have the patience or determination to succeed, they want everything right now and usually end up with nothing!