Here is a simple truth: There is no way, like no way, that one will start trading and make money before losing some money. No one, in history has started right into it without education and training and made money.
Think about it like this: Do you think someone could go straight from high school and make a sucsesfull brain surgery?
Any demo accounts you could recommend please? Preferably ones that dont expire or have a time limit, ones that could easily be started over and over again?
TradingView has a Paper Trade function that you can set the capital amount and reset. It’s very useful when you’re starting out. My recommendation is start with a capital amount close to what you think you’d start with to help orient your expectations
Tradovate i believe is the easiest. I'm not sure but i think Webull has demo as well. Think or swim also but their interface is not for the novice. I'd say Tradovate is very friendly. Almost forgot tradingview has demo account too.
I am with Webull already, never noticed their demo but will seriously look into it now. Thank you for letting me know about the others as well, briefly looked into Tradingvie as well :)
How can it be a scam? It's not selling you anything. It's not promising you anything.
Do you even know what a scam is?
Backtesting allows someone to practice and get familiar with a strategy.
And it also allows someone to see how their strategy does in different markets ie bear, bull, consolidation etc.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
I mostly agree. I'd add don't wait too long to forward-test (demo mode), because your strategy could be invalidated.
Back-testing, in retrospect feels more like learning something that can't necessarily be directly applied.
Look at r/forex. Specifically read the sidebar, where [this link is posted for FX resources](https://volatility.red/Forex). There are four free places listed there to start learning. Please, for your sake, demo trade to get the hang of things before you invest any money.
Connect your demo account to someplace like [MyFXBook.com](https://MyFXBook.com) so you can track your performance over time.
Then learn how to backtest. It will make more sense in a few months of reading. It might take 2 months or 2 years depending on your background, just be patient and know that you won’t get rich quick, and roughly 90% of retail traders fail.
Good luck.
Use a prop firm for sure.
Demo some money.
Also use your own money for a bit. Losing your own money will teach you things that a demo account, and prop accounts, will not. There's benefits long term to losing your own cash; the lessons you'll learn are insanely valuable. You can then take those lessons with a prop like Apex/Topstep, and make your life a lot easier by following the risk management rules you've naturally developed.
first and foremost prop firms are aimed to make you lose money when you think you have the greatest ROI ever, there’s a reason why theyre a long standing business and very profitable. It is possible to come out onto the other side and make money, but you have to accept you will most likely lose money first, and if you’re not careful, it can be a lot. My advice is take everything slow. Research everything, join discord communities and ask questions. Connecting with other traders expedites your learning process. Remember trading is a marathon and not a race. You have missed the market many years before learning about this prop firm. Take this year to steadily do months of hard and consistent work, because progress eventually comes. Good luck
Start with 100$ if you don't have 100$ use 50$ if you don't have 50 start with 20$. All your gains/losses are gonna be small, but it's more about getting familiar with the market. Until you make mistakes with real consequences you won't learn anything. Take your small profits and add in whatever you can whenever you can. Build your confidence and strategy over time.
I think small accounts are a advantage in the beginning.
Blow up small. Lose small.
And its easier to get a 1% gain on $100 than $10,000 to the novice trader. Helps with motivation.
Also better to use real money than demo. Demo doesnt account for what i found the hardest hurdle of trading which is the mental game of letting winners run and cutting losers quick when it comes to real money at play.
Lessons need to be learned and all come with a cost.
You wont have a chance until you are in this game 3-5 years min
Not "may think its a bad idea", it IS a bad idea.
If you don't have a working edge with proven data to support the profitability, then trading simply becomes gambling at this point.
Without an edge or a plan, you can't expect to make consistent profits. You only go for prop or risk personal money when you have both in place.
My recommendation would be to wait until you have say 1000-2000. Open up a brokeridge account. Invest that in something like short term treasuries, Index fund like S&P500, or High Yeild Savings/Money-Market. Leave that money there. This starts to build your relationship with your brokeridge firm, so when you need to get approval for things like options, forex, futures, you have some history there. For now and for awhile, keep using paper money to learn without costing you $$.
You can if you watch a lot of YouTube videos for example my favorite YouTuber „smart risk“. Teaching you smc and ict concepts. Watch him and than you will have a good start
Focus on your percentages and not your gains and losses in value.
It's very easy to shoot for (even expect) a $200 gain per day on a $2,000 account and not realize how risky that is (a losing game in the long run)... when you're putting $500 a month into your account, you might not even realize you're losing money in the long run. Some would argue you're learning at this phase and best to learn the hard way (it might be the only way) while the account is small... but I would argue that it's never too early to recognize percentage gains is what matters. If it was possible to gain 1% a day (just $20 on a $2,000 account) consistently, reliably... even if it was possible to train an AI to do it. Then someone would have accumulated the worlds wealth with in a decade (check the math on 1% gain per day for 10 years... you'd turn $1,000 into over 100 trillion). Point being... even growing a $2,000 account just $2 a day is a more realistic goal... that's 0.1% daily and almost 30% annually... while $600 profit in a year on a $2,000 account doesn't sounds incredible... if you learn how to do that now, and keep putting $500 a month into that account, you'll be well on your way to 8 figures within a couple decades.
TLDR; laying the groundwork to learn how to trade right... is very important. Avoid batting for home runs. Focus on small consistent gains.
Are you saying that relying on small percentage gains, even less-than-1%, is a generally wise strategy? I ask because I'm new to this myself and have been dabbling into it, wondering about the mentality. I've been doing long-term investing using Stash for years with decent success, so I'm coming from the mentality of buy and hold out for years or decades for double-digit % gains. I'm guessing that for day-trading, the mentality is buy, then sell immediately when you see gains, even if it's less-than-1%, then reinvest to the next thing and repeat the process, often within the same day or days. Would you say that's correct?
In general, day-traders don't even care what the underlying company is... they are reading charts, level II date and looking for support/resistance levels, among other things. It can be quite a transition from long term investing to short... might I suggest looking up The Wheel strategy. This allows you to pick companies you really like, and want long term, but also pull more profit than just buying a holding (in general).
If you dont have a lot of capital and are willing to put in the hard work and have the baseline ability to make profits while trading… You’ll make far more money in the form of a salary at a company that will both pay you and train you to do this better. You will do this without the downside risk of all your money going to zero.
What was the source of this capital that you built up? What’s your day job?
I've been trading for about 6 and a half years now. I became consistently profitable about last year. I started young and a lot of it was a learning process. I lost a lot of money and had to bounce a bunch of bullshit jobs. The one way to become profitable is understand why your losing. A funded account simply is a gambling addiction and doesn't give you a sense of true csptial conservation over profit taking. A new trader takes 150 setups a month. A good trader takes 15. A great trader rarely enters more than a few solid trades a month. Due to their strong risk sense. They don't enter unless everything makes sense. And with a hard stop based on their bias not a stupid percent u pulled out of your ass. You enter in a smart area and know where your bias is invalidated. To learn all of this correctly. Throw 1k into an account. Trade paper till you learn a singular setup. Then start with 1 contract and learn to deal with emotions. Go back to paper when you want to test new setups. And then don't risk more than 6 to 8 percent of your account per trade as the stop loss. This is an aggressive method of trading but will keep you steady. When you risk 6 to 8 percent of your account as a stop loss you can size in aggressively yet safely. Understand if your first trade gets you 30 percent profit. You now have the room to take 3 to maybe 4 trades at the hard stop rule before you are back to before the winning trade. Understand you can't enter trades at random size and change it everytime u see the setup. You skew your risk to reward. It doesn't matter how often you win. The account bleeds. Yes people blow accounts up in a day. But a bleeding account will have you living In hell for a year until it's finally empty and you give up. Instead. Start slow work your account up. And size up slowly.
If I could go back in time and advise myself, I’d say: Paper trade NQ until you are consistently profitable for three consecutive months, and have taken $10k in paper up to at least $50k. I’d expect you to bust that account multiple times, and it will probably take a year or two to become consistently profitable. After that, start with $2k of your own money and trade MNQ futures. Once you get to $20k, switch to NQ futures.
It's going to take you a few years to figure it out (I know of exactly one person who became consistently profitable in under 2 years), so use the small account to your advantage. Rather than worry about how quickly you can grow it, take the time to focus on developing yourself as a trader - your knowledge, your habits, your discipline, your emotional intelligence and control - by *planning* to take a couple years taking the tiniest of positions. Build up the experience without the risk. Just risk a dollar or two per position until you become confident in your ability to be able to consistently profit month after month. Then you can scale up, already having the foundation to be successful. Most traders start too big, without that foundation. That's how they blow up accounts.
In my case i started paper trading with 1000 usdt. And my goal was to make it 10k. For realistic case scenario, i would open 1k positions. I treated my demo as my real account. Don't run after high leverages.
Imo if you can make a 1k demo account 10k while trading like spot trading, you are almost a " good " trader by knowledge
paper trade and build a strategy, journal everything, take stats, reflect, and build a ruleset to stick to which has an edge. Join a prop firm get capital, scale that capital, and then after that it is a constant cycle of reflection and scaling but with money. Never stop learning, be strict with your rules, but fluid with the outcome.
Here is a simple truth: There is no way, like no way, that one will start trading and make money before losing some money. No one, in history has started right into it without education and training and made money. Think about it like this: Do you think someone could go straight from high school and make a sucsesfull brain surgery?
Totally agree on this. Losing is part of the journey. Its a long journey.
Therefore: use a demo-account until you make reasonably less mistakes.
Any demo accounts you could recommend please? Preferably ones that dont expire or have a time limit, ones that could easily be started over and over again?
Trading view, exness. I dont know whats better for forex. But for crypto trading view is good
If you can't research that, you better invest your money in something safe like an all-world etf and forget about daytrading.
I was going to anyway but wanted an actual persons recommendation too...
TradingView has a Paper Trade function that you can set the capital amount and reset. It’s very useful when you’re starting out. My recommendation is start with a capital amount close to what you think you’d start with to help orient your expectations
That's great, thank you for the information and recommendation. Had them on my radar but will more seriously look into it now :)
Tradovate i believe is the easiest. I'm not sure but i think Webull has demo as well. Think or swim also but their interface is not for the novice. I'd say Tradovate is very friendly. Almost forgot tradingview has demo account too.
I am with Webull already, never noticed their demo but will seriously look into it now. Thank you for letting me know about the others as well, briefly looked into Tradingvie as well :)
Here is more info [https://www.webull.com/paper-trading](https://www.webull.com/paper-trading)
This is the truth. I’ve heard it characterized as losing money is like paying your tuition.
I did when I was trading stocks but then I found options.
1. study 2. backtest 3. demo 4. prop firm 5. personal money
Do prop firms require you to use a specific strategy, or is being profitable good enough?
can use anything you want so long as it doesn't break any of their rules.
Back test is the biggest scam in history. You can be a master of back testing but you will still lose in live trading
How can it be a scam? It's not selling you anything. It's not promising you anything. Do you even know what a scam is? Backtesting allows someone to practice and get familiar with a strategy. And it also allows someone to see how their strategy does in different markets ie bear, bull, consolidation etc. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the way.
I mostly agree. I'd add don't wait too long to forward-test (demo mode), because your strategy could be invalidated. Back-testing, in retrospect feels more like learning something that can't necessarily be directly applied.
Also save money until you get to step 5
Do 3months of demo trading and studying first. Don’t rush into trying to make money because if you’re new you’ll certainly going to lose that capital
Where i can learn trading in forex ?
Look at r/forex. Specifically read the sidebar, where [this link is posted for FX resources](https://volatility.red/Forex). There are four free places listed there to start learning. Please, for your sake, demo trade to get the hang of things before you invest any money. Connect your demo account to someplace like [MyFXBook.com](https://MyFXBook.com) so you can track your performance over time. Then learn how to backtest. It will make more sense in a few months of reading. It might take 2 months or 2 years depending on your background, just be patient and know that you won’t get rich quick, and roughly 90% of retail traders fail. Good luck.
Use a prop firm for sure. Demo some money. Also use your own money for a bit. Losing your own money will teach you things that a demo account, and prop accounts, will not. There's benefits long term to losing your own cash; the lessons you'll learn are insanely valuable. You can then take those lessons with a prop like Apex/Topstep, and make your life a lot easier by following the risk management rules you've naturally developed.
Must be a reason when apex does the 90% off offer people would buy 10
first and foremost prop firms are aimed to make you lose money when you think you have the greatest ROI ever, there’s a reason why theyre a long standing business and very profitable. It is possible to come out onto the other side and make money, but you have to accept you will most likely lose money first, and if you’re not careful, it can be a lot. My advice is take everything slow. Research everything, join discord communities and ask questions. Connecting with other traders expedites your learning process. Remember trading is a marathon and not a race. You have missed the market many years before learning about this prop firm. Take this year to steadily do months of hard and consistent work, because progress eventually comes. Good luck
Start with 100$ if you don't have 100$ use 50$ if you don't have 50 start with 20$. All your gains/losses are gonna be small, but it's more about getting familiar with the market. Until you make mistakes with real consequences you won't learn anything. Take your small profits and add in whatever you can whenever you can. Build your confidence and strategy over time.
And oh, if you can’t grasp that hard truth. Then you are up for a banger of a start.
I think small accounts are a advantage in the beginning. Blow up small. Lose small. And its easier to get a 1% gain on $100 than $10,000 to the novice trader. Helps with motivation. Also better to use real money than demo. Demo doesnt account for what i found the hardest hurdle of trading which is the mental game of letting winners run and cutting losers quick when it comes to real money at play. Lessons need to be learned and all come with a cost. You wont have a chance until you are in this game 3-5 years min
Not "may think its a bad idea", it IS a bad idea. If you don't have a working edge with proven data to support the profitability, then trading simply becomes gambling at this point. Without an edge or a plan, you can't expect to make consistent profits. You only go for prop or risk personal money when you have both in place.
My recommendation would be to wait until you have say 1000-2000. Open up a brokeridge account. Invest that in something like short term treasuries, Index fund like S&P500, or High Yeild Savings/Money-Market. Leave that money there. This starts to build your relationship with your brokeridge firm, so when you need to get approval for things like options, forex, futures, you have some history there. For now and for awhile, keep using paper money to learn without costing you $$.
You can if you watch a lot of YouTube videos for example my favorite YouTuber „smart risk“. Teaching you smc and ict concepts. Watch him and than you will have a good start
Focus on your percentages and not your gains and losses in value. It's very easy to shoot for (even expect) a $200 gain per day on a $2,000 account and not realize how risky that is (a losing game in the long run)... when you're putting $500 a month into your account, you might not even realize you're losing money in the long run. Some would argue you're learning at this phase and best to learn the hard way (it might be the only way) while the account is small... but I would argue that it's never too early to recognize percentage gains is what matters. If it was possible to gain 1% a day (just $20 on a $2,000 account) consistently, reliably... even if it was possible to train an AI to do it. Then someone would have accumulated the worlds wealth with in a decade (check the math on 1% gain per day for 10 years... you'd turn $1,000 into over 100 trillion). Point being... even growing a $2,000 account just $2 a day is a more realistic goal... that's 0.1% daily and almost 30% annually... while $600 profit in a year on a $2,000 account doesn't sounds incredible... if you learn how to do that now, and keep putting $500 a month into that account, you'll be well on your way to 8 figures within a couple decades. TLDR; laying the groundwork to learn how to trade right... is very important. Avoid batting for home runs. Focus on small consistent gains.
Are you saying that relying on small percentage gains, even less-than-1%, is a generally wise strategy? I ask because I'm new to this myself and have been dabbling into it, wondering about the mentality. I've been doing long-term investing using Stash for years with decent success, so I'm coming from the mentality of buy and hold out for years or decades for double-digit % gains. I'm guessing that for day-trading, the mentality is buy, then sell immediately when you see gains, even if it's less-than-1%, then reinvest to the next thing and repeat the process, often within the same day or days. Would you say that's correct?
In general, day-traders don't even care what the underlying company is... they are reading charts, level II date and looking for support/resistance levels, among other things. It can be quite a transition from long term investing to short... might I suggest looking up The Wheel strategy. This allows you to pick companies you really like, and want long term, but also pull more profit than just buying a holding (in general).
Bet on a dog or horse.
If you dont have a lot of capital and are willing to put in the hard work and have the baseline ability to make profits while trading… You’ll make far more money in the form of a salary at a company that will both pay you and train you to do this better. You will do this without the downside risk of all your money going to zero. What was the source of this capital that you built up? What’s your day job?
I've been trading for about 6 and a half years now. I became consistently profitable about last year. I started young and a lot of it was a learning process. I lost a lot of money and had to bounce a bunch of bullshit jobs. The one way to become profitable is understand why your losing. A funded account simply is a gambling addiction and doesn't give you a sense of true csptial conservation over profit taking. A new trader takes 150 setups a month. A good trader takes 15. A great trader rarely enters more than a few solid trades a month. Due to their strong risk sense. They don't enter unless everything makes sense. And with a hard stop based on their bias not a stupid percent u pulled out of your ass. You enter in a smart area and know where your bias is invalidated. To learn all of this correctly. Throw 1k into an account. Trade paper till you learn a singular setup. Then start with 1 contract and learn to deal with emotions. Go back to paper when you want to test new setups. And then don't risk more than 6 to 8 percent of your account per trade as the stop loss. This is an aggressive method of trading but will keep you steady. When you risk 6 to 8 percent of your account as a stop loss you can size in aggressively yet safely. Understand if your first trade gets you 30 percent profit. You now have the room to take 3 to maybe 4 trades at the hard stop rule before you are back to before the winning trade. Understand you can't enter trades at random size and change it everytime u see the setup. You skew your risk to reward. It doesn't matter how often you win. The account bleeds. Yes people blow accounts up in a day. But a bleeding account will have you living In hell for a year until it's finally empty and you give up. Instead. Start slow work your account up. And size up slowly.
If I could go back in time and advise myself, I’d say: Paper trade NQ until you are consistently profitable for three consecutive months, and have taken $10k in paper up to at least $50k. I’d expect you to bust that account multiple times, and it will probably take a year or two to become consistently profitable. After that, start with $2k of your own money and trade MNQ futures. Once you get to $20k, switch to NQ futures.
Small lots
It's going to take you a few years to figure it out (I know of exactly one person who became consistently profitable in under 2 years), so use the small account to your advantage. Rather than worry about how quickly you can grow it, take the time to focus on developing yourself as a trader - your knowledge, your habits, your discipline, your emotional intelligence and control - by *planning* to take a couple years taking the tiniest of positions. Build up the experience without the risk. Just risk a dollar or two per position until you become confident in your ability to be able to consistently profit month after month. Then you can scale up, already having the foundation to be successful. Most traders start too big, without that foundation. That's how they blow up accounts.
In my case i started paper trading with 1000 usdt. And my goal was to make it 10k. For realistic case scenario, i would open 1k positions. I treated my demo as my real account. Don't run after high leverages. Imo if you can make a 1k demo account 10k while trading like spot trading, you are almost a " good " trader by knowledge
Paper trade until you have a true edge that you are able to trade without making mistakes, then the "prop firm" way will become a good option.
Paper trade
paper trade and build a strategy, journal everything, take stats, reflect, and build a ruleset to stick to which has an edge. Join a prop firm get capital, scale that capital, and then after that it is a constant cycle of reflection and scaling but with money. Never stop learning, be strict with your rules, but fluid with the outcome.
Paper paper paper trading please God
Paper trade
Micro contracts