In this episode of TAFX, Walter shares how he started in trading and how long it took him to be able to trade fulltime. He also shares some important tips on when should you decide to take trading as a fulltime occupation.
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In This Episode:
00:46 break even trader
01:43 biggest hurdle
02:33 do you want to be a full time trader?
Tweetables:
The biggest challenge is to overcome switching from one system to another. [Click To Tweet].
Don’t hurry to quit your job if you’re not earning that much from trading yet. [Click To Tweet].
Is it really possible for me to do this? [Click To Tweet].
Announcer: Sometimes, forex trading is a wild and wooly place to be. That’s why Hugh is here, to post your questions to Walter, the naked forex guy. Hugh’s got questions and Walter’s got the answers. Here at the Truth About FX Podcast.
Hugh: Hey, Walter. Today, I think this question is something that everybody who follows you or people who’ve heard of you want to ask. Maybe they haven’t had the time or the guts to ask you but we’re going to answer here: how long did it take you to become a full time trader?
Walter: Roughly about four years, essentially. For me, when I got to the point where I was a breakeven trader, that was a real milestone. For me, that was when I knew it was possible to do this.
When I first start trading, a friend of mine basically introduced me to forex trading. She’s back in a day when online trading was just starting to come into — this is 2000, 2001. We first had an account. I think, I’ve told a story before where, basically, we tripled our money the first night.
We we’re like, alright, we have visions of Ferraris dancing in our heads and knows it was like “this is too easy”. Of course, three days later, two more nights into it and we basically long lost just about everything. We certainly had a leverage problem of money mess.
This is what I would say, the biggest hurdle that you’re going to have to overcome is this thing of keeping switching system. Keep moving from system to system to system because you don’t really ever set your roots and get good at one thing. That’s the biggest thing.
That was certainly my problem, as well, when I was trying to get good at this because I kept moving around. I traded Stochastic system, I traded moving average system, and I traded a MACD system. Then, I went back to multiple moving average system, and so forth.
It was really kind of when I sell on one thing, which was for me, to throw away all the indicators which is somewhat ironic. But, yeah, that’s when I started to get to the point where I could see that this was possible and I started making money.
The other thing I would just add to this is if you are looking to quit your job and you want to be a full time trader, make sure that you’re making more money from your trading than you are from your job.
In other words, that means that you have to stay with your job longer, build that money up, say, you have 6, 9, 12 months of money to live on. Even if you don’t trade for 6 months, you can still survive.
In that way, you feel quite good about yourself. You don’t feel pressure to take trades and you know that you could do this when you’re making more money from your trading account than you are from your job.
That’s what I will recommend. For me, it was basically four years. When I hit that four year mark that’s when I started getting to breakeven and I knew that profits we’re just around the corners. That’s kind of how I work at it.
Hugh: I see. Interesting. Well, thanks for sharing that.
Walter: Ok. See you.
Hugh: See you.
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