I wasn't quite sure where to post this, so I decided on the Elite Circle where I figure a lot of traders will be full-time. I wrote a background to give context to my question, which took on a bit of a life of it's own! But anyway I hope it's useful for framing the question.
So late last year, after about 6 months of various intense reading I opened my first trading account. I really struggled, but I (mostly) held on to my account. One huge mistake lost me 20%, but hey it was a great lesson about never removing your stop (yes even when you know you shouldn't but find a reason anyway). One that perhaps everyone must make once but I hope will be my last. Apart that one ahem "outlier" I was treading water in fairly difficult market conditions. I suppose as a novice I could have been satisfied with that, but I wasn't. I kept up the work trying to find a system, an indicator, a method that worked for me.
In Feb I finally got talked into attending a forex course (yep one of those). Way over-priced and staffed by salesman not traders, but it somehow did serve as an effective catalyst for putting some structure into my trading, something I knew I needed. Knowing a little risk management was clearly not enough. I knew how to limit my losses but apparently had no idea how to make winning trades. Well I struggled to make intellectual sense of the strategies and flirted with the idea of giving up all forms of discretionary trading for automated trading before finally finding futures.io (formerly BMT) in March.
Since then I am happy to say I have really turned a corner. 180 degrees in fact. I have been profitable 5 from last 7 weeks with 1 week flat, and am up over 10% for the period. Maybe not astounding results but I risk