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Hi, I am based in the UK and considering learning about trading with the aim to provide a small income top up, e.g. £300/500 a month would be great! I appreciate the risks, have looked at various courses and followed people offering trading and uploading YT videos where they show examples of perhaps making a few hundred dollars and occasionally losing a small amount too. However, I am struggling to get a clear understanding of what the capital requirement would be to make a small income. From what I have read it would appear that the actual percentage gains are small and hence a fairly large capital is required, even to achieve just a few hundred pounds a month income. Secondly these online trainers offer ongoing support for a monthly fee which looks to be much needed. I am left with the impression that to pay for the support and make a small income requires quite a large starting capital which of course is then at risk for a relatively small percentage gain. I would be grateful for any feedback, I assume I am worse casing the possibilities! Many thanks for any guidance
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I am afraid that you are actually best-casing the possibilities.
Many people would like to develop an additional income from trading, and almost none ever do, whether large or small. Those who do, generally spend a lot of time (years) and a good amount of money in losses in the process. And to repeat, they are rare.
As to people who offer YT videos and courses, the general experience on this forum is that few are at all helpful and many are harmful to your trading development. You can look over the vendor review section of this forum to get an idea of how well new traders (and experienced ones) succeed with them. To put it simply, it is possible to make a lot of money trading, but few ever do. It is much, much easier to sell something to others -- the seller does not have to take the risk with his own money, and does not have to actually know how to trade. He just has to be able to sell his advice to the hopeful, which is easy. Some may know something valuable, some (many) may just be selling snake oil. You would be well-advised to treat any with great care.
This may all sound somewhat grim, and I do not mean to discourage you. There are traders who have done well also, and you can read some of their posts in this forum. But the reality is that it is nothing like how YouTubers and course salespeople make it seem.
I am reposting your question here, in the hope that other members will be able to chime in with their own thoughts.
Good luck.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
I will add that it is even easier for those who had a lucky trade that yielded a huge profit. They will leverage that to sell newcomers a product.
I have countless useless courses I have purchased over the years. The only silver-lining is that I didn't pay the full obscene price for most of them.
Knowing what I know now, no "mentor" gets my money if they don't have a track record of being a professional trader, and no school get my money that is not connected to a trading firm. The former has a catch-22, because not too many mentors with that track record waste their time in the trading education space.
In my opinion, that is the wrong approach. If you want to earn a small income, get a "side hustle" (rideshare, grocery delivery, etc).
I say this because trading requires a great amount of effort and time. If you are aiming to earn a small income, to me, that implies you plan to give a small effort.
The lure to trading is always a little extra income, then more and more until you’re rich. An analogy might be in writing. You enjoy reading and like to write, and imagine you could write a few articles and maybe a short novel for some added income. So you take college-level literature and creative writing classes. Education is easy. The trick is you need to take all that education home, sit in front of your computer and crank out a book that will sell >100,000 copies so you can eat just a little bit better.
Statistically, even if you copy the style of your three favorite authors, you just aren’t going to write a saleable book quickly, if ever. [Your mind now focuses on the six authors who wrote wildly successful first novels, while ignoring the thousands who didn’t.] Trading is more a game of wrangling your emotions and innate style into a hybrid process that you can consistently execute, than connecting dots.
You will educate yourself on how limit orders and aggression animate the charts, and how you might find a statistical edge in all that to win. Check out Tradingresearchgroup.com. Then develop, test, re-engineer, and test again and again your process.
In time you realize the game isn’t making money, but consistency, your consistency. How much time? This won’t happen quickly, and you’ll need a passion for it to drag you through the muck of defeat and depression. If you can't experiment within the economic parameters of several ES, or NQ micros, don't start the adventure yet. Allow any success to scale you up, not additional capital.
agree with @bobwest and @BA 21 .. trading seems easier than it is ..
I looked at the historical data provided by YahooFinance for the last 5+ years .. been doing this for a while so my data is approaching 6 years .. comparing the OPEN to the HIGH and the OPEN to the LOW .. then counted the number of days where the price went at least a defined number of ticks in my favor .. I chose the number of ticks where the trade would make $50 (or $5 for micro-futures) ..
turns out that about 98% of the time it doesn't matter which way you trade some of the popular futures contracts .. you will still get your 5 ticks ..
so why aren't all traders rich .. because it is harder than it looks ..
I say it is like driving a car .. you may be a great driver but at any given time you may not be prepared for what the weather is going to do .. what the other driver(s) are going to do .. AND the roadmap you used yesterday may not be the best way to reach your goal today ..
focus on learning first .. growing your knowledge, your skill set, and your intuition ..
Many thanks for the feedback from everyone, really appreciated. It is very early days for me, unfortunately I haven't educated myself enough to know what would be best to trade and what would be the costs in the UK. I am semi-retired and so I do have time to commit although would rather limit it to 2/3 hrs a day if that is possible. I did pay a small amount for a course by someone who states they were a professional trader, just to give me an intro and it focused on volume profiling which felt like a good approach (as a complete beginner!) rather than pure Technical Analysis. I decided not to spend more on advanced courses without understanding some fundamentals like how much capital is needed. I have just now seen a trading for beginners video that suggests a successful trader will make between 2 and 6% a month and so to earn £500 a month assumes capital of between £8.3K and £25K - and of course that would be success, with many mistakes along the way! I'll think carefully before pursuing further, thank you again for all of the advice, I am very grateful.
