I was very much interested in following a trader here who planned to take a £100 OANDA account and parlay it into £5000 in a year, though I did comment that I was curious to see if the thread lasted. Another trader wrote that all the individual had to do was make 1.8% per day compounded over 220 days. Unfortunately, this quest appears to pretty much be over. Being the simple man that I am, I did not quite understand why. Perhaps it had something to do with it not being worthwhile without the trading being automated, or unless it was conducted using a daily timeframe, or something to do with a friend who joined the forum at the same time having abandoned the site. Whatever the reason, it seems I will not have the pleasure of following the odyssey’s progress, hence my establishing this thread. What little money I had for trading I withdrew to spend on Christmas gifts last December (I don’t use credit cards) so I’m slowly replenishing my discretionary funds (very slowly) and when I’m up to $100 (I’ve saved about half that amount so far) I’ll get started. All of my measly income is generated online, so it might take me ’till about the middle of February to get there, if not longer, but at least by putting my plan in writing it will generate a level of commitment on my part that will help motivate me to exert whatever amount of effort is necessary to find the hundred bucks and get underway.
This is again that stupid eternal compounding that pops up every now and then. Why is it stupid? I will explain why: If you start with $100 and make every day 1.8% profit, after 5 years you would mathematically have around $13794 billion. The top 5 biggest funds from 2015 have total assets of around $ 423 billion. It means that your account will be about 32613 times bigger then the total assets of this top 5. It is impossible to invest such an amount of money. Not to mention the amount of employees (50,000 till 100,000?) you will need to trade this account. And the traded volume will heavily move the market.
It is a fancy yet basic tool those not in the know like to use to convince others on how to make income the size of small-country GDPs. Pure folly. Sad.
It may not be a good idea to get trading advice/ideas from someone that has only has an account funded with only £100.
i'd like to see 1.8% compounded for 10 days after commision and expenses. I don't mean backtesting, any monkey can do that.
There's nothing wrong with compounding, theoretically and in the real world, you can compound to a million if you want to...if you swim in something liquid like the SPY, for example. The SPY is the Pacific Ocean of things. The SPX would be the Atlantic Ocean. and bitcoin would be the bermuda triangle. Compounding to a billion (or two) though is just being a sarcastic and dumb commenter.