Give me 1/2 the money you want to deposit for trading, and I will hold it for you. After you lose all your money, I will give you back most of it. That way, you have some money left to buy food and water instead of losing all of your money.
I know you're trying to be funny oracle, but I don't like that crap. Trading is hard and after a few weeks everybody realizes that. They come to ET to pick up a few pointers, discuss ideas and get educated. True, if I had my head screwed on right and worked hard and maxed out my IRA and 401k I would probably be ahead financially, but trading can be very rewarding.
froglet, It was the same for me. When I started trading again I opened up an account with my old broker IB, and it was just like old times, making and losing my ass in beans (although when I quit trading you couldn't even trade beans electronically at IB). But I tried to learn forex, and opened up a paper account with them and started fooling around. It was kind of difficult at first, I didn't even know how to enter an order. They have something called FX trader which to this day I don't know how to use and have no desire to learn. But once you figure out how to set up quotes and enter orders, it is just like trading anything else. The kind folks here pointed me to many educational links but none of the links were very helpful to me. It was the constant fooling around in the paper account that made me comfortable. I have a lot of experience in futures, but I like forex now because it is all new to me and I don't have any bad memories about it yet. The great thing about spot forex is, you can trade as small as you want. At IB the minimum for most pairs is 25K (you can trade less but that is not a good idea) So, the margin is 40 to 1 so to put on 25k the margin is probably less than 2k. Don't freak out the first time you trade JPY and see a 193.00 commission like I did. that is 193 yen, which is about $2.50. I mostly trade 100k positions (which in forex is very small), and a $1000 move in a day is a good day. But there are many days when almost nothing happens. Forex is very report oriented. The big boys are not trading on TA. I doubt you will find the information you are looking for on the web. Open up a paper account and then you will know the right questions to ask. Before commiting any real money, you should know the difference between a Market maker and an ECN, and make up your mind which way you want to go. IB is an ECN, which stands for Excellence in Connecting Nobodies.
Thanks. I have done turbo tax for my taxes the past 3 years and I haven't had any issues. I'm guessing turbo tax can take care of it. I'll look into it more later. Thanks.
yeah, in the early days turbo tax didn't even have a clue what 1256 was. I use to do the taxes for my family on turbo tax, but I always had to do my own futures trading taxes myself. But now they handle it very easily. So the deal is with forex, do you want to handle it like a futures trade or just like anything else in your life. If it's a profit you get preferential treatment if you treat it as a futures trade. It's no big deal, you just answer the turbo tax 1256 question yes or no and they take it from there.
okay, I ignored this thread for awhile to let people chime in. Here is the answer to the OP. Get an account with OANDA. Put ten dollars in that account. When you double that thru you trading strats, put 20 more dollars in. When you double that thru your strats, put 40 in, and so on ad infinitum. When you can no longer add to your account, scale down the hours at your job, that's means you are making money trading and it is impossible to contribute thru conventional means because the number is now too big. Do it this way and you cannot fail.