A little over three years ago, I created this thread as a software engineer who had stumbled into retail trading after coding and backtesting a Forex strategy for someone else. Just to recap, I was demo trading two strategies I had built, mostly on the S&P 500, metals, and major forex pairs. They weren’t perfect, but they were showing consistent profitability in a demo account, and I was wondering if moving to live trading would just lead me to blow up my account like so many people warned about.
Fast forward to now, and I thought it might be useful to share what’s happened since.
1. My early strategy did work, but…
I ran my initial strategies live for about 18 months and managed to average around 3% monthly. It wasn’t life-changing, but it was consistent enough to give me confidence that the whole “retail traders always lose” narrative isn’t the full story.
2. The big lesson: volatility in Forex is brutal.
The biggest challenge I found with Forex wasn’t that my strategy stopped working, but that the volatility swings made risk management much harder. The emotion of dealing with trades going from near TP to hitting my SL, in minutes, was really tough. I was never one for risking more than 2% on a single trade, so I never came close to blowing my account, but clusters of losses really made me question the validity of the strategy at times. Even when I was profitable, the ride was a lot bumpier than I wanted it to be. Forex really was a white-knuckle ride.
3. Moving into indices changed everything.
After nine months of live account trading, coupled with extensive backtesting using 20 years of market data I purchased, I realised that performance on the S&P 500 was strongest of all, so I started to evaluate and refine my strategies further on the DAX, FTSE, Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq, whilst continuing to trade Forex and metals. Using fundamental analysis together with Wyckoff accumulation/distribution patterns to track shifts in medium- and long-term market conditions, I found that the strategies adapted well. In fact, they performed best on the DAX, FTSE, Dow, and Nasdaq. The setups became cleaner, my hit rate improved, and profitability climbed to around 6% per month at my peak, during a period when I was pushing risk a bit harder and spending every spare minute I had trading.
4. Growing to full-time.
Over time, compounding those returns grew my account to the point where I now trade full-time and make a very good living from it. These days I risk no more than 1% per trade, and only 0.5% around news releases, which means I now follow a strategy that gives me greater stability and peace of mind.
5. Final thoughts.
For anyone starting out, my main takeaway is that it is possible to build consistent strategies, but it takes years of study, testing, and adapting to what the market gives you. It’s a gradual journey, not an overnight success, and the biggest edge comes from patience, consistency, dedication, and hard work, not chasing “holy grail” systems. What worked for me was focusing on understanding market structure (through Wyckoff) and aligning it with fundamental drivers, and coupling that with technical factors, using indicators, to craft entries, rather than relying purely on indicators, the approach that online educators promote.
If anyone is thinking of starting to trade, or is struggling with their trading, feel free to drop my a line and I'd be happy to give you my thoughts based on my experience to date.
