Hey everyone. My name is Bill and welcome to my funded trading blog. If it wasn’t clear already, I’ll get straight to the point: I’m trying to become a prop firm forex trader. If you share the same goal as me, I can’t wait for us to profit together.
I’m thrilled that Forexra.com has allowed me to file a trading blog in this way. Not only because it’s so important to keep a record of your trading, but also because I get to share what I’m doing with interested observers. Plus, sharing my trading journey in this way gives me a greater sense of accountability. I hope that having to write my results up like this will push me to make my trading tidier and more disciplined, knowing that I’ve obliged myself to share the results.
That’s actually one of the reasons why I now think prop trading is so good. Because, at first, I didn’t think much of it. I thought all the rules and restrictions were just to trip you up so that the prop firm could pocket your cash. But now, I think that nothing could be further from the truth. While, there’s no hiding the fact that failed challenges are probably a tidy source of income for the broker, those rules are to help you stay on the right track. They are a reflection of the discipline, money management, and risk management skills you need to be consistently profitable as a trader. Being held to account by another party should theoretically push you towards being a better trader.
FTMO
The very first part of my journey will start with FTMO’s free trial of a $200,000 account. It’s an obvious way of putting my skills to the test before I shell out a four-figure sum for the real challenge. Once I attempt the real funded challenge, I will continue to go with FTMO because they’re a tried and tested industry leader. Plus, their maximum daily and total drawdown loss limits aren’t too bad.
The only thing that bothers me with FTMO’s challenges is the time restriction. However, I must not lose sight of the fact that there is always the potential of a free retake. Failing to meet the profit target will not cause you to fail the challenge. So long as you finish the challenge in profit and you haven’t breached the other main rules, you can have another go without paying a penny. There’s even the possibility of a two-week extension if you’re 5% or more in profit towards the end. True, the idea of a time limit doesn’t sound great, but there are ways to mitigate it. It makes me think that the pressure of it is all in your head.
As for my level of risk, I think I’ll be going with Normal so as to do things slow and stable. Personally, I’d rather not see the potentially huge changes in account equity that could come with the Aggressive type. However, I reckon I will be going with the Swing account type, as this will allow me to hold trades overnight and over the weekend. Swing account types come with much less available leverage (1:30 vs. 1:100), but this doesn’t bother me as I don’t see myself holding the number of positions that would require 1:100 leverage. My platform will be MetaTrader 4.
My trading blog – the strategy
Once I’ve found potential setups, my strategy won’t be complicated. It will mainly consist of scalping gold against the dollar (XAUUSD). The “swing” account mode will allow me to hold the trade overnight if higher-level analysis or fundamentals suggest that it may be prudent to hold the position for longer. However, the main strategy will be an intraday principle of simply taking money when I see it.
Ideally, this will translate into a 0.5% – 1% profit of the original account balance. But of course, nothing is certain. I will not limit myself to a certain amount of trades, but once I’ve made this amount or bagged 20-30 pips, I will stop trading for the day. Hopefully a nice little side effect of doing this blog is that it removes the temptation to overtrade, because once I’ve met my goal for the day, it’s time to stop trading and start blogging.
As things stand with my current work commitments, it should be possible to trade every day. On this basis, I hope to write one blog post every day. The posts might not appear on consecutive days due to other commitments, but one post covering each 24 hour trading period seems like an obvious and attainable goal.
I will not be using any trade copiers or Expert Advisors during the trial. I will be using the FTMO’s Windows 10 Desktop MT4 client, and the iOS app.
Signing up
I’ve signed up for my free trial. All that’s waiting for me now is to start trading. Let the journey begin!
