I have always been getting emails from our subscribers asking me how to become a full time trader and what is the capital needed in order to be able to trade forex full time. Although I did mentioned that if you have a good forex trading system and you follow the trading rules, you can be successful someday. But I also did mentioned that you will need psychological control, discipline, money management and other stuffs to be successful in trading in the long haul. If you are thinking to become a full time trader, it’s good that you aim for it but you must understand the situation you are in now. Are you already trading very well currently and making consistent profits every month? Even so, are you able to overcome the psychological barrier of having to quit your full time job and switch to just trading?

There are many factors that you have to consider carefully before you step into the world of full time trading, it’s not as easy as it’s said to be. I really consider forex trading as a professional job because it’s just so specialised! Yes, everyone can learn to trade and start to money money too. But is he/she able to maintain good performance for years to come? It really takes up experience and some knowledge to sustain great trading performance. I have seen traders failed after a few years of successful trading…why? They became greedy and over confident, one mistake and they bust up the whole trading account. But that’s not the main reason why they quit, it’s the lack of confidence to trade that makes them fear trading again.

Another main factor that will decide whether you can go full time trading is the trading capital. Yes, you can trade with small accounts when you just started, but in order to become full time forex trader, you will need reasonable huge accounts. This is because you should only risk 1% to 5% of your equity per trade and therefore small accounts mean tiny loss and tiny profits, how to earn a full time income this way? Below are the 3 biggest reasons why small forex accounts will fail.

1) You Will Take More Risk. With a small account, you will have smaller gains in profits because you trade smaller in lot size. Most people will focus on the nominal value (like dollars earned) instead of return on investment (percentage growth). When you see you are doing well but the gains are small, you will be tempted to break the rule of money management and risk a huge percentage of your capital. Then one mistake will wipe out a large portion of your trading account. Therefore I recommend a five digit trading capital if possible.

2) Wrong Mindset. Most people will not treat their trading seriously if it involves only a small capital. They will think that if they lose money, they will only lose that bit. Not getting serious will get you a bad habit. Once bad habit is there, it’s hard to remove it. On the contrary, good habit takes long time to build but just a mistake to spoil it.

3) Makes You Want to Trade More. Most likely you will not be satisfied with the amount of profits you have made as it’s seem small. Most people will then think they are good in trading already and start to look for trading opportunities every day (instead of trading along the trend). There will not be quality trades everyday and the more you try to trade, the more mistakes you will make and then slowly your account will be reduced.