The 3000$ Smartphone Challenge : Perfect Practice Makes Perfect !

Time for another update in our Smartphone Challenge ! Recently I received an email from a lady (50+ years old) who discovered my blog and the FIRE movement. She argues that it will be tough to retire early at her age. Nothing is impossible. Just believe in yourself and develop the skills required to retire early.

Forex trading skills is part of my EARLY Retirement plan. I hope you read my (EARLY) Retirement Plan blogpost. 

In that blogpost you can find the following infographic.  

Today I am informing you about the progress of our forex trading skills.

Our Key Learnings from trading in Demo Account 2

Early July we have RESET our demo account from 1,4 Million to 10.000. WHY ?

We have been trading from february to July 500$ to 1,4 Million. We had major gains in gold trades and other forex currency pairs but now our objective was to learn how QUICKLY we can trade 10K to 100K. Our key objective is to trade specific limited risk lot sizes so we can grow our account in an exponential way.

Most long term profitable traders possess a set of skills that lead to their consistent success over a long period of time. Here are the 10 skills that I have seen in common with so many successful traders. These are skills that I have to be master before I will be able to generate and keep long term CONSISTENT profits from trading the financial markets.

1. STRATEGY : Traders must have the skill to create a trading system with an edge that rises above randomness and creates a high probability of long term success. Over the past months I have been testing and practising in two demo accounts. I am convinced the strategy works ! Just a matter of practising the other skills..
2. RISK MANAGEMENT : Profitable traders know how to create good risk/reward ratios by managing their margin of safety on entry, their stop loss, and their potential open ended upside profits. Here there’s still improvement margin for setting my stop loss (SL) levels and taking my profits earlier from the table. A recent change that I implemented is moving my SL in profit, once it moves sufficiently in a profitable trade. When the trade turns around, you still end in profit. My win ratio has gone up after this change in trading style.
3. RESEARCH : Backtesting and doing historical chart studies is a skill they possess to see what worked in the past. To give them better odds of success in the present. Personally I document my trade setups so I can review them in the future and I also review my losing trades to learn what decision I did wrong.
4. ANALYSIS : They are not tempted to fight trends. They go with the flow until that stops making them dough. Together with a team of forex traders, I started to do a charting session to analyse the markets and upcoming opportunities for the week. Preparation in the weekend gives you better odds in the market and understanding the trend of certain pairs or gold/indices.
5. LEARNING FROM MISTAKES : The ability to accept an unprofitable trade is wrong early in the loss. In the past years I was sick for a day or even two when I lost a trade. I have developed now the emotional control to move on as there will always be a “NEXT TRADE”. Only trade with the 200$ or 500$ you are prepared to lose. The goal is to improve the win ratio and perfect execution. So far I haven’t LOST any money in learning this skill.
6. MINDSET : Trading is their business for making money and they treat it that way, not a form of entertainment and excitement. If you don’t treat it like a skill that can set you financially free, why bother ? Trading psychology, motivation and dedicating the necessary time to master it is KEY FOR SUCCESS. You want to learn how to drive a car and put in the necessary time, right ? So why not for mastering a skill that can set you financially free ? It’s a question I ask many times to people, but often stays unanswered.
7. LET YOUR WINNERS RUN : The flexibility to let a winning trade run when there is no reason to exit it early. This is also an improvement point for me. Sometimes I take the money from the table and then the trade could have double or triple as my entry was correct but my exit was too early… I hate leaving money on the table ! Patience is a point I need to improve.
8. READING THE CHART : They possess the skill to navigate the random nature of prices and focus on the signals that really matter. Trading the Profit & Loss versus Trading the charts is a common problem for beginner traders. I struggle with it sometimes too. Each month I see myself improving in this area. Having a TRADE PLAN is important and now I focus more on the execution of the plan versus maximizing the profit (being greedy).
9. ROBOTIC EXECUTION : Profitable traders have developed an unbreakable faith in their trading system and their own ability to execute it with discipline over the long term. Below you can see my results in my demo account. I have developed a strong belief in the trading system. Now it’s important to master the trading psychology and get to perfect execution.
10. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT : They have the skill to accept the unknown and that the future is unknowable and to trade what is currently happening. Personally I am passionate for learning about investing and trading skills. I still see huge opportunities to improve my own skills. Two days ago I saw a 28y old trader make 26.000$ with ONE gold trade in ONE day. That is the KNOWLEDGE and EXECUTION level I want to get to !

So 15th of July we started with 10K. That was just before my vacation with the family. The biggest gain was made one week later when my account increased from 11K to 83K in one day trading gold and silver. 

 On the last day of July 2019, our account did hit 100K during a relax day in our family vacation in Corsica. So then I decided to move on and see how much we could grow it further. 

On 12th of August we did hit 200.000$ and on 2nd of September we did hit 400.000$. This trade on 2nd of September was the first time I tried out trading an indice such as the NAS100. My broker offers also DE30EUR, NAS100 and other indices for trading. It’s great to know that I can apply my trading strategy for those tickers.

Our Next Milestone

So we did hit 400K in our demo account 2. Now what ? Why don’t you replicate this in a real money account ?

My key focus is to improve the points listed above. Perfect practice makes perfect. I also still have several losers.  Here’s a screenshot of a day in August where I lost more than 10K  and went back from 260K to 249K. Within a demo account, you have less emotional impact than if this would happen in a real money account. Going forward I don’t want to see those major draw downs in my trading journal.

Now I have RESET my demo account to 400$ and started a SMALL ACCOUNT CHALLENGE. The goal of this new milestone 3 is to optimize my lot size and risk management for growing a small account. I want to perfect a trading plan for small account growth. The goal is to grow a 400$ account to 1000$ and then to 3000$ with the correct lot size as in a demo and then REAL MONEY account. In a demo account you have more leverage than in a real money account. The goal is to limit the leverage and only use lot size similar like a real money account. Let’s see how we execute and improve our skills in the coming months. I keep on following training sessions twice a week with my mentor and improving my trading style. My mentor also continuously seeks improving his skills to get to 100K a month. That is a mindset that MOTIVATES ME !

In our real money account so far, we have mixed results. We have winners and losers. We lost several trades due to stop losses being too close or news impacting the trade. We didn’t lose our account. The key is to trade this account to 3.000$ this year.

Final Words

If you have read our Financial and Travel Objectives of 2019, you know that our goal for this year is to earn 15.000$ passive income. In order to achieve this result, forex trading is one of the different strategies to reach that goal. I consider myself still in phase 2 FOREX trader. I traded a 500$ account from February 2019 to June to 1,4 million. Then I traded a 10K account from 15th July to 2nd of September to 400K.  Now let’s see how QUICKLY we can grow 400$ account. The key advantage is that I can do this from my smartphone everywhere where I have WIFI or an Internet DATA connection….

The key is improving continuously our skills, our trading psychology and our risk management. Perfect practice makes perfect. I am not a ROBOT yet, but I am always ONE STEP closer to my goal.

Stay tuned how we progress in coming months…it is definitely an exciting journey.

This is the end of this blog post.

In 2019 we will send out ONE newsletter per month to our blog followers. Life can be busy sometimes and people lose track of following a personal finance and travel blog. Subscribe and you will get one email per month highlighting what you missed…

Thanks for following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading this blog post. We end with a quote as always. This quote you can find at NEWARK airport when you land in the United States.