Very few people actually manage to make money from forex trading in the long run with market estimates suggesting that only 5% of people are consistent winners. So does this small percentage of winners mean that in order to become a successful forex trader you need to be trading full-time?

Well not necessarily. A lot of people automatically assume that if they really want to start cranking up their profits they need to sit at their computer screens all day with no distractions. I personally don’t believe this to be true. In fact I generally suggest to people that they don’t quit their day jobs and instead just trade the markets on a part-time basis.

Forex trading is an extremely difficult occupation which is why I always think that you should have at least a few years trading experience under your belt before you even consider going full-time. But even with this experience, nothing can prepare you for the pressures you face when you’re trading full-time and your entire income is the profits you make from trading.

You can take quite a relaxed approach to trading when you are trading part-time knowing you have other sources of income coming in, but when your mortgage payments are completely reliant on you making money from the markets, then this can make things really difficult, not to mention stressful.

This stress can affect your trading decisions and can even throw your original trading strategy out of the window. For instance if a position goes in your favour you may be more tempted to grab your profits early rather than letting them run.

Another reason why I don’t really recommend full-time trading is because you can quite easily come up with a profitable trading strategy that is based on end of day data, or uses weekly or monthly charts, for example. This longer term approach can yield just as many points profit as short-term scalping and is a lot less stressful and time-consuming. In fact you don’t really need to be at your computer at all during the day. You can simply monitor your position and enter any orders at the end of the trading day. This way you can still keep your other full-time job as well.

So hopefully you can see why you don’t necessarily need to be a full-time forex trader in order to make the big profits. You can simply trade part-time during the day or you can adopt a longer term strategy which can in fact be a lot more profitable because long-term charts conform a lot better to technical analysis.

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