Brokers will do what they can to make you trade as much as possible before your expected trading lifespan is over.

I think a trader needs to grow with his account, and I always encourage people to start with a demo account.

I think most people would be able to come up with a good trading recipe if they decided to invest the time, money and effort it takes to achieve the desired result.

If your account is so big that a total loss would cause problems in your lifestyle, you probably should trade a smaller account. You can use your mobile to check your account stats and learn from your mistakes before you start to trade bigger accounts. If you have a look on the chart, you will see that the balance and the equity are calculated for each tick that comes in. I know that my smartphone is a better navigator than Christopher Columbus, and I know that any ten year old computer is a better trader than me. Why do you think your broker is offering free trading capital?

Free bonus offers, free education?

Most people use a too high risk right from the beginning and that might cause the account to collapse. Do you believe in fortune telling? Should I do any palm reading with you to see if I see any profitable trades in your future? One of the common ideas is that you maybe want to change the direction of the trading entry after a loss. But why?

Historical data does not need to be imported. It is automatically downloaded when you start a backtest for the first time. Trading never feels good. When you make a profit, you expect that to happen again, and if that doesn’t happen, you feel bad. Heuristics help the humankind to survive.

Heuristics work in most situations but are dangerous when it comes to trading because they are shortcuts in thinking.

Some people fiddle around with a handful of trades and most of them are always searching for the next better Holy Grail system. I call those people hope traders because they hope that something will work out for them. From time to time I read about people who talk about trading systems that really work, and most of the time those people only have 50 or 100 trades to back up their opinion.

Would you still try to use Christopher Columbus’s equipment and try to reach the other side of the world with a paper map and a fragile sailboat? We have seen the Swiss bank giving up the bonding for the Swiss franc, that caused several bankruptcies in 2015.

At the end of the day, there is only one thing that I might remember. So if you would ask me, what would you like me to remember? I would say you are the one to decide what you are going to do. It is not very hard to find dozens of other shiny systems indicators and trading strategies. Maybe you are what I call a hope trader, hoping that something will somehow make you a profitable trader.

Most people learn that you should keep your losses short and let your profits run. Have you heard that sentence before? Yes. It sounds like a reasonable concept. I agree.

But when you really measure the stop loss cost, you will find something that is really interesting.

Some people like to trade trends, other people like to trade outbreaks and so on.