New trader here. The Dunning-Kruger affect is REAL!

RSHobo

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Hello, everyone. My name is Richard and to a lot of you I am sure, I am fresh off the bus to camp. First of all, I want to preface this post with this: I originally had the intention of thinking I could come on here, post a complaint, get a resolution and be done with it. After much research and thorough inspection, I humbly apologize for ever thinking that in the first place and that is surely not my intentions here now. I commend all of you for what you are doing and helping out in this cause. This industry is very mysterious to new people like myself and especially since I have no one in the real world with any experience with trading or investments at all anyway.

Now, I have been a professional Executive Chef for the past 14 years. Spending about 11 hours in the kitchen and 3 in the office. Then back home, 6 days a week, most weeks. I was ready for a change, that is for sure. But where could I go that would allow me to use all of my skills at once like I could in the kitchen (not including cooking abilities, there is WAY more that goes on in a kitchen than just cooking food, lol.) So, I wanted to become a trader, huh?

That being said, I have definitely done my due diligence as far as I can tell, learning as much as I possibly could absorb. Sounds like most new traders, huh? I was really excited too, so many companies, so many different ways to play the game. I had/have a pretty good "concept" (notice I put that in quotes) of what I think the market is and how to play the game just enough to dip my toes in. Only problem? I bet this story is quite similar to a lot of the people here. No capital. Of course. I wanted to play the game but without enough money for a leveraged account and surely I couldn't afford $25k to get around the PDT rule. So, I started looking into some other things.

I looked up so many different ways that a person could get started in trading, whatever way possible. I looked at crypto, because it was easy to obtain by mining. So I started trading that, small successes. Crypto was only in fractions of pennies and there was no leverage. I found one company that allowed me to trade the crypto with leverage but lots of hidden fees here and there. I tried a few prop funding companies and tried their challenges. I succeeded in one of the challenges but noticed that their software was "buggy" (possibly being manipulated) and I refused to proceed to the live account and demanded my money back (Which I did get, to my surprise.)

So, I did not really want to pump in another $500 to a prop funding company just to possibly lose to at no fault of my own. I'm not a gambler at all and once my money is in jeopardy like that, I get it out. Unfortunately, real life does not have any stop loss. Just your own discipline, research, knowledge, experience, etc.

Now, here I am facing another situation where I feel like I am being manipulated by a company that I will not mention yet, but feels like soon to come. I really now just want to see what I can do to help other people from experiencing the same situations that I have been dealing with for over a month now. I'm not sure if or when I will ever find a legitimate source that will allow me to trade that also meets my requirements or not; but I do know now that what is even more valuable than that is my time, my sanity and my dignity.

I spent MONTHS in these simulators (and I mean sometimes HOURS per day), I was reading books, I hand drew charts on graph paper with a compass to get more intimate with the drawings so I could hopefully develop more of an understanding of them. I went into a lot of the math and why the oscillators work the way they work. I learned about Herd Mentality or psychology of the masses. I learned about Elliot Waves and how they correlated to the Fibonacci Sequence. Support and resistance and how the Principle of Polarity works with them. The Law of Energy of Conservation and how it correlates with Stoch and RSI. Blah blah blah.

Hence why I titled the post with, the Dunning-Kruger affect is REAL! Here I am, what feels like LIGHT YEARS away from how much I knew before; defeated, slumped down in my chair, feeling worthless and wanting to give up. I feel like I don't know ANYTHING about ANY market and maybe everyone was right and I can't be a trader and it's a dead end gig, don't waste your time or money. But deep down, I really don't believe that and I really do think I can be successful at this. I do not think I have had a fair chance at this. I don't want to give up and I don't want anyone else to either if it is what they really want to do. Anyway, that was my ramble and a little bit of my backstory. I hope I can work together with some of you all soon and we can continue the good fight.
 
C'mon, you've seen at least 3 YouTube videos, so you should be making 40% per day by now. ;)

Love the subject line. Also, congrats on understanding that you got affected that way. I've been exposing Ponzi schemes for over a decade and was into wrecking other online financial scams many years before that, but I still have people who collected one payment on time from an obvious Ponzi tell me what an idiot I am, at least until the Ponzi fails. I'll try to remember not to tell you about the cool tip I saw online about how to boil water more efficiently. :p

I'm pleased you still have an urge to trade. A lot of people who are convinced they fully understand the market and finally hit a brick wall they can't blame on the broker give up.

It sounds like you've paid your demo dues, but I have some suggestions regarding that. Realize that a demo account doesn't connect to the real market. You could open a trade for 10 billion dollars of currency at a slow time on a holiday and you won't create a ripple in the market. A real trade under those conditions would be very noticeable to all traders.

So, keep refining your trading system under demo conditions, but don't take the profits you gain as "that's what I'll get if I do this live." Instead, recalculate the profits with at least two full pips (20 points on a 5 digit broker) subtracted from each trade. Why? Simple. In the real world, you could easily end up with a pip of slippage at entry and at exit. Possibly even more. This adjustment will bring your demo results closer to what you can expect in the real world. Also, if I'm wrong, you can enjoy those 2 extra pips of profit.

Another useful thing would be to calculate how much you plan to put with the broker when you go live. Then open a new demo account, call/chat with support,, and request that the account balance on the demo be changed to the amount you will really be using. If you plan to trade mini or microlots on a $500 account, you need a demo account that matches this. Like any simulator training, the closer it is to reality, the more useful the experience will be.

Don't be in a big hurry to go live. As you save up, park the cash in some way that earns interest (yes, it will be small at first, but over time, it adds up). If you want to take a little more risk (hopefully for better rewards), buy a few shares of inexpensive stock with some (NOT all) of the money that you are saving up to trade with. If you go this route, remember that the world's stockmarkets are currently levitating by burning trillions in stimulus money. Do a little research on "recession proof stocks" to try to keep any stock investments a little safer during the wild uncertainty of 2020.

If you think your broker did scam you, open a separate thread in the Scam Alerts folder. If you develop a simple, easy to use, absolute fool proof trading system that enables you to make piles of money per day on a live account, don't tell anyone (except me!) how it works. :D
 
Hope you don’t give up mate, would like to see how you get on. Took me a while to get my head in the game, sounds like you may have plateaued a bit.
 
It does sometimes feel like the more I research the more I realise that there’s still so much more to learn.
 
There are times when we are told things by other people and we think that they are just making things up. Most of the time people want to see things before they can believe it. it has always been real and will forever continue to be real. I hope everyone else gets it now.
 
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