Your first account and market

Hi guys, i was just wondering how big was your first trading account and what markets did you trade first? Was it a success or did you end up blowing your account? :whistling

Tiny - a few hundred. I think it was with Finspreads, or some similar third-rate bucket shop.

Spot forex through a spread bet company. Can't get much worse really.

Didn't blow up as such, just lost a little (in cash terms, although as a percentage of the opening balance it would have been fairly significant), stopped, rethought things, moved on.

The Leopard said:

Tiny - a few hundred. I think it was with Finspreads, or some similar third-rate bucket shop.

Spot forex through a spread bet company. Can't get much worse really.

Didn't blow up as such, just lost a little (in cash terms, although as a percentage of the opening balance it would have been fairly significant), stopped, rethought things, moved on.

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Oh yea i also fell for that.. trying to scalp FOREX on a spread betting website that had possibly the slowest charts ever. I knew something was fishy about them with their £300 cash back offer aswell.. anyway about 2 weeks after i withdrew my money there was a major fraud bust and they ended up going bankrupt and into liquidation. :-0

First ever account was deal4free(now CMC), £1000 account which took me a LOT of hard work to save.
Trading at £1 per point.
DOW30 Instrument.
I just looked at the flashing numbers. Didn't know anything about charts or TA. If it was flashing lots and the numbers were going up, I bought it! Amazingly I did rather well for a good few weeks and got the account to around £1800.
Then I read about support and resistance and pretty much lost the lot!
I cant blame TA alone though. Even when I was doing well, I didn't like taking stops (which ultimately led to the blowup).
However, I think when I didn't know anything about charts/TA, I was naturally going with the trend, whereas I found myself trying to fade every single move when I discovered some TA concepts!

Cityindex SB, £1k acct trading 3-5% per trade (after 100s of back and fwd test demo trades) positional trading commods/index futures - set and forget trades as had a day job, went well. TP was for large amt of ticks (relative to intraday TPs) so didn't notice too many SB issues, and slippage was negligible.

IG, in the days when spreads on indices and FX were five to ten times what they are now, and the internet was so slow that prices were probably a few minutes old by the time they reached the screen. Lost my £250 pot pretty quickly, then discovered binary bets and lost the same again even more quickly.
Lesson learnt, and far more cheaply than signing up for a trading course.

R.Charnock said:

IG, in the days when spreads on indices and FX were five to ten times what they are now, and the internet was so slow that prices were probably a few minutes old by the time they reached the screen. Lost my £250 pot pretty quickly, then discovered binary bets and lost the same again even more quickly.
Lesson learnt, and far more cheaply than signing up for a trading course.

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And what was the lesson you learned?

Lenry said:

And what was the lesson you learned?

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That I was an idiot for thinking I could make money straight away from doing something I knew precious little about, using spread betting, which in those days really did live down to its Steal4Free, Indigence Guaranteed reputation.

You really want to know... lost 10k account back in 2008. Was new and naive and put it down to lack of experience....then since then probably blow over 10 accounts of 300-500 each...put that down to being under capitalized....

Recently just had my worst yet...lost 15k account by over leveraging, adding to losers and being stubborn.

Giving up for good now, I simply can't control the gambler in me!!

advfntrader said:

You really want to know... lost 10k account back in 2008. Was new and naive and put it down to lack of experience....then since then probably blow over 10 accounts of 300-500 each...put that down to being under capitalized....

Recently just had my worst yet...lost 15k account by over leveraging, adding to losers and being stubborn.

Giving up for good now, I simply can't control the gambler in me!!

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It's really the risk to lose control by yourself... better to start with mini account..I also lost 10k ...really sad on this . Now I hope I've got the experience...

When I started out, I decided to "only trade what I could afford to lose", but in those days with a lucrative career "I could afford to lose" a lot... so I did. After giving up the day job to trade and write (about trading) full-time, scaling back to smaller stakes, learning to control risk with stop orders, and position trading rather than day trading, I grew a couple of smallish accounts each by an embarrassingly-high 3000% (i.e. 30x) in 2009. Since then it's been slower, but my philosophy is: make a lot when the going is good, and lose a little when it's not so good. And that's probably all we can hope for.