My honest opinion is people only like to play the blame game to mask their own mistakes and **** ups, knowingly or unknowingly that they are making them.
Most people are either following a losing strategy, using far to tight stop placements becasue of fear and greed, or they are not experienced enough.
Its all to easy to point the finger and blame the SB company that you got stopped out or they were after you. Most of the people who say these things are normally trading less than £5pp and using 10-25pt stops and have a few hundred quid in the account, are we really to believe that the SB companies are widening spreads or manipulating price in order to take your minuet £20-£50 trade risk and wipe you out only to then go and spend a huge chunk of cash on marketing trying to get new punters in the door, I don't think so.
My view is SB's want you to make money as you will then be a long term client continually trading and paying the spread.
Were is the point of an SB company wiping a few hundred people clean for their few hundred quid, when they then have to go and spend thousands of £'s on marketing to try and get more punters in? It makes no sense.
I have been spread betting for 6 years and I will continue to spread bet as I have never had any problems with it.
6 years already makes you something of a rare dinosaur to still be actively trading. Well done for that... did your bankroll survive 2008?
People have overconfidence in everything they do when it comes to money and they expect to win. As a recent example, I have read comical reviews of online casinos with punters complaining that they were fleeced.... even though each and every game has a decent house edge regardless of any potential shenanigans going on... why on earth did they think they wouldn't lose their money? Terribly ignorant at best. Perhaps the casinos did whack in another 5% to their favour than advertised, but the mantra about a fool and his money comes to mind regardless.
The same can be said for a person new to the markets. Going in with a +VE expectation is a difficult thing to overcome. I think most of us do come to this with such an expectation and it is this that claims more scalps than anything else. Most of us dabble in this to get away from the mundane and give us hope for a monetarily rich future. It is difficult to cope when that proves to be untrue making you more and more irrational in your decisions. Not to mention bloody depressed.
Having said that, method is by far the most important facet of trading. You need to empirically test that your techniques give you a profit AFTER the spread and/or commission. The reality of spread betting is that the variable broker spread is much more difficult to account for than a market spread + commission. These days (since I day trade) I'd rather pay commission as the effect of a wide spread is cumulative against recovering a winning position at all, whereas you can recover a position much easier (pip wise) with a tiny spread + commission even if you finish the day down overall in pure money terms, but this can be accounted for in a weekly target. Anyway, people read Trading in the Zone (ultimately a good book though) long before they have figured out what their style actually is. Such nonsense. A lot of newbies have read the trading mantras distilled from this book on the forums etc so actually go in more resistant to the mental shocks than they should be (look at the number of losing traders on these forums dolling out psychological advice...), but are eventually worn down by their losing method so that they come out both a technical loser and a psychological wreck. Because their whole damn game plan was flawed. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think the shared knowledge in trading now has only made people less liable to question their method and skip steps. They honestly think a 3:1 ratio will sort them out, that the entry isn't (almost) all important, that supposed managed trades alone give them a tangible edge etc. That's why despite all this free information made available to us all, most of us lose.
And finally... the initial money required for someone with sound method... I would say don't waste your time thinking you can quit your job on £500-£5k and I'm not one of these naysayers about the potential of a good return for a trader vs an investor (since you can get filled around the current price easily, don't move the market, and are highly leveraged, there shouldn't even be comparisons with a 7-15% annual treasury investor against a full time trader, I won't even bother addressing this). However, there is a reality to it. If you're single, unattached and without dependants, then 25 grand is going to be your savings target... and expect to go back to work after the first time. I started trading with 5 grand, lost that, got another 5, lost that. Put in another 5, made some money, put in some scraped together savings of around 15 grand (absolute nightmare to put together) and took a career break with 25. I lost 7k in 6 months, which included the cost of significant London rental and living expenses so actually not bad all in. Returned to work. Collected a sh*tton of data during that time and quit again having saved the 7k again. That time I was able to leave employment for good - though I'd become such an intolerable phallus that I would have had to find something else to do regardless.
