Academy of Financial Trading – Forex Markets

Earlier in the week, we provided you with some “interesting facts” regarding Forex trading, and the monetary sums involved on a daily basis.  Let’s now look at things from a slightly different angle.

Online trading, as we often mention, is one of the very few occupations (yes – occupations!!) which people believe that they can succeed immediately in, irrespective of their background or specific knowledge in the subject matter. 

We often refer to day traders as “retail traders”.  This is the industry term for a regular person who has opened an account with a broker, and has committed some of their hard earned capital to this broker in the hope of generating a return – in most cases a substantial return.  This person also has very little experience of the financial markets, or of how they work. 

Let’s put some figures on the table.  Did you know that a recent study revealed that 99.6% of retail traders are unable to achieve more than four back to back profitable quarters?  Let’s put that another way – only 0.4% of traders achieve consistent profits quarter over quarter in one year.  Are you one of those? 

Some investment banks are known to allocate up to 20-30% of their funds into the Forex market.  This generates between 40-60% of their total profits - by far their most lucrative endeavour.

We were recently given a great analogy by a student – trading without an education, without a proven strategy, without learning to trade, is no different than you standing on the 1^st tee at St. Andrews Golf Club, beside Rory McIlroy, then taking all your potential trading capital and betting on you to emerge victorious after 18 holes.  It’s just not going to happen, is it?

Online Forex Trading – Some Interesting Facts

Did you know that the Forex market (foreign exchange market) is the most widely trading market in the world?  Over US$4 trillion is traded on a daily basis. This is a phenomenally huge figure… so large that it is almost impossible to comprehend it. Let’s break it down a little…

If you had $1 million dollars, made up of one million individual $1 bills, then the stack would reach a height of 358 feet. That’s about the height of a 30 – 35 storey building.  That’s impressive!  Now let’s imagine that you had $1,000,000,000,000. That’s $1 trillion. That stack, if made up of individual $1 bills would reach a height of 67,866 miles. That’s just over one quarter of the way to the moon. If $4 trillion is traded each day, then that is enough to stretch all the beyond the moon! 

When you read these figures, it’s easy to see why the Academy of Financial Trading spends most of its time managing people’s expectation. It’s too often that people aim for the moon… it’s too often that potential traders believe that trading the financial market is easy. 

For those who are learning to trade, it needs to be pointed out that it is not easy. It needs to be emphasised that training is required.  It needs to be shown that a proven trading strategy is a pre-requisite to successful trading. If you are not sure whether you have a trading strategy or not, then you simply do not. 

We can help. We provide our students with the best trading courses available. We provide an honest, realistic and straight-forward education, focussing on continuous and conservative returns. This is what we excel at – this is what our traders excel at. 

One more interesting fact… if you had one million dollars and simply had to spend it at a rate of $20 per second, your $1,000,000 would be gone in 13 hours and 48 minutes. If you had one trillion dollars, and had to spend it at the same rate, it would take 1,585 years. Now that’s impressive!