Without a doubt, this was a successful year at 2ndSkiesForex. As a team – our staff grew, we got smarter and accomplished many goals.
While this type of success is ‘satiating’, what really floated my boat was the students and traders. Many this year after hard work and lots of practice + training broke through.
One student got funded $100,000. Another finally broke through to profitability after blowing up several accounts. And one student did +25% over a 6 month period.
There are many more successful trader stories like this at 2ndSkiesForex. While I’d like to share all our forex success stories, we’ll share a few to start the year on a good note and hopefully inspire you.
Getting Funded $100K after 8 Months
Harkanwalpreet Singh joined 2ndskiesforex in December 2014. You can see his payment receipt + account with us below.
He is a member of our Price Action Course & in February joined our Advanced Traders Mindset Course.
After 2 months of training diligently, he funded an account for $10K with the AxiTrader Select program.
5 months later he got funded $100K by the AxiTrader program. You can read the article about him getting funded here.
Note how they state he ‘performed consistently during volatile markets and complex trading environments‘
Below is his email to me about getting funded (click image to enlarge).
Mr. Singh is not a common forex trading success story by getting funded within 8 months. Normally it takes 1-2 years of hard work before you see this kind of result.
Instead of just learning price action strategies and trading techniques, he worked on his trading mindset.
Many struggling traders fall into the trap of just working on one skill – learning price action and making trades.
He realized how important a successful mindset is and did our core mindset techniques for months.
The result is consistent performance, handling volatility, and getting funded $100K.
What I think is unique about Harkanwalpreet is his maturity. Not long after getting funded, some personal family issues came up. He decided to suspend trading till the situation would pass realizing how is mindset was affected.
Instead of just hammering on, he knew when to take a break and not trade. This shows awareness, discipline and maturity.
If he asks, I’ll be there at every step of the way, and may even fund him myself if he continues to perform.
To me his forex story is a great marker of success and I’ll look forward to watching him grow.
Gaining +25% in 6 Months
Nazar Bent is from Canada and joined 2ndSkiesForex back in the summer of 2014. You can see his receipt of our price action course from June that year below.
As a student unhappy with his college studies, Nazar knew from the moment he started trading this is what he wanted to do full time.
Below is his myfxbook account since he started with us.
To summarize:
1) in the beginning, he struggled like most traders (red box), but he kept working at it
2) after finding a groove, he started to stabilize (blue box)
3) since February 2015, he’s gained +25% over 6 months (green box)
Below is a zoomed in screenshot from his Feb. trading on.
Notice the red box in the middle? This is what happened when trying a new strategy. After giving that up, his gains returned and trading stabilized.
What should be noted is his accuracy + risk to reward numbers. He’s only averaging about 23% for his accuracy, yet is still making money.
Why? Because he’s crushing his +R per trade with his avg. win 184 pips and avg. loss 36.9 pips. This goes to show you don’t need large stops when trading price action.
And his average trade length is < 1 day also demonstrating you don’t need to hold trades for weeks to make good money.
I’ll talk more about accuracy later, but below is his review of us on forexpeacearmy (click image to enlarge).
Notice how he mentions his trading changed when joining us. Also key is how he zero’s in on building a proper mindset and trading psychology.
I feel this is something we excel in with our heavy focus on building a successful mindset and unique approach.
Nazar is one of most dedicated students to becoming a professional trader. I’ve told him if he keeps it up, I’ll fund him personally.
What is interesting to note is his performance when he opened up a new account for me to monitor. His trading has been mostly flat (see below).
He’s openly admitted the psychological pressure of trading for me has affected him. This shows honesty and self-awareness which I appreciate in his candor.
My guess is he’ll break through come 2016 and get back to his typical winning ways.
From Blowing Up Several Accounts to +23% in 4 Months
Shahab might just be the most interesting student & character I have. Before coming to trading, he sold expensive cars to high profile clients around the world.
We’re talking Ferrari’s, Lambo’s, you name it. He’s used to dealing with decent sized numbers of $250K+.
He’s also a risk taker, meaning he’s completely comfortable taking massive risks. This definitely translated into his trading as his swings were massive when he first came to me.
He wasn’t taking trading or training seriously and within 1.5 years blew up several accounts. Trust me – he deserved every dollar he lost during this time and he knows it.
Then he contacted me about really digging in. So in the summer of 2015, we started doing 1-1 mentoring (which is not cheap at $10K per month).
He also lives in Canada and we often go out for tea or lunch, talking trading, mindset and success.
Shortly after, he found a groove trading some of our advanced price action models + his own system.
Here is his myfxbook account below.
‘Shahab503‘ is the name of his myfxbook profile. It’s also the name of his account with us below:
Now, there are several things that should stand out here from his myfxbook account above:
- he’s day trading (done thousands of trades) & continues to have massive swings
- he still shows the tendency to go over risk parameters and isn’t as conservative as I’d like him to be. This is an improvement in the right direction from where he was though!
- he’s got a lot of open risk (yellow line) which is way outside my normal risk parameters. Again, the key issue of risk and money management keep coming up so this is something he needs to work on
- his risk of ruin is just below 1% meaning there is a small chance he can blow up his account at this rate
- accuracy is still under 45%, but his avg win vs. loss is balanced enough at +1.3 and he has a positive profit factor over +1
Hence I consider Shahab to be a work in progress. Considering he was blowing up accounts faster than you could drink a pint of cold beer, I’d consider his progression a success.
Do I think he’s in the clear? No, absolutely not as he still has unhealthy habits around risk. But what I’m focused on is his progression instead of just a static number.
He’s not just where he is now, but what he’s becoming. His trajectory is in the right direction and his trend is upward.
How he performs from here is up to him and how much he wants to engage his level of discomfort and discipline. But from where he was, I’m proud of his progress and have positive hopes for him.
A Common Thread
If you noticed, there are several common thread across these success stories. They are;
- They all had rough beginnings and losses (like most of you)
- They stuck through the hard times and showed mental toughness in trading. This eventually led to a change & breakout in their performance
- Accuracy – they all had accuracy levels below 50%.
This last point I want to touch on briefly as it’s a heavily misunderstood subject.
Beginning traders think you need a highly accurate system to make money, but this simply isn’t the truth. There are a million ways to make money with varying levels of accuracy.
Generally the lower the accuracy, the higher the durability of a system as it doesn’t need to consistently win to make money. And let’s be clear, you are going to have losing periods (perhaps months) where you aren’t making any money.
If you system is dependent upon high accuracy, during this losing period you’ll likely experience a massive drawdown. These large drawdowns are psychologically harder to overcome.
Most professionals are between 35-50% accurate throughout all their trades over a year.
My accuracy for 2015 was about 46% but my +R per trade was above 2, so this shows a positive expectancy with proper control of risk.
What Level of Accuracy Should You Expect As A Beginner?
As a beginning trader, you should expect your accuracy to be between 30-50% while learning the ropes (perhaps lower). This is because you are still building your skill set and not trading sub-consciously, so performance will be affected.
Think of it like learning how to shoot a bow and how seldom you’ll hit the center. Yet with practice + training, you can start to get 9 and 10 points more often.
Hence do not be discouraged if your accuracy is low. Accuracy is not static and fluctuates on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
There are days when I’m highly active intra-day and can lose my first 5-7+ trades before hitting my first winner.
Akin to trading, professional poker players can play 40,000 hands before making new equity highs.
What this tells you is drawdowns, losing periods and corrections are natural. The difference is most people do not endure these times and give up or change their strategy.
What they miss is the breakout which comes through training, experience and diligence. Hence try not to look at your current state as your overall numbers. Success is a moving target just like your accuracy.
Be more concerned with progression, trajectory and process.
In Closing
I hope you found these forex trading success stories above inspiring and what is possible. To be clear, these stories are not written in stone. They could go backwards and not make it to the next level.
But they show you what’s possible, why psychological endurance is needed, and how important proper price action training + a successful mindset are to making money trading.
With that being said, will you become the next successful trader story?
Will you get funded $100K this year and start making consistent profits?
If you are looking to be the next forex success story, then check out my price action course where we change the way you think, trade and perform.
Make sure to leave your comments below as I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Until then, may this be a year filled with good health, abundance and success.
