Setting expectations for trading
Day 08 of 26 · 9 min read · By DT Terminal
How long getting consistent really takes, measured in trades rather than dates, and why most new traders lose money, in the words of the risk warnings brokers are required to publish. This lesson puts realistic returns next to social media claims, explains process goals over profit goals, and walks the road from demo to small live to funded.
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Worked examples, the quiz and the interactive tools are in the app. Free account.
How long getting consistent takes
You placed a demo trade in Day 7. How long before it works? Nobody can honestly give a date; anyone selling one is guessing, or selling.
What can be measured is trades: a strategy needs a sample, usually 50 to 100 trades taken the same way, before its results mean much (Day 9 shows why).
| Setups taken a week | Weeks to 100 trades |
|---|---|
| 2 | 50 |
| 5 | 20 |
| 10 | 10 |
| 20 | 5 |
Worked example
Example 01: Three trades a week
The worked example, with every number walked through, is in the app.
Build your first sample faster in the backtester
Go deeper
The backtester does not replace live experience, but it tells you whether the rules are worth taking live.
Add the weeks you will spend learning to follow the rules at all, and it is clear why getting consistent is measured in months and years. Ten weeks of trading with no records teaches less than a hundred trades written up and read back. The calendar only matters because it is where the trades happen.
Why most new traders lose money
You can check this yourself. Regulators in the UK and the European Union make brokers that offer CFDs to retail clients state the share of their own retail accounts that lose money. Look at a few broker footers: the figure varies, and it is usually well over half.
That does not prove trading cannot be learned. Most people lose to the same few avoidable habits, and this course takes each one on:
| Habit | What it looks like | Where it is covered |
|---|---|---|
| Too much risk | Five or ten percent on one idea. A normal losing run empties the account. | Day 4 |
| No stop loss | A losing trade is left open until it comes back. One day it does not. | Day 3 |
| No written plan | Every trade is a new decision, made in the moment. | Week 3, the strategy lessons |
| Ignoring costs | Spread and commission quietly turn a small edge into a small loss. | Day 9 |
| Judging too soon | Dropping a sound approach after five losses, or sizing up after five wins. | Day 9 |
| Chasing losses | The next trade is bigger, to win the last one back. | Week 4, the psychology lessons |
Go deeper
The figure changes from broker to broker and from one quarter to the next. When the EU brought the warning in, in 2018, national regulators' studies put the share at 74% to 89% of retail accounts.
Realistic returns
Compounding is the best filter. A small return held every month grows large over time. A large one stops making sense within a couple of years.
Worked example
Example 02: Two percent a month against ten percent a week
The worked example, with every number walked through, is in the app.
Interactive tool
Compounding reality check
This interactive tool runs in the app, with your own numbers.
None of this says what you will make. In your first year, a realistic aim is to lose little while you learn, so the account is still there when the skill arrives.
Go deeper
The S&P 500 has averaged somewhere around 10% a year over long periods, counting dividends and before inflation, with losing years along the way. That is why 2% a month is already strong.
If the 10% a week claim were real and repeatable, its author would have no need to sell a course.
What you will make depends on your edge, your costs and your risk, and none of those exist yet. Use the widget to pick a monthly return and a length of time, and compare it with a steady 2% a month.
The stages of the learning curve
Progress is not a straight line up. Most traders who stick with it describe the same shape: an early high, a long low, and a slow climb. Knowing it makes the low easier to sit through.
| Stage | What it feels like | What to focus on |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Excitement | A few early wins. It feels easy. | Luck looks exactly like skill over a handful of trades. Keep the size tiny. |
| 2. Reality | The wins stop. Losses arrive in a run, and the account sits below where it started. | Survive it: small risk, a stop on every trade, and a record of what happened. |
| 3. Building a process | Long and flat. Rules get written, broken, rewritten. | One strategy, written down, followed and reviewed. This is the stage that does the work. |
| 4. Consistency | Months that look alike. Losing weeks still happen and stop feeling personal. | Keep following the plan. Change one thing at a time, and only with a sample behind it. |
| 5. Scaling | The process holds at a bigger size or with a prop firm. | Size up slowly, and step back down if the rules slip. |
Even stage 4 is not smooth. On this real chart price climbs from 2303.63 to 2536.07, plainly up, yet falls 4.7% from its high and takes 40 days to close above it again.
DT Terminal ChartsXAUUSD · D1Sample dataRead it as a good trader's equity curve: up over time, with long stretches below its last high. A drawdown inside an uptrend is normal. One that comes from breaking your rules is the one to fix.
Process goals beat profit goals
A process goal is one you can meet on every trade, whatever the market does. A profit goal, like "Make $1,000 this month", is one the market can take away.
| Instead of this profit goal | Set this process goal |
|---|---|
| Make $1,000 this month | Risk no more than 1% on any trade this month |
| Win 60% of my trades | Take only setups that meet every rule in the plan |
| Pass a challenge this month | Zero rule breaks this month |
| Never have a losing week | Write up every trade on the day I take it |
Worked example
Example 03: The 20th of the month
The worked example, with every number walked through, is in the app.
The working, and why profit goals mislead
When a profit goal slips, it pushes you toward the habits from section 2. Profit is the result of a process repeated over a sample. Leave the profit goal for later.
"Make $1,000 this month" sounds like a good goal. The trouble is that you do not control it. The market decides when your setups appear and which of them win. What you control is how you take them.
In the example, the goal now needs $1,300, which is 13R. A strategy that wins 40% of the time at 1:2 makes about +0.2R a trade on average (the next lesson shows the sum), so 13R takes around 65 trades.
Set a process goal
Demo, then small live, then funded
The road has three stages, each teaching what the one before cannot. Your demo runs on the same platform you will trade live, so the buttons never change.
MetaTrader 5
cTrader
TradeLocker| Stage | What it is for | A common bar for moving on |
|---|---|---|
| Demo | The mechanics, and learning to follow a plan with nothing at stake. | A run of trades, often 30 to 50, all taken by the plan with a stop on every one. |
| Small live | Real money emotions at a size too small to hurt. | The live record follows the plan as well as the demo one did. |
| Funded or scaled | Trading the plan at its planned risk, with your own money or a prop firm’s. | There is no finish line. The record keeps deciding. |
Every arrow in the figure depends on your record, so it has to be one you cannot fool. Memory blurs the rule breaks, and a spreadsheet you type yourself can be tidied after a bad week. A broker-synced record cannot: trades come in as they were filled.
Go deeper
Prop firms get their own lesson in Day 25.
With a broker-synced record you add only the part you know: why you took the trade and whether it followed the plan. That record is the honest scoreboard for you now, and later for a prop firm or anyone else who asks how you trade.
Check yourself
Quick review · 0 of 0
What a screenshot leaves out
Social media is full of 10% days and accounts that went from $500 to $10,000 in a month. A screenshot shows one trade or one week, never the whole account. Nobody posts the account they emptied.
Go deeper
A screenshot can come from a demo, it can be the one good week out of twenty, and it can be edited. A real result survives the question of the whole account.