Forex Need some wisdom from fellow traders

Here's what I am thinking:

That to be a full time retail Forex earning around the US national average income you need:

1. A big amount of capital and
2. The skills to squeeze a profit out of it consistently.

Most retail traders, when they start to trade, don't have both.

If they're lucky enough to be able enhance their skills to a level where they can make consistent profits - they are still left earning peanuts.

Don't get me wrong, when I started out trading I didn't really started with the aim of making millions.

The motivating thought that I had while suffering emotional pain and learning lessons the hard way was that once I started making consistent profits out of Forex Markets - all the hard work will be worth it.

I guess I started trading with the intent to learn a skill valuable enough to make me a living.

After sixteen months of making mistakes and evolving as a trader, my trading style is such that I managed to churn out around 4% per month since January with a max drawdown of less than 10% and around 80 trades per month.

I do manual trading, requiring four to six hours of screen time per day. I agree that the sample time is small and I am sorry I do not have a link to myfxbook or other third party sites to prove my statements - so let's just go with the assumption that I'd average 4% in the future also.

I say trading style and not trading strategy because I think it is the style that is being honed and crafted - strategy after some time becomes a method to achieve relatively high level of confluence in entries.

Like many others, right now, I do not have a large trading account - in fact I have around $2800 in my account. So essentially I have earned $110 to 180$ per month since January.

Reading around Forex Factory it seems many people agree on the conclusion that making 8 to 10% per month consistently will be an outstanding performance. So when I look at that fact, my own performance of around 4% doesn't seem that bad.

Now a person earning 7$ per hour, working at Mcdonalds in US for 40 hours a week - makes roughly $1120 per month. And for someone like me - who makes 4% per month of trading capital - to earn that much, I'll roughly need a trading capital of $20,000.

Keeping the 4% per month criteria in mind, to match average national income of US in 2014 - $53,000 - I'd need around $115,000 to be a full time trader.

I thought of trying to have an EA built but my style doesn't really has one set rules to follow I mean I keep in mind several methods by which I can make an entry and keep in mind some other things when exiting but can't really write that down in a fixed, to be followed way by a bot.

So I looked into the option of becoming a signal provider. I thought there were bound to be people looking for consistently profitable signal providers and I was ready to put in the X number of months required to show that I was consistently profitable.

Turns out that the most followed traders at MQL5 are employing a variation of the martingale style of trading with success ratios of 97% and above - were willing to provide their services for 20$ a month per subscriber and the most followed signal provider had 230 something subscribers. Essentially if you do not trade the martingales you won't be able to boast of awesome success ratios and subscribers would rather follow a ticking time bomb with 99% success ratio than some sensible trader (there were actually five or six very good providers who only had 20 to 40 subscribers paying 20 each).

Signal Providers at myfxbook had both demo and live subscribers listed combined so I couldn't tell how much they were making. Suffice it to say, reading from a comments there, that one can perhaps earn around a 1000 bucks being a signal provider - and that too after months of trading and everything.

I am aware that earning constant, low amount of profits will gradually compound my trading capital. But if I'd be making let's say 50% per annum from now with 3000$ capital - I'd have around 10,000 dollars of trading capital after three years of trading four to five hours per day.

So I ask those traders with experience and wisdom - what should my next steps be if I cannot arrange even a $20,000 trading capital. Do I continue to earn peanuts or accept the fact that for a retail trader, just having the skills isn't enough - that a retail trader should have a big amount of capital and skills.

Source.