Can You Make Trading a Full Time Career?

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One of the common themes in modern Hollywood classics such as Big Short, Too Big to Fail, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Margin Call is that forex trading offers a quick money-making avenue. However, until recently, most people considered forex trading a niche reserved for experts. But can you make trading a full-time career?

You can make trading a full-time career as long as you set realistic income goals, take time to learn and grow your trading skills, and stay patient because success in trading takes time. 

If you’re on the fence about whether to take on trading as a full-time career or not, this article will help you make that decision. Here, I’ll provide some tips to guide you through your journey as a full-time trader. Let’s get started.

You Can Absolutely Make Trading a Full-Time Career

What makes a good career? There are several factors you should consider before selecting one career path over the other, such as:

  • The amount of money you can make
  • Opportunities for both professional and personal growth
  • Work-life balance and flexible schedules
  • Mobility, among others. 

Trading Full-Time Allows You To Earn Good Income 

According to Indeed, a stock trader in the United States makes an average of $80,086 per year. On the same breadth, Salary.com notes that the average salary a forex trader in the United States makes is $186,217 per year.

In both options, the amount of money you can make will depend on the amount of capital you have and your level of skills in managing your portfolio. 

Therefore, trading is a very lucrative option when it comes to income, and the sky is your limit.

Trading Offers Growth Opportunities

Most traders will start small depending on their initial capital. As explained above, your starting point will depend on your capital and the risk you’re willing to take. However, as your skills and understanding of the market grows, you can increase your capital base and income.

Whether you start with a few hundred dollars or thousands of dollars, growth possibilities are tremendous. As you hone your trading strategy and grow your portfolio, you have the option to take on clients or become a trading consultant, all of which expose you to new challenges and help your professional and personal growth. 

Trading Full-Time Can Help You Achieve Work-Life Balance

Trading will allow you to be your own boss. Unlike the standard 9-5 job, you can choose your working hours and working days. Trading, therefore, gives you tremendous flexibility while also freeing up ample time to pursue other interests. If flexibility is something you value in a career, trading is for you. 

You Can Work Anywhere as a Full-Time Trader

One of the features of trading is that you can work from virtually anywhere. As long as you have your laptop and reliable internet connection, you can easily make moves on the market. In fact, you can make potentially lucrative trades right from your smartphone. 

Trading, therefore, will allow you to travel around the world or move with ease without getting concerned that this will undermine your career growth.

Tips for Making It as a Full-Time Trader

While trading can be your first-class ticket to financial independence, it has its fair share of challenges as follows:

  • High failure rate if you don’t develop a sound strategy
  • Likelihood of substantial financial losses
  • Steep learning curve
  • Requires significant investments in your skills

Below are a few valuable tips that’ll increase your chances of success as a full-time trader. 

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Set Realistic Income Goals

Your income as a trader will depend on various factors such as your level of education, experience in the profession, the additional skills you have accumulated over the years, and your certifications. 

Therefore, before breaking the bank and transferring your savings into your trading account, remember that you could lose thousands of hard-earned dollars trading if you don’t have realistic goals. I recommend starting small to minimize your risk.

As recommended by Trading Strategy Guides, start small and with minimal risk and raise your risk gradually as your skills improve. If you want to make millions overnight suddenly, trading may not be for you. 

Grow Your Skills

Trading requires discipline and effort. Therefore, you have to focus on growing your skills to succeed as a full-time trader. That means you’ll need to be open to learning and be willing to put in the hard work and time.

To grow your career as a full-time trader, you’ll need to understand financial markets and how they work. You also need to recognize changing market conditions and take advantage of them, as well as understand and evaluate business trends, perform technical analysis and evaluate expert opinions on various stocks, among other things.

To bolster the above skills, I recommend taking a course on forex trading from a reputable institution. You should also take certification courses to obtain essential and relevant certifications to help you edge closer to your career goals. 

In addition, take ample time to conduct your own research in the field. By doing this, you improve your grasp of any relevant business jargon and gain a wealth of information on the workings of forex trading. The better prepared you are for your career, the easier it’ll be to grow.

Understand That Success Takes Time

According to the experts at FXS, it takes patience to be a good, profitable trader. Trading will test your ability to take your time when evaluating different options and opportunities. Accordingly, one of the reasons many traders fail is because they’re too eager to make money as quickly as possible. 

When you take adequate time to evaluate all the vital information regarding your trades, you reduce your likelihood of failing. Patience also allows you to evaluate trends better, allowing ample time for the market to correct. As elaborated by FXS, the market will send out the wrong signs from time to time, which can spell huge losses. 

Patience will also keep you from making rushed decisions, particularly after losing some money. It’s normal human behavior to try to overcorrect past failures. However, you increase your success chances when you understand that this will take time and you’re in it for the long run.

Conclusion

You can make a decent living as a full-time trader, and unlike typical 9–5 jobs, you have a higher income ceiling. However, you need to maintain discipline and patience to fully realize your personal trading goals.

Like many other careers or personal pursuits, a full-time career requires significant time, effort, and money investments. Most of all, it requires the right mindset. In the words of Roy Bennett, “Happiness depends on your mindset and attitude.”

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