Hey! So Glad You're Here.

I am Richard just an average Joe family man in my late 30's based in the UK, possibly like yourself. Time of initially writing is May 2023.

*Disclaimer I am not qualified to give financial advice and any information shared is from my own experience or experience of people I trust most people will lose money trading especially in the first year or more. Any financial decisions you make are your responsibility. This site is for entertainment purposes to follow my journey* my hope is you can skip some of the mistake I have made.

I am not adding external advertising to this site as personally find them annoying but some/most of the links will have affiliates linked to me, but I will only add links to services I do personally use/ have used and trust, am planning to use in the future or have come highly recommended by people I trust I am in contact with.

Many of the points I mention below I will do a short blog post or share links in the resources section above.

I will get this out there right now. Am I a 7 figure trader? Nope not yet at least. Early days of seeing some success in a long love affair with trading.

So I have always been interested in finance and the stock market since a teenager. When I was around 20 I had a little bit of spare cash and stumbled across stock trading a guy called Robbie Burns - The Naked Trader.

His book was great and I was hooked he looks for value in smaller stocks to buy and hold short/ medium and long term. I made some nice returns over a couple of years. I then bought my first house and needed funds for deposit so I was back to flat in the market and didn't revisit for a few years after that.

Fast forward to about 27 year old I heard about spreadbetting I don't recall how but wow It sounded great tax free in the UK. So I joined IG which is a large broker in the UK with many years experience in the industry. Of course I had no idea what I was doing so lost money. But I stuck with it for years had some success but overall lost money. I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn but with no real direction. I had no mentor or good training recourses.

Even though I didn't win overall my experience with IG was very good deposits and withdrawals were super easy using PayPal and their online platform was very easy to use (I will find some links for them)

I gave up again for a couple of years but the trading bug was still burning away inside. I took to YouTube and that was it I was hooked again. The goal really was/is to be able to leave the rat race.

The system I found and joined sounded great so I joined it wasn't expensive around £100. I am not going to share the group as it wasn't for me there was merit in the system but such bad Risk Reward ratios I never traded it. But The gem in that group I found some successful traders they weren't trading the system but one called Dan decided to help us and made a Discord group to share his knowledge and help us for free. This was around a year ago (at time of writing 2023).

Today the Discord has evolved and is now a paid group he has a huge Vault of courses you can view and download both standard type systems and Smart Money Concepts. He has is own training series with a number of easy systems to learn so you can get going fast. Also currently he is live streaming daily with his chart and we discuss and share ideas. Currently it is $500 1 off fee for life membership. Yes its a lot of money but I can hands down say this is the most valuable resource I use.

Rewind to early 2022 I was concentrating on trading US30 only. Yes its wild but I wanted to concentrate on one thing only.

Started on a demo account with IC markets made some gains some losses. But overall it was looking good.

September 2022 went live but trading US30 using IC markets the minimum lot size is 1 lot so I had to deposit quite a large amount. Started great, then made the usual rookie mistakes by moving stop losses and adding to losing trades thinking I was right. But nope lost a big % of my account. By December 2022 I pulled the plug and went back to learning and concentrating.

Back onto demo things looked good again early 2023.

I then discovered another broker FP markets they allow 0.01 lots for US30 loaded a little live funds and that's where I am now.

I also have a automated trading bot I am testing but this is always higher risk.

Right now (May 2023) I am seeing some nice gains after initially losing again when first going live.

Looking forwards here is the big plan/ updates as I go:

Become a funded trader with multiple prop firms while building my live account at the same time.

UPDATE: OCT 2023 I am now a funded trader have max allocation with FTMO $400k and $200k in phase 2 with TFF and $200k in phase 1 with instant funding. Dan has launched a new strategy which is an ongoing development and people seem to be getting good results. Vader Dan trading discord group details in Resources tab.

UPDATE: Jan 2024 Good spell and multiple payouts from FTMO then had a few real bad months calming it back down now thankfully but I blew 1 live FTMO account and blew the 2 ongoing challenges (dang!) So took some black Friday deals and running 1 FTMO challenge its up a bit, and 1 Instant Funding challenge its down a bit. The last Live FTMO is now blown it but that's how trading goes sometimes I still fell positive that I can crack this nut bring on 2024.

UPDATE: Feb 2024 Great start to 2024 made amazing gains on all live accounts (they are still small money though). Now have $400k in funded accounts again. $200k with FTMO and $200k with Instant funding. Need to keep calm and get to payout stages then I can receive the refunds so they are again risk free to me. Then I can expand to more challenges but only when these are risk free.

That's about it to today as brief as I can keep it.

I would love to hear where you are in your own journey feel free to drop me a message below.

Follow my blog posts and check the resources tab for more information and links

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