Six Steps To Blow Up Your Forex Account

January 11, 2008 by Trader Rich 

There are a lot of traders out there that have totally blown up their accounts.  I'm one of them.  Unfortunately, I never really knew how quickly this could happen until I actually did it.  Here's a brief synopsis of the events:

  1. I'm trading normally, with what I think is sound money management, slowly trying to build on my capital.
  2. Win 1, loss 1; win 1, lose 2; win 3 lose 1; win 1 lose 3; this can go on for quite some time.
  3. Then a consecutive losing streak happens, 3 in a row, 5 in a row, 10 in a row, who's counting.
  4. Emotion get the best of me, I start over-leveraging to try to get back what I've lost.
  5. Things get worse and my balance is low.  Let me ride the rest on this 1 trade.  I can make it back. 
  6. Kaboom! Margin call.

The last 4 steps can happen so quickly that before you know it, you've totally blown up your account.  Fortunately, I've come back from this smarter.  Instead of a blood gusher, I'm a slow bleeder.  Colin over at Forex Spirit had a rough December.  His 2007 equity graph alone shows how rough.  Check it out, you may learn something.  I think it was an important step for him to actually throw it all out in the open and write about it. 

What to read more about REALLY blowing up your account?

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Comments

2 Responses to “Six Steps To Blow Up Your Forex Account”

  1. Forex Trader on January 11th, 2008 12:29 pm

    Dude, I wasn’t even that sophisticated, I just rocked on a couple of lots here and there, no stop loss or anything.
    It all ended in tears of course :) Ah, those were the days!

  2. Uri on January 11th, 2008 3:21 pm

    after losing 6% today after following what I thought was strict money management (max. 2% risk per trade), I’m adding a new rule to my trading - if I lose 2% in a day I’ll step back and shut down trading for the day no matter what - this will help prevent trying too hard to trade when I’m out of sync - even losing “only” 2% at a time will add up if you throw too many bad trades one after the other…

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