Trading Strategies

I am looking for a side hustle. Is day trading a viable business in 2025? How much money can I make trading forex?

Absolutely! Day trading is and will remain a viable business until we humans have free markets. Here we will provide you with the basics of a good trading “business” so you don’t dilly dally and waste your time and resources. Why did we put emphasis on “business”? Because most traders ( not really apt to call them traders but then again its the toughest business out there and they don’t know better so .. ) out they would not be comfortable investing money into their own trading business and if the numbers were bigger than their tiny flip accounts they wouldn’t want to put money in them for fear of loss and every good trader out there still has their fear of loss instinct but has learnt to overcome it by first getting results consistently in line with their trading plan.Remember, learn right the first time around. Understand the game. You would still make losses as that is the right of passage to get good at the game but there are the right kind of losses and the wrong kind of losses. Once you start on the wrong path, it becomes difficult to unlearn all those behaviours and habits that manifest subconsciously because the markets trigger our emotional response and once the wrong habits get ingrained, the learning curve becomes even steeper to unlearn all the wrong behaviours. You would find it difficult to stick to a trading plan, you would exit positions prematurely, you would subconsciously be inclined to chase the dopamine rush, you would find it hard to manage your emotions in a losing streak. By learning right the first time round, you avoid the unnecessary losses and save your capital for the realistic and sizeable gains that you could make trading instead of going the wrong way and reducing your net capital and picking up negative habits. Regardless of where you stand within your trading journey, the best time to learn the right way was a year ago, but the second best time is now.1: TRADING CAPITAL:How much money you can realistically make by trading depends upon how much money you have in your trading account. You cannot make 2000$ a month consistently by starting with a 500$ account. Keep realistic expectations. If you treat trading as a business and understand the key concepts you will be rewarded. If you gamble, be prepared to lose all your money and sleep. For our example we will take 2000$ as a base income per month which is enough for most people living in South East Asia, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh as livable wage. For anyone within developed countries this is a good side hustle to supplement your main income or savings. So how much money do we need in our trading account to realistically and consistently make 2000$ per month? Well, that depends on risk. How much risk are you comfortable with? Say you have 10,000$ in trading capital, you would risk 1% per trade (100$) to make 100$ ( Risk to Reward of 1:1 ) or 200$ ( Risk to Reward of 1:2). Many blogs will say 1-2% but whatever figure you choose 1% or 2%, stick to it and don’t change the percentage. Remember, you want consistency and changing the percentage you risk per trade adds more variables to a business that already has a lot of moving variables! Keep it simple. As we have discussed in other posts, every trader will have losing trades and every trader will also have losing streaks of trades at one time or other. If you risk 100$ per trade and have a losing streak of 10trades to start, you would still have 90% of your trading capital and your emotions would be in check. This is how a sustainable business operates. With a Risk to Reward of 1:2 you would recover this and make some money over a number of trades. 2: TRADING STRATEGY: Once we have allocated funds for our business, say 10,000$ in our trading account and defined the percentage of risk we are going to take per trade (1%) we will go into strategy development. Strategy development within trading for our purpose will mainly focus on technical analysis based on past price action. First and foremost, price action is key. Candlestick patterns will tell us market direction and momentum. Start by taking Price Action Charts of the assets you wish to trade. Pick a few and make a Portfolio, no more than 5. Remember, don’t create a clutter. Don’t dabble in too many assets. Take the Price Action charts and start looking at candlesticks one by one until you start developing intuition. You can use tradingview.com to do this. Go candle by candle and develop your intuition for pairs you wish to trade. The thing about candlestick patterns is, consider them like personalities, how us humans have different personalities and at the same time, no matter how different we are, we are similar to each other. There are nuances to Price Action which are particular to that asset. If you focus on Price Action and practice charts repeatedly, you would start developing intuition for those nuances which in turn would add to your edge. For example, Gold or XAUUSD spot is to a great degree, I believe 90% correlated to EURUSD. You can check the exact correlation on mataf.net or myfxbook.com but XAUUSD moves very very different to EURUSD. It’s more volatile, Gold impulsive moves are strong and it can form strong unidirectional trends without a pullback for a while. Do not spread yourself too thin. Once you focus on 1 or 2 assets, you would pick up on small things which will help you succeed ( but within a defined trading system ). Remember, if you are having trouble maintaining profitability and are a losing trader, take a step back and evaluate. Make clear rules ( that you can follow and execute, this is very important ), make the trading system easy. Your first and most important task is to be a profitable trader and not the most profitable trader in the world. There’s nothing wrong in leaving more profit on the table. That is the thing about markets. There is a give and take, there’s no perfect strategy. Period. Realise this. The more profit you take on an entry is not necessarily good as that would in turn affect your win rate and just sticking to a 1:1 Risk Reward is not bad as no system will ever be 100% right. You cannot have a perfect stop loss or take profit. Volatility keeps changing. Stick to one approach with reduced variables, reduce the variables if you’re not profitable and keep it simple and be consistent with it. There will be times when you will think it’s frustrating and there’s not enough profit etc or its not working but maintain a trading journal to keep yourself in check. Remember, trading is the hardest business out there because we are not competing against other traders or market participants but ourselves.