Trading a small account will let you place small trades that should not affect your financials, but will affect your emotions.

You can scale up the account by making regular additional deposits. This will get you accustomed to trading larger sums of money.

The next step will be to trade a funded account once you have seen some consistency in your trading results.

The idea of trading to build is to slowly build up a large amount of capital to trade with. I do this by investing and trading with limited risk. The goal is to create enough capital that will be able to generate enough monthly income if traded or invested with limited risk.

I currently trade at SimpleFX.

For more brokers for trading and investing see:

The idea of trading to earn is to earn a monthly income with a relatively small account. To make this work I will take more risk and use higher leverage.

I will use an offshore, non-regulated broker as these are the only brokers that offer high leverage to retail traders. Regulated brokers normally offer 30:1 or 33:1 max leverage on major pairs. off-shore brokers will provide leverage up to 1000:1.

The plan

The plan is to trade my strategy as normal but use a different money management. The money management will be as follows:

• deposit 500 USD into an offshore broker account
• use 500:1 leverage
• risk 10% of the equity per trade
• withdrawal above 3200 USD

I have modeled this plan as part of my backtest and here are the results:

Risk per trade	10%
Start balance	500
Payout balance	3200
Minimum balance	245
Maximum balance	3840
Total payouts	71375
Months traded	70
Average Payout p.m.	1020

 

I use the following broker:

• XM Global

I use a broker like XM Global where you can trade with high leverage.