How to scale up your account

[u0362565]

Hi all, I'm not ashamed to admit that I made some classic mistakes when I started trading. One being that my position sizes were way too big for the knowledge I had at the time. I think back on it now and ask what the hell was a I thinking! But hey you live and learn. I now look at the markets and think man this is hard rather than man this is a piece of cake which is weirdly a step in the right direction I think.

I then decided to start again with a more sensible account size and position sizing. But I was wondering how others have scaled up their accounts over time as they grow in confidence. One issue is that you build up some profits and consider it market money that in a way doesn't matter if you then lose it but if you suddenly say doubled or tripled your account those profits could be swallowed fairly easily I imagine. 1% per trade of £10k is very different from 1% of £50k for example.

Anyone got any thoughts on this. Money sitting around in a savings account is doing nothing for me other than its maintained which of course is by no means guaranteed in the trading world!

[MongiIG]

18 hours ago, u0362565 said:

Hi all, I'm not ashamed to admit that I made some classic mistakes when I started trading. One being that my position sizes were way too big for the knowledge I had at the time. I think back on it now and ask what the hell was a I thinking! But hey you live and learn. I now look at the markets and think man this is hard rather than man this is a piece of cake which is weirdly a step in the right direction I think.

I then decided to start again with a more sensible account size and position sizing. But I was wondering how others have scaled up their accounts over time as they grow in confidence. One issue is that you build up some profits and consider it market money that in a way doesn't matter if you then lose it but if you suddenly say doubled or tripled your account those profits could be swallowed fairly easily I imagine. 1% per trade of £10k is very different from 1% of £50k for example.

Anyone got any thoughts on this. Money sitting around in a savings account is doing nothing for me other than its maintained which of course is by no means guaranteed in the trading world!

Hi @u0362565

Thanks for sharing! You can have a look at the links below:

How to Scale In to Positions

How to Scale Out of Positions

How to Scale-In and Scale-Out of Trades

Scaling into positions – a better approach?

Hope this helps.

 

All the best and happy trading - MongiIG

[u0362565]

Thanks for the info. I am aware of scaling but I was sort of not considering my question in this way. But it's another way to look at it. I was thinking more along the lines of using a % of account per trade. If you say doubled your account balance you'd then be using more of your balance per trade and could quickly eat into profits taken from the smaller account. Basically I think the answer is if you're not willing to lose money in excess of the profits you've made you shouldn't increase your account balance.. Which means the only way to grow your account further is through taking more profits on the smaller account. However, it must be typical for traders to start with a smaller balance then at some point decide to make it bigger with confidence.

Edited January 14, 2022 by u0362565