Trading Forex with a Full-Time Job
For many aspiring traders, being a full-time forex trader is a pipe dream. Whilst the profits and results may be coming in fast, real-life often prevents traders from quitting their 9-5 jobs. With a family to feed and bills to pay, becoming a full-time forex trader isn’t always the best idea. In fact, many successful forex traders are trading alongside their full-time job and only trade part-time. Does this actually work?
It’s very possible to trade forex part-time, alongside a full-time job. To do so, you need to ensure your trading strategy fits your commitments. For this reason, swing trading and position trading are the most popular strategies for part-time forex traders.
Trading Forex With A Full-Time Job
The large majority of profitable forex traders are actually just trading part-time and still work their typical 9-5 jobs. In fact, this is what I did for many years! Trading part-time actually has a huge amount of benefits and shouldn’t be looked down upon by the online community. Being a ‘full-time trader’ seems to be the benchmark of success now within the Instagram traders community, and it’s not a valuable metric. Trading full-time also has a lot of benefits and can typically allow for larger returns in the forex markets and much faster progress. This needs to be measured, however, against the lack of security and salary. Sadly, there are no salaries for retail forex traders.
Most importantly, you need to be catering your trading to whatever time you can dedicate to the markets. For instance, I wasn’t able to check my charts every hour. Therefore, I was swing trading the markets using the weekly, daily, and 4h time frames as this is what suited my work life.
Let’s take a look at some pros and cons of trading part-time and how you can use funded forex accounts to your advantage…
The Benefits Of Trading Forex Part-Time
The benefits of trading forex alongside a full-time job far outweigh quitting your 9-5, in my opinion. Having traded part-time for many years, I feel well-placed to weigh up the pros of doing so…
Lack Of Stress
If you’re trading alongside your full-time job, there is a huge lack of stress on whether bills can be paid. When your whole livelihood depends on forex profits, it can be huge stress when the market isn’t looking great. This stress to pull profits out of the market to pay bills usually causes traders to abandon their strategies and risk too much or over-trade. This is a spiral I’ve seen many times when the pressure makes full-time traders crack. By trading part-time, you have peace of mind in knowing that if you never saw profits from the forex market – you’ll still be fine!
Additional Income
Trading forex alongside your full-time job allows you to keep the profits from forex trading as additional income. This typically means that part-time forex traders are actually earning larger amounts of money in a year than some full-time traders. Having this additional income also leads to possible compounding your trading accounts, which we will touch on shortly.
In fact, many of our prop firm-funded traders have full-time jobs and trade our funded forex accounts alongside their careers. If you’re unfamiliar with funded accounts and how prop firms make money, have a read here!
Career Progression
If you completely step away from your 9-5, it can really damage your potential career progression within the industry or firm you’re leaving. For this reason, you’d have to be very sure that forex trading will work out for the long term before taking this risk. By trading part-time, alongside your full-time job, you don’t run the risk of hampering any career progression and can still make use of opportunities that present themselves to you.
Obtaining Capital Is Possible
It’s still very much possible for part-time forex traders to get funded trading accounts. Take our Lux Elite Trading Club traders, for example. We have funded traders with up to $10,000,000 of our capital, in exchange for a profit split, without ever needing to trade full time. In fact, we prefer funding part-time forex traders as we know that their emotions will be in check and no risky decisions will be made! This is one of the many reasons why you should be trading with a forex prop firm. If you’re looking to take on additional trading capital, check out our funded forex accounts.
Compounding Profits
Compounding is one of the wonders of the world and leads to forex traders having great levels of capital in their accounts, with only a small seed capital. Compounding is only possible if you don’t withdraw from your trading accounts. This means that full-time traders are typically not able to compound as fast as part-time traders, as they’ll need the profits to pay bills and taxes. By leaving your profits in your trading accounts for years, you’ll be able to massively increase the amount of capital at your disposal and therefore lead to trading larger lot sizes in your positions.
The Drawbacks Of Trading Forex Alongside A Full-Time Job
Although I had a great experience part-time forex trading, I’m fully aware that there are some drawbacks that are worth discussing. In my opinion, these drawbacks are not enough of a reason to give up on part-time trading and jump to full-time if you’re still not profitable enough to do so!
- Missing Trading Opportunities
One of the largest barriers to stop traders from looking at the markets on a part-time basis is the fact you will miss trades. If you’re unable to dedicate your whole life to the charts, there is a possibility that whilst you’re in meetings at work, you’ll miss your entries. This is mitigated by trading a strategy on the higher time frames that requires less time in front of the computer. For instance, by entering trades on the daily time frame, you know that you only need to execute trades at 10 pm UK time each day. By setting up your trading strategy to accommodate your schedule, you’re easily able to sidestep this potential issue!
- Longer Learning Process
The main drawback of trading part-time is that you simply have less time to dedicate to the markets. This isn’t usually a problem when you’re profitable. However, when you’re learning the craft, it can dramatically slow things down. With that being said, I know of part-time traders that learned the ropes within a few months and full-time traders that took years to reach profitability, so there may be no correlation at all!
- No Pressure To Progress
Contrary to everything I said previously, not having the pressure to succeed is as bad as having pressure. When traders have a lovely 9-5 and nothing to stress about, learning to trade is usually something that gets put to the side and forgotten about. We all know that trading requires a huge amount of discipline and time commitment in order to succeed. Not having the pressure bearing over you may cause you to not fully commit to learning the craft and give up during the process.
How To Trade Forex Part-Time (Which Strategies Work?)
So, now that we know it’s possible to trade forex part-time alongside a job, what strategies are going to work best?
Well, it depends on your lifestyle. You need to choose a trading strategy that compliments your daily commitments. For instance, when I was trading part-time, I was in meetings for the majority of the day at work. This meant that I couldn’t check the charts or even enter positions on my phone each hour. With that in mind, I built my whole swing trading strategy around the Daily, Weekly and 4H time frames. This meant I only had 1 or 2 trades on my watch list at any one point. Every time I went to the bathroom in the office, I quickly checked on the progress of entries. Every 4 hours and at the end of the market that day, I could enter positions. This suited my lifestyle and work-life perfectly!
I would highly recommend starting with a swing trading strategy, rather than a day trading strategy. If this is still too much of a time commitment, looking at position trading may be a great option. With that in mind, having trading strategies that don’t require constant monitoring will be a great help to you. Perhaps only 1 or 2 positions per setup would suffice.
In Summary – Can I Trade Forex With A Full-Time Job?
In short, you can absolutely trade forex with a full-time job, and we actually recommend this for the majority of forex traders! Doing so means you get the best of both worlds. You can take on a funded forex trading account, make use of high-quality setups within the forex markets and not have to stress about making the wrong decision or bills not being paid. If you’re on the fence, we would highly recommend you jump in and spend some of your free time, outside of work, learning to trade forex! Once you’re stuck in the learning process, check out our Elite Traders Club if you’re looking to trade on a large amount of forex trading capital.
