Over the past few weeks, I must have made more than 1000 short term trades. Some were on demos. Most were live accounts. Some trades were done on raw spread, others used a full spread broker. Here is what I discovered.

It doesn’t matter what strategy you use. It doesn’t matter if you trade chop. It doesn’t matter if you trade trend. It doesn’t matter if your spread is 0.2 wide or 1.4 wide. It doesn’t matter if your target is just 3 pips or even 1.5 or 5 or 6 or even 7 – you can’t make money in FX day trading unless you target is 10 pips.

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The reason is – to paraphrase Bob Dylan is that you got to pay somebody. It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you’ve got to pay somebody. Regardless of how you make your trade your average cost per trade is 1.5 pips (either spread or 1 pip commission + raw spread). That translates to about 15% cost of doing business.

When you factor in the vagaries of the market, the risk/reward payoffs, the various news bombs that blow up your trades, that frankly is about as much cost as you can absorb. If you go down the 5 pip level, the transaction cost becomes too large at 30%. Basically, you give up a third of your gross profit right off the bat and few businesses can survive that math over the long haul.

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10 pips is also a very reasonable distance for a day-trade. The average true range for a major pair is about 100 pips (yes, yes I know that’s wishful thinking in these low volatility times – but it is still a decent rule of thumb). That means that a 10 pip trade is about 10% of the daily move which is very achievable 2-3 times each day. Like a perfect bowl of porridge, 10 pips is not too cool, not too hot. For those of us who like to day trade – 10 pips is juuuuuuust right:)

As to all the snarky position traders who constantly berate day traders for just churning our accounts – feel free to ridicule all you want, but some traders in my chat room have been trading for years with drawdown profiles of less than 10% – and that’s basically what? – a bad week in your world :).

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