Your First MATI Trader Q&A
What You’ll Find:
How much money do I need to start trading?
How can I save money to trade?
Enjoy a cheese and tomato sarmie
QUESTION #1
Q. “Hi Timon and first of all congrats on the new venture with MATI Trader. I have followed your trading tips for the last six years and only now I’m ready to take the plunge and start trading. My question is – How much money is the right amount to start trading with?
ANSWER:
To start trading nowadays, you can start with any amount really.
You can start with nothing
If you’d like to back test and forward test a trading strategy before you go live, you can open a demo account to test the waters.
For Forex, the best platform I’ve found and used to test different strategies, is with Oanda.com.
They offer an incredible free platform where you can trade live currencies, indices and commodities with a starting demo account of $100,000. You can talk to Matthew who’ll help you set it up by emailing
mcox@oanda.com.
You can start with R1,000
If you feel you’d like to take the full trading experience with the slippage, costs and the emotions that come with trading real funds, you can play around with a starting value of just R1,000 account.
NOTE: you’re not going to make a good income with this trading portfolio, so make sure you focus on taking every trade well, and managing your portfolio with strict risk management rules just to see if you have a solid strategy before going live.
You can start with R10,000 up to R1,000,000
If you know how much you can emotionally handle when you start trading then the choice is all yours.
If you can handle taking losses with a R10,000 account or even a R1 million account, then you’ll need to find your starting account value.
As long as you start trading with money you can afford to lose physically and emotionally, by all means.
I personally started with R30,000 in 2003, but if I could go back I would’ve started with R10,000.
Just remember, this phase of your career is what I call the “Class Is In Session Phase”. You are going to learn, make mistakes and lose avoidable money. But as you practise more and more, you’ll level up your trading and eventually graduate to college.
What a MATI Trader member has to share:
“I’ve signed up to quite a number of trading programmes in the past, but not one of them have identified the true elements that are required to actually make trading work. This is by far the most comprehensive and complete trading programme I’ve ever come across and now my entire perception on trading as a whole has changed forever.”
~ Jeremy
REPLY: Thank you it was for that exact reason that I made sure the Lesson 1: MATI Trader System Programme – MARKETS was free to each MATI Trader member to test and see if it suited their personality…
QUESTION #2
“My biggest issue is not being able to actually save money to deposit into a trading account on a monthly basis. Do you have any tips that I can try out?”
ANSWER:
Yes, I have three savings tips that may help you:
Tip 1: Pay yourself first
As soon as you receive your pay cheque open your banking app and allocate a portion of your extra funds to your savings account.
You’ll need to calculate what percentage this is, to make sure you cover all your obligations and average monthly living costs.
For example, first thing in the month I deposit 8% into my savings account in order to allocate the funds into different investment classes.
5% of my savings goes to my trading account, 2% into my investment account and 1% into my emergency funds account.
As we all have different risk profiles, investment classes and personalities, you’ll need to prioritise each portion of your savings into your own investment allocations.
Tip 2: Enjoy a cheese and tomato sarmie
Another tip is to choose two days in the month where instead of going out for drinks or to a restaurant, or to the movies instead, deposit that extra leisure spending money into your trading account.
Make it a special two days in the month where you rather decide to make home cooked meals with your loved ones like toasted cheese sandwich or tacos or whatever tingles your tastebuds…
You’ll be surprised how you’ll be able to save from R3,000 up to R8,000 a month just by sacrificing a few going out days.
Tip 3: Drink more water
This might be tough, especially on a Saturday when the game is on or when you go out with your mates, but it could help with your financial future.
Try to ease down on the alcohol spending whenever you go out or when you have a get together at home.
Sometimes just ordering water at restaurants or buying water to drink at home will definitely save you a ton of money which you can use to deposit into your trading account.
Until next time,
Trade well…
Timon Rossolimos
Founder, MATI Trader
BEFORE YOU GO: What is your number one savings tip? Send us an email or your next trading question to info@timonandmati.com and you’ll stand a chance to be featured in our next MATI Trader Q&A article.