My FX Success and Failure Stories I Want to Tell Beginners [Mayo Takano]

As a trader, everyone has their own success stories and failures from when they were beginners. What you learn from them and how you apply it is essential to continuing to win in the markets over the long term. Here, Mayu Takano, a trader, shares important lessons she wants to convey to beginners from her own experience.

※This article is a reprint and revised edition of an article from FX攻略.com August 2019 issue. Please note that the market information in the body is different from the current market.

Profile of Mayu Takano

Takano, Mayo. In 2007, she became interested in a housewife who “evaded taxes with 400 million yen by trading FX” and started FX. This year, she left a large telecom company where she had worked for over ten years since entering as a new graduate, and became a full-time trader. A hyper-active mom who, during long vacations, swims to Cuba with her child. Hobbies include swimming, kayaking, and mahjong. Primarily watches Bollinger Bands as her technical, futures trading is mainly scalping. She also trades binary options and EA trades. Her motto is “Going my way.”

Blog:Lifelong Carnivore
Twitter:https://twitter.com/lin122111

Repeating Loss Patterns from Assumptions

I started FX in the summer of 2007. When smartphones were still rare in Japan, I began trading using a desktop PC that I had bought for job hunting but stopped using. As a new employee with little overtime, I traded from 9 p.m. to midnight.

At that time I read one beginner’s book casually and skimmed it, then only read the explanations on the FX company’s site, skipped demo trading, and went into real trading without knowing anything about technicals. My initial margin was 100,000 yen, but looking back I was really young, or rather, full of movement and ignorance.

I was amazed that you could make money just by clicking in front of the PC, so I entered trades and was happy whenever there was a 100-yen unrealized profit, so I closed quickly. On the other hand, I hated the idea of losing money, so I didn’t set a stop loss, assuming it would come back to break-even someday. You can guess the result. The well-known slow-and-steady-to-disaster, and ultimately I blew out. Since I only set take-profit limit orders and had no stop-loss orders, when the market moved sharply against my position, the result was a forced liquidation.

I received an email at work. It was a margin call notification. My account was liquidated with a 0% margin maintenance rate, so my 100,000 yen disappeared in a few days. I couldn’t believe that the price had bounce around in the same place for so long, and then after I entered, it hadn’t even passed near break-even once! I doubted whether there was a system error or I was being trapped. Something felt off, but I decided to assume nothing was wrong and repeated the same mistake, losing another 100,000 yen. A pattern of losing when I became heated.