My Forex Journey Part 1

My Forex journey goes way back in early 2014, I had just graduated from Kenyatta University with a degree in Bachelor of Commerce with a major in Finance. I had got an accounting role in a local media startup which was later shut down due to the digital migration in 2015 (story for another day). During the one year that I served in the position of a Finance Assistant, I was itching inside, I knew deep inside that there has to be a way out of the corporate 9-5 job in (Kenya 8-5 and overtime with no pay for overtime in the private sector in the name of giving you “exposure”) with my major motivator being by brother who had successfully started his own company and was doing really well after one year of struggling. So I signed up with Big Options traders from the United Kingdom with an initial investment of $250 which was one of the mistakes I did early on and I will tell you why.

I knew that guys usually make investments in the markets but I had no clue of how it works. I was bold, and somewhat a risk taker. The fact that I was assigned a senior broker to help me manage the account gave me confidence that I would be in safe hands. I did not do any due diligence on the company, I had no idea that brokers had to be regulated. Looking back, I can now confidently say that the initial investment of $250 is rather too small an account to think of being a serious trader. Due to the eager nature I had and my curiosity to start trading, I lost all my money in a span of one week. Let me break that down to you, my trading account had what is to be a BUY and SELL signal, it was diversified, I could see currencies, commodities like gold, copper, and oil, and then there was an option of a trading robot. I was so impatient, I went ahead to click on the buy and sell signals without knowing what I was doing or even waiting for direction from my allocated senior broker, My account gradually dwindled to I think $140, then up by a few dollars and then down, all the way to zero in less than 5 days.

A panic attack, hahaha, you know losing $250 can be painful to a new graduate, especially because I would make less than $500 after tax deductions on a monthly basis in my accounting role, sad facts about the Kenyan Employment Law, industrial wages are like trying to live in Mars while on Earth, they aren’t followed and employers think they are doing you a favor by giving you a job, that sucks, I know. So I received a margin call from the broker asking me what really happened. He asked if I had used the option of a trading robot, I told him no. He also asked if I knew how to trade, I told him no, he asked if I was serious about taking up trading as a profession and I said yes. To my shock and surprise, he started bugging me with calls the next few days, that if I wanted him to manage my account, the least minimum trading capital I would have to allocate to my trading account was $5,000. Today, YES, that makes sense for a standard mini lot account whose threshold is actually $10,000. In my mind, I was like, where do you think I can get that kind of money, I’d have to save my salary for a couple of years to start trading. Then he asked me how much I make in a month, an ACCA qualified and a degree holder in Finance. When I mentioned my salary, he was like, you earn less than the immigrants in the UK who work as domestic workers, in fact, you earn less than a waitress in the United States for a day’s wages. I was like, where do I live? Yes, process that and get that to your head.