How much money can you make in forex?

Nobody serious will give you a monthly percentage, and it isn't caution: that figure isn't a property of the market at all. What does exist is a multiplication of three numbers you can work out today from your own data. Do it once and you can see why the advertised "10% a month" needs assumptions almost nobody can hold.

Why doesn't the question have a percentage answer?

Because the market doesn't pay an interest rate. A deposit returns 3% because 3% is a property of the deposit; forex returns nothing by itself. What returns something is your method, at your frequency, on your capital — and all three belong to you, not to the market.

So the question worth asking isn't "how much do you make in forex", it's "how much does this particular combination produce". That one has an answer.

What does it actually depend on?

Three numbers, and only three:

1. Expectancy per trade — what you make on average every time you click, losers included.

2. How much you risk per trade — usually 1% of the balance.

3. How many trades you take per month.

Expectancy is the piece almost nobody measures:

Expectancy = (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss)

Using that post's own example: across 100 trades you win 40 averaging $300 and lose 60 averaging $150. That comes to $30 per trade. And since the average loss is what you were risking, $30 on $150 is exactly 0.2R — 0.2 times your risk. Expressing it that way, in multiples of risk, is what lets the three numbers combine:

Monthly return ≈ expectancy (in R) × risk per trade × trades per month

What comes out of the sum?

Using the 1% rule per trade:

There's the answer, and it looks nothing like the adverts. A genuinely good method at 0.2R with twenty trades a month returns 4% monthly. That is not small: compounded and sustained it's an excellent result. But over a single week it's invisible, and the gap between what the account produces and what impatience expects is exactly what pushes people to touch the other two numbers.

Why not just raise risk or frequency?

Because of the three factors, two are trapped.

Raising risk per trade moves the whole table at once: at 5% per trade those figures multiply by five. The trouble is that it multiplies in both directions, and one of them has no way back. Risk of ruin explains why: past a certain percentage, a perfectly ordinary run stops being a bad month and becomes the end of the account. The lever works right up until it takes you off the table — and then the other two multiply nothing.

Raising frequency looks free because in the formula it only multiplies. But the trades you add aren't worth what the ones you already took were: the first are your best signals, and the ones you add to reach forty a month are precisely the ones you used to pass on. Expectancy isn't a constant you repeat, it's an average that falls as you stretch it — and the cost per trade doesn't fall with it. That's why the day-trading data says what it says once thousands of accounts are aggregated: whoever trades most doesn't earn more, they pay more.

Of the three numbers, only the first can be raised without an immediate price — and it's the slow one, the one that demands method and sample.

And what do the ones who manage it actually make?

The available data is uncomfortable and worth reading whole. From the same body of research: in Brazil, of the 1,551 who persisted beyond 300 market days, 97% lost money and only 1.1% earned more than the minimum wage. In Taiwan the aggregate result was negative in 14 of 15 years. The CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) sums up retail forex bluntly: two out of three traders end each quarter in the red.

But the most instructive figure is the best performer's: $310 a day on average, with a standard deviation of $2,560. That isn't a salary. It's an income shaped like a lottery, and it describes what "making money" means in this trade rather well: it's not enough to ask whether someone made money — you have to ask how much, for how long, and while enduring what.

Does a funded account change it?

It changes the capital, not the expectancy. The profit split typically runs 80% to 90% in your favour, so trading $50,000 of someone else's money multiplies your method's output without multiplying your personal risk.

What it doesn't change is the bottleneck. That isn't the split percentage — it's consistency, because the drawdown rules stay alive on the funded account. A method with negative expectancy on someone else's capital still has negative expectancy; it just costs you the challenge fee too.

So, how much?

Whatever your three numbers produce — and now you know which three they are and how to multiply them. As an order of magnitude: a solid method traded with discipline lives around 2-4% monthly, and the way up from there runs through better expectancy, never through more risk.

If someone promises you 20% a month, you can now run the sum backwards and see what combination of expectancy, risk and frequency it would take. That's the real value of the formula: it won't predict what you'll make, but it spots the impossible instantly.

And if what you're missing is the three numbers, because you don't have trades to measure yet, that's where the Academy starts: 60 ordered modules, at your own pace, free and with no account.