7/9/2026
Petko AleksandrovHello everyone, what I’m going to talk about today is what it is to be a professional trader and how to become one. I will share with you what it took me to become a professional trader and then as well, I will give you some tips that you need to keep in mind before you start trading.
I know a lot of people are just wondering at the moment, should they start with Forex trading? Is it real at all, the Forex market? Is it possible for me to make money on the Forex market or not? How professional traders trade Forex? And that’s OK, I mean you should always be very careful about what you start with. Especially when you start reading different forums, reviews, comments.
What is a professional trader?
You will see that a lot of people are losing money. So what happens usually is that beginners start to wonder, if trading is a real thing? Should I waste my time and my money to do it? Or should I go for my daily job where I know I will have a constant income monthly? I absolutely understand that. That’s why I wanted to give you a few tips and ideas on what you can expect and what you need to be careful of if you’re interested in becoming a professional trader.
So first of all, let’s make it clear what it is to be a professional trader. Now personally, I consider myself to be a professional trader for 5 years now. Although, I’ve been on the Forex market since 2009. This is how long I’ve been trading. But I’ll be honest with you, I started trading long ago before I became a professional trader.
So to be a professional trader means that you make your living with trading. This is what a professional footballer is, this is what a professional video editor is. When you make your living from the thing, then you’re a professional. That’s like the general explanation I can give you.
So at the moment, when you don’t need to work a full-time job or you don’t need to do any projects or anything else and you do just trading, and that’s enough for you to cover your expenses, to have a good life and to give everything to your family that it needs, then you can say, OK, now I’m a professional trader.
Find capital to trade
As I said, I consider myself to be a professional trader just in the last 5 years. Before that, honestly, it was very difficult for me to get to this point, where I didn’t need to work for any company just because I didn’t have capital. And that’s the number one thing that you need when you start trading, you need to have capital.
Even if you’re good, even if you learn a lot of good strategies, even if you use trading robots like me, but you don’t have capital, it’s really hard. And you should know realistically how much you can make on the Forex market.
Avoid scammers who pretend to be professional traders
There are a lot of scam reviews, scam YouTube videos, people showing unrealistic results. They just want to bring you to something, for example, to a certain broker or they want to take your money. Or it is a video from the broker where they will just promise unrealistic results. So anything that is between 10, 20 maximum to 50% a month is a realistic result. As well, anything between 50-100% a year is still realistic.
Anything that will make you rich in a few weeks, a few months, you will win millions of dollars investing just $100, all of that is crap. All of that is a scam. So if something sounds too good to be true, then it means it’s not true. This is especially how the Forex market works.
There are a lot of scam companies and scam brokers that will promise unrealistic things. So I said number 1 is to have capital.
Learn to trade by yourself
Don’t depend on anyone out there to manage your funds. Let no one do the trading instead of you. No matter what they show you guys, no matter what they promised you, you don’t believe that.
The only person in the world who can do this for you is yourself. You need to learn to trade, you need to learn to do good money management. And you need to trust only yourself, not even me. Even if I really do my best to make my lectures useful for everyone.
But I’m never promising unrealistic stuff and I never say unrealistic stuff in my lectures. So by the time I became a professional trader, it was really hard for me. Because I had to work for other companies. And ever since I graduated, I knew that this is what I was going to do. I always wanted to do it.
At the end of the lecture, I will share with you what are the downsides and what are some of my concerns when it comes to trading, and why I actually started recording courses and establishing the Trading Academy.
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How professional traders trade Forex
You will find yourself in a situation, guys. You will know whether you want to only trade or you need to do something else. Or maybe you’re going to combine the two. That’s what I want to answer in this lecture. So as I’ve said, I had to work for companies.
And instead of working some random job, when I was learning to trade, I said to myself: “OK, I will be investing my own money one day. I will save money and I will put it in a trading account and I will start day trading. But where am I going to put this money? I’m going to put them in the Forex brokers.“
Because this is how we can trade, we open an account with a broker, and there we have the opportunity to participate in the market through their trading platform. So I said, OK, I will put my money, let’s say I was always planning to start with $1,000, then obviously I increased that.
I will put my money one day into that broker but what’s here? What’s going on here? Where will I put my money? How do they work? What will they take from me? What does it take to make it? So what I did is I started working for Forex brokers.
Beware of scam brokers
I’ve worked for 5 different trading brokers, Forex brokers and it took me over 3 years. I moved from one to another, not because of better money, not because I wanted to establish a career in trading brokers. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted to see how they do it from the inside.
From where they get the prices, how they are managing the people’s money, where they keep them, and what is the risk involved if the broker goes bankrupt. And most importantly, what it takes for me to be safe putting my money in a broker and knowing that at that moment I will be able to withdraw it because that’s very important.
The scam brokers around will take your money but they will not let you withdraw them later. They will find hundreds of explanations and excuses. And when they cannot find any excuses anymore, they will just stop answering your emails or calls.
And then, on one sad day, you realize that you’ve lost your money. This is how I started learning but at the same time, I was working for Forex brokers until the moment I felt comfortable in trading and I knew that I didn’t have to do it anymore and this is when I became a professional trader.
Manual trading is not far from working a full-time job
So, after I became a trader on my own, trading from home and later from an office, then obviously in 2020 again from home, I realized that to be a professional trader has one major concern and that is why I established the Academy. I had my team and I started recording videos and online courses. And I will tell you what was the concern.
When you start trading, especially when you do manual trading, it is not far from working a full-time job. Because when you start trading and you do it seriously, every day from Monday to Friday, you have to be there at least for 2 sessions.
As a professional trader, I used to participate in the London Stock Exchange session and the New York Stock Exchange session. I didn’t do a lot of the Asian because it’s during the night for me. But when you want to be really serious about it, you need to sit in front of the computer, you need to follow the news, you need to know what’s going on in the market, you need to follow a few strategies, look at the charts.
I used to have so many monitors, in some of my old videos, you will see that I have 6, 7, 8, up to 10 monitors. And that was really exhausting. At one moment, I realized that if I’m not trading, I’m not making any money. I had some really good months and some bad months. And most of the bad months when I didn’t make a lot of profit, it was because I was traveling a lot (I’m even traveling right now, and I’m recording this video/lecture where I explain how to become a professional trader).
Why do algorithmic trading with Expert Advisors
So when I was not trading, I was not making money. One of the solutions for me was to switch to algorithmic trading, and I did it.
Right now, while I’m creating this lecture, I’m trading with Expert Advisors or trading robots. And this is what I usually teach in my courses. Moreover, I started creating more content for our students. Because when I’m recording online courses and when I’m recording YouTube videos I have an extra income obviously.
I have followers and subscribers and students, by the time I’m creating this lecture, we have 30,000+ students. Real students in the Academy, who bought our courses and I’m very happy with that. So monthly, I have income from the content that I’ve been creating and sharing my strategies and my systems for trading.
I try my best to create useful content
So even if there are days when I don’t have the opportunity even to trade with algorithmic trading, some problems with the VPS or it’s just not the moment to trade with EAs, there are such moments on the market, I still have the income from the courses. This is how I found myself comfortable, I keep trading but at the same time, I create useful content.
I create videos, I write blog posts, I’ve always wanted to make my content useful. Because I know that when it’s useful, you will watch the next video. Probably, you will get some of my courses, it will be useful, you will be learning something, I don’t want to lie to people, I don’t want to mislead people because you will feel it.
You will understand it in one moment and then obviously, you will not watch any other video from me. So I am really happy to have the opportunity to record videos, and to create content, making income at the same time.
I’m now concentrating more on content creation and investing
Nowadays, trading is not my major priority. This is because I want to dedicate more of my time to create useful content and expand the Academy to thousands of people, so I am slowly switching to investing. And of course, because I have the opportunity now to invest bigger amounts of money.
So in 2020, I prefer to invest and now in 2021, obviously, I’m investing a lot in cryptocurrencies because it was just super easy in 2020 to make profits on the crypto market. And much bigger profit than what the Forex market offers.
And I don’t know how far the cryptocurrency market will go, honestly. A lot of people ask me this question. What I know is, that for the moment, there are a lot of opportunities in crypto trading and I always take the opportunities. If the crypto market starts to fall, then I will just take a lot of the profit, I will keep some of the crypto coins and I will leave the rest for the next momentum when we have the next strong up movement for Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies.
The approach you should take to become a professional trader
So basically this is what it takes to be a professional trader. This is what it took to make it. First, you need capital to start trading. Second, you need to learn before you start trading. And third, I’ll suggest you don’t quit your job until the moment you make more money from trading.
So if you do, let’s say $2,000 from your daily work, let’s say this is your salary at the end of the month, I don’t suggest you quit your job unless you have $2,000 from trading monthly. And to be realistic with that, you need to have at least $10,000 so if you make like 20% for the month, this is $2,000.
A lot of the beginners ask me, “Is it OK to start with $100, or with $200?” It is, but you need to be really lucky to grow your account to thousands of dollars, which will make you comfortable to quit your job.
You need to be passionate for you to succeed
And the last thing I wanted to share with you is that to be a professional trader on the Forex market is one thing, to be a professional trader on the stock market is a different thing, and on the cryptocurrency market, it’s another thing. Even in the Forex market, if you do manual trading and you do algorithmic trading, it is very different. You need a lot of different skills and experience and you need to learn in detail one of the two.
So if you don’t know where to start, what I would suggest you do is to try all of those markets. Just try Forex trading manually, Forex trading automatically, take a few courses for one of the trading markets you’re interested in. Take stock trading courses, take cryptocurrency courses.
That’s why usually I do courses for all of these, which will make it easier for you to decide which is your thing. You need to feel really comfortable when you’re doing it, you need to have a lot of desire to learn about it. Anyway, if you’re just forcing yourself to do it, it’s not really going to work.
An institutional trader is not the same as a professional trader
The last thing about being a professional trader, as I’ve said at the beginning, is when you are making enough money for yourself or for your family, so you won’t need to do another job. There is a huge difference between a professional trader and an institutional trader.
A lot of people are wrong when they say you can’t be a professional trader if you haven’t been an institutional trader, that’s wrong. For me, I haven’t been an institutional trader simply because, in Bulgaria, there are a lot of brokers but there are no trading companies like hedge funds or the huge guys who manage funds, and have institutional traders.
It is fair to say I didn’t have that opportunity. I didn’t have the chance. I guess it would have been a great experience in the times when I was working for brokers if I had a few years working as an institutional trader. But the main difference there is not because they have these amazing strategies that nobody knows, what they have is a lot of money and when you trade with millions or even billions, actually it’s not that hard.
Institutional traders know the news before the news is out there
Because even if you buy an asset and the price drops, you’re totally fine because you can buy at this price and if it drops you will still buy. And you will have a better average price at one moment when the price goes up again, which always happens on the market, you will be profiting. They have strict rules to follow.
And lastly, because I’ve been to such offices in London, I haven’t worked but I have visited such offices, they pay for information. They know the news before the news is out there. So these guys pay a lot of money to Reuters, Bloomberg, and the other huge media, where they get the news before the news is published on Forex Factory or on the economic calendars of the brokers.
This is how they trade the news very successfully because they know what they are doing and they have the information just before everyone else.
This was a brief overview of how I started with trading and what it took me to become a professional trader. If you want to make a career in trading, consider investing some time in education first and take a good professional Forex trader course before you jump into the deep waters of trading. Or crypto course, or stock trading course, it’s up to you.
And if you enjoyed the lecture, I would be happy if you share your thoughts in the comments below. I will see you in another lecture about trading.
