Can I trade if I have a full-time job?

Yes! There are many approaches for how an individual trades depending on their circumstances. It will take you longer than others who have more time to invest in learning but it's not impossible.

How much money can I make?

Potential returns from trading are a factor of just 2 things: 1) Your individual skill set, 2) Your trading account balance. The output of that equation is practically unlimited.

How long will it take to be profitable?

This is down to you, there isn't a set time-frame or 10,000 hours invested and you will achieve profitability, it's about embracing the work, learning from your mistakes, and keep moving forward. Then, one day, it will click, but without action and reflection, you'll be stuck in a loop of drawdown.

Do I need a lot of money to start trading?

No. It's best to invest money you have into education and tools. However, that can get quite costly but this is one of the main reasons I created Meteor Trading, everything you need is here so you can easily total up how much everything will cost you.

Do I need to be good at maths to trade?

Absolutely not. Any maths you do (such as calculating your position size in order to risk 1% per trade) can be done by Magic Keys on your trading platform.

What markets can I trade as a beginner?

Any market. However, I would recommend the most commonly traded forex markets such as EURUSD or GBPUSD due to their low spreads and high volume.

How much time should I spend learning each week?

This is down to your time limits. My ethos is that even if you put in 0.01% you are still making progress. The key is steady practice with quality, not random bursts of quantity with the risk of burnout.

Without an edge, yes. Once you develop an edge, however, trading becomes more like running a casino than playing in one. A casino isn't worried about one lucky spin of the roulette wheel because it knows the odds are stacked in its favour over time. Through the course I recommend, you'll learn how to build that edge. When you combine this with the law of large numbers, risk management, and consistent execution of your trading plan, short-term wins and losses don't matter. Over the long run, the probabilities work in your favour. In other words, you stop being the gambler and become the casino.

What tools do I need to start?

The obvious answer is a computer, good internet connection, and a trading platform. The next step beyond that can be found in the Tools page.

Weekly Overview #12 - 100 Backtested Trades, Backtesting Series

Date

December 13th, 2025

Written by

Daniel Griffiths

Hello Traders!

This week was not the most productive I will admit but I have managed to gather my 100th backtested trade.

This is a huge step forward because now we can start to get an idea of how the strategy will likely perform over a large sample size.

100 trades is the bare minimum and the optimal is more around the 200-300 recorded trades, so that’s the next goal!

Let’s have a look at the data.

(Tools I have used this week are featured at the bottom of the blog, including discounts!)

Backtesting Progression

Here’s the stats:

101 total trades
45.54% strike rate
97.80% return

AsofDec2025no2

Results measured in R (R = % gained)

An extremely profitable strategy even when we take the silly low probability trades (read Weekly Overview #11 here if you want to learn more about low probability trades)

It’s taken a while to gather all this data, especially since I took a break to actually try out the strategy in a live market and because some weeks my motivation to backtest is quite low but that’s fine, the small weeks of progress do add up eventually!

What does it mean to have 100 trades tested?

The main point of gathering this much data is so you can see how well the strategy will perform over a large sample size. It shows you profitability and how much you can likely (not certainly) make and lose over X period of time & trades.

How can you say you have an edge over 10, 20, or 50 tested trades? You will never know the true extent of losing streaks or different scenarios for your trade execution.

The more tested trades you have the better, but this doesn’t mean to go crazy and start rushing through the days on FXReplay. You’ll only make mistakes and take trades that don’t meet your rules.

Be methodical and process oriented when it comes to going through the days.

How can I achieve this?

Here’s a very light overview of my backtesting process to help you formulate your own process:

Pre-session analysis put in Notion
Slowly go through the day on FXReplay, waiting for my entry to appear
Post-session analysis put in Notion + record any trades in Google Sheet
Write out with pen and paper what happened on this day

This helps stop making mistakes and I can absorb everything about the day I just tested.

An important thing to remember when backtesting is to not overanalyse trades. It’s so easy to try and justify invalid wins and overanalyse losing trades saying why you shouldn’t have taken that trade.

Keep it simple, stick to your rules, losing trades happen.

What’s next for backtesting?

I want to go over these trades to make sure that they are valid and meet my rules because mistakes can be made.

I’ve already started to review and have found 2 invalid trades, which have been excluded from the above data and there’s still a chance to find more but I will let you know next week.

Then after that it’s time to go and get the next 100 trades!

I might be able to gather these next 100 trades before I start live trading again as I don’t plan to go live until the end of Jan 2026 but we will see.

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If you enjoyed this Weekly Overview, please share it by copying the website URL, or by taking a screenshot and sending it to your friends!

As promised, here are the tools I have used this week:

FXReplay (for 15% off monthly plans, use code: MTRFX15, for 7% off yearly plans, use code: MTRFX7)
Recommended course
Notion

Check out the tools page for more info

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post, it means a lot to me.

See you next week and happy trading!