Eight years ago, I couldn’t find a practical guide to becoming a full-time trader that wasn’t either selling a dream or telling me it was impossible.
So here’s the one I wish I had. A complete and practical guide to becoming a full-time trader.
Strategy-agnostic, no fluff, and built for anyone who’s serious about making trading work.
Whether you’re trading futures, forex, or indices, whether you’re a complete beginner or someone who’s been grinding evaluations for months, this roadmap applies to you.
The only thing I’ll say upfront: I’m personally biased toward volume profile and order flow as the highest-edge approach to retail trading. But I’ll hold my tongue. Whatever you trade, this approach works.
Disclaimer: Trading is extremely risky. Most traders fail. Everything here is for informational and educational purposes only — not financial advice.
First: Important Truths About Full-Time Trading
Before we get into the roadmap, we need to clear the air.
The online trading space is dominated by two loud extremes: Reddit cynics who insist no one can beat the market, and Instagram gurus posting fake MT4 screenshots next to rented Ferraris.
Neither is useful. Here’s the actual middle ground.
Truth #1: Full-time trading is possible
Yes, the statistic that 70–90% of traders fail is real.
But those people fail because they treat trading like a lottery ticket, never develop a genuine edge, and never implement proper risk management.
The skill is learnable.
If you’re serious and process-driven, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Truth #2: You don’t need large capital
In the age of prop firms, your only financial exposure is the evaluation fee.
A single funded 50K account might cost you $70–$150 all-in after a discount code. That’s your starting point. More capital helps once you’ve built the skill, but it’s not the barrier most people think it is.
Truth #3: It doesn’t take all day
Eight years in, my trading day is one to two hours, max.
Most days I’m actively in a trade for 10–15 minutes. Full-time trading means making a full-time income from trading — not replacing a desk job with a different desk job. That distinction matters.
Truth #4: Failure is optional if you get serious
Traders fail because they come in with the wrong expectations and wrong processes. They never find a real edge. They gamble. They give up and become the person on Reddit telling everyone it’s impossible.
That doesn’t have to be you.
Step 1: Choose the Right Trading Strategy
Strategy selection is the foundation everything else is built on. No strategy alone will make you profitable — what it does is give you a structured framework so you’re not just pushing buttons at random.
That said, some strategies have more inherent edge than others. volume profile and order flow, for example, are rooted in real institutional data and have far more edge than pure candlestick pattern trading.
Here’s a contrarian tip: in the beginning, it’s okay to strategy hop.
The common advice says don’t. But common advice also produces a 90% failure rate. Try different approaches, consume different content, until one genuinely resonates.
Once you find it — and you’ll know when you do — go all in.
When evaluating any strategy, ask yourself these four questions:
#1 Does it make logical sense and resonate with me?
If you have to force yourself to believe in what you’re doing, it won’t hold up under pressure. I switched away from ICT-style trading because too much of it was stated as fact without factual grounding. Volume profile, by contrast, is built on real, verifiable market data.
#2 Is it rooted in facts?
The more your edge is grounded in actual data — volume, price acceptance, institutional activity — the more durable it is long-term.
#3 Does it provide opportunities when I’m available to trade?
A momentum strategy requiring the New York open doesn’t work as well, for example, like myself, are trading the overnight from Australia or New Zealand (most realistic session for me, timezone-wise)
#4 Does it match my personality?
I’m impatient. Long holds make me do stupid things. So I scalp. It’s far easier to adapt your strategy to your personality than the other way around.
If you’re still searching for a strategy that makes sense, I’d encourage you to look into volume profile trading. It’s what I trade, it’s rooted in real data, and it works across all sessions. You can check out my course at learnvolumeprofile.com.
Step 2: Build Experience the Low-Risk Way
Demo trading is overrated.
When nothing’s at stake, the psychological experience is almost completely different from live trading. Demo taught me very little, and nearly everything fell apart the moment I put real money on the line.
My recommendation: demo briefly to get familiar with your platform and test your strategy mechanics, then shift to cheap prop firm accounts trading micros as fast as possible. You get skin in the game without catastrophic downside.
For example, Lucid Trading’s 50K account starts at around $100, but with a discount code it drops to around $70. That gives you access to $2000 in drawdown.
Now you’re actually feeling something when you execute. Your body responds. Your discipline gets tested. That’s where real trader intuition gets built.
Step 3: Calculate Your Freedom Number
This is the single most underrated concept in trading education, and almost nobody talks about it because it’s not flashy enough.
Your freedom number is the monthly amount that covers all your living expenses — rent, bills, food, debt repayments. Nothing more, nothing less.
When I started out, mine was $3,000 a month.
Today it’s closer to $13,000 — lifestyle expands with income.
But the principle is the same. If trading can cover your freedom number every month, every dollar you earn from work, a side business, or anything else becomes pure surplus. That buys back time and freedom in ways you massively underestimate until it actually happens.
Write that number down. Stick it on your monitor. Make it your trading target every single month — not “make as much as possible,” not “grow the account 300%.” Just: can I hit my freedom number this month?
The first time I ever hit my freedom number from trading alone felt better than my first $10K week.
Because it meant the skill I’d worked so hard to develop was finally paying off in a real, material way.
Step 4: Use Prop Firms to Get Your First Payouts
Learn from my mistake. Eight years ago I blew $8,000 of my wife’s credit card money in one week because I didn’t know what I was doing and jumped in with real capital too early. You have far better options today. Use them.
Here’s the exact progression I recommend:
Start with one account only. Not two, not five. One. Get funded. Earn your first payout.
Then earn three total payouts from that single account. Why three? One payout could be luck. Two could be a run. Three means you’re genuinely consistent — and you’ve earned the right to take the next step.
Once you’ve hit three payouts, start allocating a portion of those earnings toward building a personal trading account.
The threshold I found meaningful in my own journey was $10,000 USD in personal capital. At that level you have enough margin flexibility and compounding potential to generate real income without relying entirely on prop splits and payout approvals.
Until you cross that $10K mark, prop firms should be your primary focus.
After that, gradually shift attention to growing your own account while keeping a prop or two running as supplemental income.
Step 5: Use the 10% Rule to Stop Blowing Accounts
This is the thing that finally broke my cycle of passing evaluations, getting funded, and blowing accounts before ever taking a payout. It’s not exciting. But it works.
The rule: In both the evaluation and funded stages, risk a maximum of 10% of your total max drawdown per trading day — and be ruthlessly strict about it.
On a 50K Lucid account with $2000 max drawdown, that means your daily risk cap is $200.
You would need to lose 10 consecutive days in a row to blow the account.
Unless you’re massively oversized and essentially gambling, that’s very hard to do when you’re trading a real strategy.
Meanwhile, you’re not capping the upside. If your first trade of the day wins $200, you can take another.
If that one wins too, you’re up 2R on the day while your downside was still limited to zero.
In practice, implementing this approach meant I was consistently passing evaluations and qualifying for payouts within two to three weeks — without luck, without swinging big, without needing a perfect setup every single day.
If your prop firm has a daily lockout feature — Lucid Trading and several others now offer this — use it. Set it to automatically lock you out once you’re down 10% of max drawdown for the day. Remove the temptation entirely.
The core principle underneath all of this: cap the downside, leave the upside open. That one discipline shift separates traders who cycle through accounts indefinitely from those who consistently take payouts.
Step 6: Know When You’re Actually Ready to Go Full-Time
Here’s the honest benchmark: when you’ve withdrawn the equivalent of your freedom number — or more — for at least six out of twelve months, you’re in the conversation about going full-time.
At that point you have a real decision to make. You could quit your job and trade exclusively. You could keep your job and treat trading income as financial acceleration. Or you could do what I do — use trading to hit my freedom number every month, and spend the rest of my time building businesses alongside it.
That diversification matters more than most people realise. A red trading month doesn’t derail your life when you have other income coming in. And let me be clear: you are not more of a “real” trader because trading is your only income source. That pressure — where a losing trade means you can’t pay rent — is exactly the emotional context that causes blown accounts and bad decisions. Diversification isn’t weakness. It’s professional risk management applied to your own life.
If trading covers your freedom number while you’re still working, that job income becomes entirely free capital — to save, invest, pay off debt, or fund your personal trading account faster. That compounding effect on your path to financial independence is massively underestimated in a space obsessed with overnight riches.
The Bottom Line
This isn’t a glamorous roadmap.
There are no P&L screenshots next to watches or private jets. It’s a practical, achievable path that a genuinely applied person — someone who picks a real strategy, implements proper risk management, and hits their freedom number month after month — can actually walk.
Most people will take the hype-fuelled route, blow several accounts, and eventually quit. But if this resonated with you, you’re already thinking differently than the 90% who fail.
Frame the goal correctly. Freedom number first, wealth second. The whole thing becomes far more achievable than the internet would have you believe.
Want a strategy rooted in real market data? Start with volume profile. It’s the framework I’ve used for years and the clearest edge I’ve found for high-probability setups. Check out the course at learnvolumeprofile.com
Disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Trading involves significant risk of loss. Some links in this article are affiliate links — Spoozey may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
